Ella Mason: Founder of Pony Club Gym

Can you tell me who you are and a little bit about what you do?

I’m Ella Mason and I own and run Pony Club Gym. Pony Club is a gym for everyone, but it’s also a queer-owned gym. I used to coach as an aside to my job for about 10 years, and it was something I did because I enjoyed it. But movement has always been important for me as a mental health practice, and eventually I decided to quit my job. Where I was living at the time had quite a big brick garage, and I turned it into a gym across that summer. And in June, when it started getting colder, I thought “I should probably start looking for a job." But what actually happened was that the gym was getting busier and busier, so I looked for somewhere bigger and landed here, on High Street.

I have always felt some discomfort in gym spaces to some degree. Whether it's overt reasons or just covert, or there's not representation of me in some way, or with the communities I am part of.

Ella Mason

Can you tell me a little more about the links between movement, mental health, and trauma?

We all take in information and store feeling in our brains and our bodies. This can be a very conscious thing, but it can also be something we don’t know we’re doing. Training is a really good way to help us handle trauma, because we can put a little bit of stress on our body in a safe environment, and in a way that helps capture where we’re at on any given day.

I don't really call the gym a fitness space – the goal is much more a space of movement. Some people like to move in one particular way, and some in another. We use the movement in the space here for people to explore being more embodied in their bodies. One of the common responses to trauma is a disassociation with our bodies, but strength training really requires being in our bodies.

We may teach a certain technique or movement on a certain day, but it's never forced. If someone says to me, "I'm not comfortable doing that," then we change it. People have autonomy over their bodies, and I think that in queer black POC communities, autonomy over body isn't a given.

How do you create a safe space like Pony Club Gym?

I can't tell anyone this is a safe space. People can only tell me if it's a safe space. We can often talk about inclusivity as if it’s a static term, but actually it's ongoing. I continually have to as myself, "who can access, who can't access?”. And it will always be that way. It reminds me of a comment a gym owner once said to me about their gym: "This is a safe space. We're inclusive. Trans people can train here." I guess my question was, "Well, why aren't they?". It's easy to say, "A trans person is welcome to train here." But if they're not, that's what you need to be looking at. Why aren't they?

Is it how you have set up the space? Is it in how you're representing people in this space? Is it the language that other people are using in this space? Are you very explicit in what you expect people in the space to do?

The wonderful thing about this space is that we have obviously have a lot of queer people come in, but we also have a lot of cis, hetero identified people as well. There's this beautiful gentle education and learning that happens just by conversation. It's not forced, it's this really, so we have this like merging of different circles that might never cross over in any other setting. Queer people can feel unsafe or pushed out of more cis heteronomous spaces, and we have to adjust; whereas here, it’s the other way around.

Would you like to see some of your practices picked up elsewhere?

The dream would be to see all gyms be like this. It’s hard because it's a two-fold thing. In some ways, it’s easy create a space that captures your own lived experience. I may own the gym, but the community that comes here drive where it's going, and I'm just the person trying to steer it. I really hope that one day, I get to just maybe hand over Pony Club Gym, and it can live on and continue to be something for the community

It’s something not just for other gyms to learn, but other trainers. You can have all of the knowledge about coaching someone through moving, but to actually have perception and understanding of where an individual might be at on any given day is something that's hard to teach. If I've got a class of 16 people, I need to be perceptive about where everyone might be on that night. That skill is something that has to be developed over time, and requires a mix of emotional intelligence and empathy.

I feel like we do a good job because people feel comfortable to send me a message when we didn’t get things right. There's always going to be a power imbalance because I’m the coach and the owner, but the fact that people feel comfortable to give us feedback is a good sign that they feel equitable in the space.

The gym also engages in the wider communities in some meaningful ways – can you tell us about that?

We've got plans to work with young people coming out of incarceration, and using movement as a part of that process – that’s something that would be quite important to me. I miss working with young people. I come from a history of being incarcerated and addiction myself, and I understand how important movement was.

The other thing we do is the 10% of profits being donated back to a range of Aboriginal run and led business, organisations and Individuals. We do that each quarter. For this quarter, it will be going to a family to fund an inquest for their son – so the funding really depends what's going on at the time.

During lockdown last year we did an online party fundraiser and half went to Pay the Rent and for sex workers through the Scarlet Alliance. We'll always do things like this, because it's super important to me. I just feel like there's always something that we can do - it might not always be financially, but where we can help, we will.

I know I've seen things online and that, but so you do classes here along with people coming along individually and doing different fitness programmes?

We're actually going to be running a competition that’s the first of its kind in October. I compete in Olympic weightlifting, and most sports as a standard are still gender segregated. So we're going to be running a non-gender segregated sport that has no weigh in, and people won’t be competing against each other: they’ll be competing together, up against themselves. A person might have a personal best on a movement, or a goal they want to achieve. And when they register, they’ll include this goal, and then on the day we’ll be there to cheer them on. We’re trying this as a different way to run a competition, where people aren't competing against each other.

I really feel that you cannot wait for systems to catch up. I could go down the advocacy route and put all my energy into trying to change the system, but they don't want to be changed. So instead, I'll put in the energy into things like this competition, and we'll do it ourselves.

What do you see as some of the main hurdles for women and non-binary people in Victoria?

We've still got so far to go in intersectional feminism. Because we still talk about certain types of women. Certain types of women are only ever represented. Non-gender conforming people are rarely, if not ever, represented. How we feel as a woman or a non-gender conforming person or a man or whatever that might be can be a very fluid experience. But we like to fit everything into nice little boxes, which makes it easier for people to understand.

 Systemic change would have a huge shift, but these are patriarchal system. They’re made to keep women, queer people, black people, people with disabilities, people with illness out of spaces. And that’s what we look to change in the gym space – those systems. People don't expect those changes happen out of a gym space. And I think, "Well, why not? Why not have it out of any kind of space?" Yes, we're focused on movement, but sport, like art, has always been a space for political change. It really has because it's this place where people come together. So it makes sense that it would drive political conversation and change.

Interview: Jessamy Gleeson