‘OK, I’ve dealt with all of this’: Why Evonne Goolagong’s story still matters
SOURCE:Sydney Morning Herald|BY:Louise Rugendyke
Lila McGuire is playing the tennis legend in a new ABC TV series. She may have been born decades after Goolagong’s final victory but much about her life is familiar.
Down the end of a cul-de-sac, in Melbourne’s quiet bayside suburb of Highett, a game of high-stakes tennis is about to be played.
The setting is the 1980 Wimbledon women’s final between Australia’s “sunshine super-girl” Evonne Goolagong Cawley and her US opponent Chris Evert.
The Highett Bowls Club has been transformed into the All England Lawn Tennis Club for the ABC’s three-part series Goolagong. Kipling’s famous quote – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same” – is painted above a set of double doors that will lead to a makeshift Centre Court, while the women’s dressing room, all chintz florals, is to the left.
Out the back of the club, which closed in 2024, the disused bowling green has been turned into a tennis court, with Wimbledon’s green and purple signage, a commentary box, a press pack and small crowd of fans in the stands.
Lila McGuire enters Centre Court at Wimbledone, aka Highett Bowls Club in Melbourne.
On one side of the net is Evert (played by Courtney Clarke) and on the other side is former Australian Open champ Ash Barty’s coach Craig Tyzzer. He is coaching Clarke through Evert’s moves – the forehand, the backhand, the footwork – in that final.
Watching it all under a tent on the side of the court is director Wayne Blair. Sitting behind the monitor, he jumps with every shot Clarke makes, knowing the gameplay off by heart.
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“I’ve known Evonne for about 20 years as I went to university [in Brisbane] with her daughter, Kelly,” says Blair later. “We did an acting class together 20 years ago. So I used to go up there on the weekends, at their place, because I was homesick, and they sort of looked after me.”
It’s a striking scene. But not as striking as when I first spot Lila McGuire, who plays Goolagong Cawley. She is dressed in tennis whites and her hair is a wonderfully thick mass of curls (despite my assumption that it’s a wig, McGuire actually made the greatest sacrifice of all and had a perm). She’s on a break from filming, but quietly practising tennis on another bowling green next to the lunch tables.
For a tennis nerd like me, it’s a complete thrill, and for McGuire it’s a dream come true.
Evonne Goolagong Cawley (left) with Lila McGuire at the Night of Champions, an evening with Evonne Goolagong Cawley AC MBE, in June 2025.Credit: Tennis Australia/Hamish Blair
“I absolutely had goosebumps,” says McGuire a few months later over Zoom. “I remember the first scene we kind of shot walking out [onto Centre Court], I’d seen the set, but I hadn’t seen any of the extras yet. I hadn’t seen the camera set-ups, anything like that. And so walking out and hearing the extras and seeing everything – honestly, we might have been filming the first time Evonne sees Wimbledon – my first time was that same moment of [Evonne] walking out and seeing it for the first time. So I did not have to fake the awe.
“I did get goosebumps. I was like, ‘This is Evonne realising her dream of being at Wimbledon, while Lila is realising her dream of being an actor’.”
At only 28 years old, McGuire was not even a twinkle in her parents’ eye when Goolagong Cawley won her last grand slam in 1980, but McGuire knew enough about the tennis legend to grasp the importance of the role.
“I knew she was mob,” says McGuire, a Whadjuk and Wardarndi Noongar woman from WA. “I knew that everyone loved her. That was kind of all that I knew. My understanding of her was she’s like the OG Cathy Freeman, you know? So I began my research, and was just like, ‘Oh, my god, no wonder everyone loved her so much.’ She’s incredible, she’s such a powerhouse of a human being.”
Marton Csokas as coach Vic Edwards and Lila McGuire as Evonne Goolagong.
Timed to premiere just before the Australian Open, Goolagong tells of Goolagong Cawley’s rise from the dusty courts of Barellan, a small wheat town in the NSW Riverina, to winning seven grand slam tournaments and becoming the first Indigenous Australian to achieve success on the world tennis stage. And while it is a story of triumph, it doesn’t skirt around Goolagong Cawley’s difficult relationship with her possessive coach Vic Edwards (played by Marton Csokas) or the racism she faced from some players.
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“She faced incredible challenges and navigated spaces that weren’t made for her with grace and with integrity,” says McGuire. “And I think for me, the thing that really stood out was just how much it mirrored my experience of being an Indigenous woman. We like to think all this stuff isn’t like that any more, but reading the scripts and her journey, it was like, ‘Oh, OK, I’ve dealt with all of this. All of my friends have dealt with all of this.’
“It’s a really important story to tell, not just to tell Evonne’s story, but because it represents the experience of so many of us still today.”
Although much has been written about Goolagong Cawley and her achievements, incredibly this is the first time her story has been on screen. Helping it get there was the job of producer Jo Werner, who also produced The Newsreader for the ABC.
“Fabulous writer Megan Simpson Huberman came to me and talked to me about the 1980 Wimbledon final between Chris Everett Lloyd and Yvonne Goolagong Cawley,” recalls Werner, during a break in filming. “There’s so much embedded drama in that game and it encompassed so much of Evonne’s spirit.
Eloise Hart plays Evonne as a child on the dusty courts of Barrellan in the series Goolagong.
“She had huge injuries to her feet, coming back from childbirth, and she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to do all of the warm-up for this tournament, but she desperately, desperately wanted to win Wimbledon again. She won it for the first time when she was 19, in her second attempt at Wimbledon. But she was desperate to win it again, and she’d come so close, so many times, and she didn’t want to finish her time in the sport without winning it again …
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“And as a fan of tennis, and also as a fan of sports movies, I thought, ‘Well, there’s a sports movie, and there’s an iconic Australian who deserves to have her story told.’”
To play Goolagong Cawley, McGuire trained for seven months (she played netball growing up, not tennis), working with Lois Plowman, a former WTA player and coach from Melbourne who taught McGuire how to play 1970s-style tennis and handle the smaller wooden rackets.
And while McGuire didn’t have to memorise the exact choreography for each match, she did have to be able to loosely replicate chunks of Goolagong Cawley’s matches.
“Wayne and Lois would come over and be like, ‘OK, so these are the shots we’re going to do: backhand cross court, then you’re going to do a forehand down the line, and then you’re going to run in, and you’re going to approach, you’re going to do a volley, OK?’
“And then also, my tennis double Vanessa would do her tennis, and they would shoot with Vanessa, and then they’d be like, ‘OK, so we’ve got these shots with Vanessa.’ I’d watch what she was doing and then replicate that as well.”
Lila McGuire with Felix Mallard, who plays Evonne’s husband Roger.
For Blair, who had never directed tennis scenes before, the biggest directing challenge – much like a professional tennis player – came with trying to handle matches across different playing surfaces, which were all re-created on courts across Melbourne.
“We went to Johannesburg, we went to London. We went to Barellan, where Evonne started playing tennis, and we went to the US Open,” says Blair. “I’m used to a drama schedule, and sometimes you have a few stunts thrown into a schedule, but then once you shoot five or six tennis tournaments, that can take up a lot of time.”
As for why Goolagong Cawley felt now was the right time to tell this story, neither McGuire, Blair and or Werner would say, all not wanting to speak on the tennis great’s behalf (Goolagong Cawley was not available for interview). But they all reiterated how involved she and her husband, Roger, were in making the series.
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“I’ve heard so many people say, ‘I named my daughter after Evonne’ and ‘My mum used to do her hair like Evonne,’” says Werner. “She’s absolutely beloved, and I grew up seeing her in Woman’s Day and always being aware of her. But there’s so much about her story that nobody knew, and that is what we want: to show how much Evonne overcame, and how it wasn’t an easy journey in any way.
“She had incredible talent, but it was her tenacity and strength of character that made her the champion that she is.”
Goolagong premieres at 8.20pm on Sunday, January 4, on the ABC and ABC iview.
