Netball Victoria is saddened to learn of the passing of its oldest alumni, Mattie Baker, who passed away earlier this week aged 104.
Mattie, known more recently as Martha Baker, was a Netball Victoria Life Member, an honour which was bestowed on her in 1978, and was later inducted into the Netball Victoria Hall of Fame in 2001.
Born on a farm at Selby in 1916 – located in Melbourne’s now-outer suburbs of the Dandenongs – Mattie was first introduced to the game of netball – then known as ‘women’s basketball’ – at school, aged 14. Mattie married at 21 and moved to Sunshine with her husband and his family, where she struck up a friendship with her new sister-in-law, Olive Johns.
Olive – another well-known name in Victorian netball – and Mattie together formed the ‘Sunshine Younger Set’. There were no facilities for tennis in Sunshine at the time – a sport commonly played by women during this era – and whilst there were cricket and football teams for the boys, there were none for girls. So together, Mattie and Olive created a local women’s basketball team for girls.
“I never was interested in any other sport of a Saturday,” Mattie said in an interview back in 2015. “I’ve never been to a football match because on Saturday I was at netball when football was playing…”
At first the Sunshine Younger Set played in cow paddocks, where you had to clear the cow pats off before you could play. Then Mattie, Olive and their team played up at the hill at Royal Park on the outside courts, until the stadium opened in 1969.
Similar to today’s game, every team had to provide an umpire for competition, so as the Sunshine Younger Set grew to encompass four teams, the umpire stocks came up short, so Mattie put up her hand to become an umpire.
After first becoming an umpire aged 25, Mattie kept her accreditation up until she was 60, when she took on supervising duties full time. An ‘A’ Grade badged umpire, Mattie oversaw games being played at the Carlton Football Ground during the War Years, as well as supervising games at the Flagstaff Gardens and Flemington Road Courts. She also assisted with country netball finals across the state, and spent many years travelling all over Victoria testing and training umpires.
Mattie was synonymous with netball at Royal Park and is arguably the reason Parkville Netball is the competition it is today. When the new Royal Park Women’s Basketball Stadium opened in 1969, Mattie supervised Monday and Friday nights’ play for countless years. During this period of time, on top of her commitments at Royal Park she spent her weekends umpiring for country and other additional competitions, as well as correcting Victoria’s umpire exam papers. In approximately 10 years she marked an estimated 34,475 exam papers!
Mattie’s talents knew no limit, and soon enough she was asked to be the voice behind the PA system for Royal Park’s Saturday competition, with juniors on in the morning, and seniors in the afternoon. So popular was Mattie behind the microphone, that these duties soon grew to include all extra Parkville competitions – a job she managed to uphold along with her country umpiring commitments, only missing three country weekends in total.
Always immaculately dressed - right down to the polish on her fingernails - speak to anyone who has was involved at Royal Park late in the 20th century, and they can remember Mattie’s commanding voice over the microphone. So much so that she was presented with a golden microphone in 1995 (pictured), for her service to the State Netball Centre competitions.
Incredibly Mattie remained actively involved in netball until the age of 92. She credits part of the longevity of her career to another name synonymous with Parkville Netball, Sue Flynn, who simply told her at one stage when she was thinking about finishing up, “you can’t leave”.
“Every time [I was there] …I thoroughly enjoyed netball. I thoroughly enjoyed everything I did, as well as supervising day and night.”
Mattie proudly kept her Vixens scarf over her chair at her retirement village right until the end; a loyalist through and through.
Netball Victoria wish to express their sincere condolences to Mattie’s family at this time, and say a massive thank you on behalf of the entire Victorian netball community, for allowing her to share so much of her generosity and skills with us over such an incredible period of time.
