‘Cairns was the big city’: Matilda Wini Heatley’s journey from Julatten to Rome

Heatley has already co-captained former club Nordsjælland for two of her three seasons with the successful Danish top-flight side, after which she “reached the ceiling of what Demark could do for me”.

“I think for growth there has to be a certain … well, I think you have to be outside your comfort zone,” she says.

“I was very, very comfortable there and wasn’t being challenged in all the ways that I wanted to be.”

Chasing the challenge has delivered the type of structured learning on which a law student like Heatley would thrive, and it is obvious in the way she explains the minutiae of manager (and former centre-back) Luca Rossettini’s characteristically Italian defensive organisation.

“The really, really small details of our positioning,” she says. “So we will do some drills where it’s literally just working on our footwork, the direction we’re facing when the ball is in a certain area of the park. Our reaction to the ball movement, and him being very particular about that. If the ball comes forward a bit, I’m dropping exactly as much as the ball’s coming forward. If it looks like they could play long, I’m dropping more. As soon as it looks like they can’t play long any more, I’m stepping up. And lots of small little footwork pieces.

“We’re only winning pretty narrowly every week, and it’s because every team is quite organised defensively. That’s definitely an element that attracted me to the league.”

There are other positives, like slowly adding the Italian language to the Danish in her repertoire. And the novelty of leaving one country “so efficient and clean and rule-following” for another famous for being the opposite.

“I’m kind of learning to love the chaos of Italy,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of all the hustle and bustle, but I definitely feel way more at home when I’m on the farm and have open land. I grew up in a pretty incredible part of the world, I have to say.”

The great outdoors

Julatten might be short on people, but it is plentiful in wildlife and water, and generally an outdoor existence many modern kids miss out on. Oh, and fruit. When the Heatleys purchased the property it was a fruit farm and, though they lopped the majority of the trees, there still remained more tropical fruit than any family could sensibly consume.

Loads of citrus, including grapefruits and mandarins and all their friends. And bananas, of course. But also lychees and rambutans, and far more niche South American varieties like the bumpy yellow rollinia, with its custardy flesh often likened to lemon meringue pie, and the purple-black grape-like jaboticaba.

“We picked the fruit and sold it, and we’d sell lemonade to all the tourists in Port Douglas,” says Heatley. “I’m very lucky for my childhood. We spent all of our time outdoors after school, just running around the neighbourhood with all the local kids. We had that typical childhood where your parents don’t see you until they call out that dinner’s ready.

“All the weekends and holidays were just spent camping … we’re pretty spoiled for camping locations in Far North Queensland, and we have a boat so we’d go out on the ocean all the time. But also with so many kids, we never went on an actual holiday.”

Heatley is one of the middle siblings in a family she describes as big and blended.

“So my parents are separated,” she says. “I have three older brothers: two who were raised by both my parents and then one stepbrother, who was the brother that passed away. Then there are four younger: two with the same parents as I have, one who is my mum’s and my stepdad’s, and then a little stepsister – but she’s 15 and I’ve known her since she was three so I don’t call her my stepsister.”

Heatley is not yet ready to talk about Josh, who died suddenly in November. Still, he feels present in these memories, woven into tales of dirt bikes and fishing and fruit stalls. Even into the genesis of her football career with the Port Douglas Dragons (not actually located in Port Douglas, rather the intersection between it, Julatten and her birth town of Mossman), having followed her older brothers into the game because “I just really wanted to be like them”.

She was and she wasn’t, in the sense that she did play and she had to leave home to do it, attending five different high schools: a Steiner School nearby, two in Cairns – including one term at an all-girls private school that had no sports field and forced to her wear a skirt for the first time, which did not go down well – and two in Brisbane where she joined the Roar.

“Moving to Brisbane was definitely a bit of whiplash,” she says. “I had a lot of responsibility to get myself places, and I’d only ever been driven in Far North Queensland. I had never caught a public bus in my life. That side of it was pretty tough as a little teenager.

“When my parents broke up we spent a lot of time in Cairns [with Mum] and Cairns was the big city. We’d go down there and Dad would be like, ‘Oh the traffic, absolute nightmare’. We’d be stopped for less than 30 seconds and that’s traffic. You should have seen him in Rome less than a month ago. It was his first time in Europe and it was the greatest thing ever. He’s not a city man.”

Heatley is not a city girl, either. Like fellow defenders Ellie Carpenter (from Cowra) and Clare Hunt (Grenfell), she is regional Matildas represent. But overriding her natural setting has brought a breakthrough selection for a major international tournament after a few near-misses, including the Paris 2024 Olympics.

“I’m not a stranger to being on the edge of squads and being that player that is cut, and I think that’s probably why the prospect of this Asian Cup is so exciting for me. It’s always pretty rough on the other side of that. But at the same time, I think everything happens for a reason, so I wouldn’t take those non-selections back in a heartbeat. I think they were really important for me as a player and as a person.”