I Am Very Busy and Important.
Hi, my name's Sophie Benjamin.
I'm a writer, multimedia producer and occasional musician.
I'm often very busy, but ultimately not very important.
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Rolling.

[caption id=”attachment_306” align=”alignnone” width=”502” caption=”Toowoomba City Rollers celebrate their first-ever win!”][/caption]

When I was living in Brisbane, I found roller derby girls terrifying. Some were gigantic and physically intimidating, others were rockabilly hot and all of them were passionate to the point of being a bit full-on.  Some were also quite aloof and elitist.
These experiences and the sport’s media saturation in 2009-2o10 meant I avoided the whole thing like the plague, as I do with most sports and scary women.

Then I moved to Toowoomba and met the Toowoomba City Rollers.

Elouise from Smells Like Zines plays for the side and she organised for me to come to one of their training sessions and do a story for the ABC.  I was still terrified of derby girls, but I had to toughen up and do the story.

They were a few weeks out from their first-ever bout, having spent the best part of two years scraping a side together and skating wherever they could - car parks, basketball courts - anywhere with a flat cement surface.

You know what? The girls were all lovely to me. There was none of the elitism and bullshit some of the metropolitan teams go on with. These girls have had to fight every step of the way to even HAVE a roller derby team, so they were more than happy to help out anyone interested in what they do.

Last night at the Brisbane Convention Centre, they had their first win at their second-ever bout, defeating the NBR Ferals by one point.

So proud.

Check out more photos here.

Original Article