On July 17, 1981 the Springboks arrived.
Earlier in the year I’d gone to a weekend session in the Union Hall, where HART organisers had briefed us on strategies they would use to stop the games should the tour go ahead. We had divided into groups, linked arms and practised ways of resisting the police. I’d been going on protest marches since I was a kid but this was new. In the past it had been a matter of showing up, grabbing a banner and joining the crowd for a stroll on the street. This seemed much more serious.
Not long before the tour began, Boyd told me a weird story. He had been driving home to Plimmerton one night after a gig in town when he passed a house where police had been called to a rowdy party. What he saw through his windscreen wasn’t the usual cop car, couple of constables and a noise control officer. A phalanx of uniformed men in full riot gear of helmets, visors and batons were rounding up what looked like a typical bunch of Saturday night revellers. It had reminded him of a scene from Roger Donaldson’s 1977 dystopian film Sleeping Dogs.
We would later learn that the police had created two special squads - Red and Blue - and sent them to Hawai’i for training. At its team-building sessions the Red Squad had developed its own motivational chant: ‘Root more, eat more, drink more piss! Red, Red, Red’s the best!’ Had what Boyd witnessed been a dress rehearsal?
At work I argued with a postie who said politics should stay out of sport. Other posties got involved in the protests. Some took roles as marshals and organisers. Once the two-month tour kicked off there was a march in Wellington every Wednesday and Saturday, the days on which the games were taking place in different parts of the country. I joined half of them. In Hamilton, the second match of the tour was cancelled after hundreds of protesters cut their way through a fence and stormed the field. The police, caught by surprise, were helpless to stop them. Although they eventually arrested many of the protesters, they were also forced to shield them from the wrath of enraged rugby-goers.
In Wellington the following Wednesday, a peaceful evening march on Molesworth Street was set upon by baton-wielding cops, leaving people in the front lines bloodied and wounded. It felt like revenge by the police for their humiliation in Hamilton. From then on, like many others I would dress in a motorcycle helmet and stuff newspapers under my clothing. The chant ‘Remember Soweto!’ became ‘Remember Molesworth Street!’
The protests were planned like a military campaign. On the day of the Wellington test match we were marshalled into groups. Those prepared to brave a possible baton charge were ushered into one squad and given special instructions. The group of several hundred that I joined was designed as a decoy to confuse the cops and stretch their resources. We formed a rambling stop-start procession around the winding roads above Athletic Park, where the game was to take place. We passed throngs of rugby fans heading to the game and dodged the odd bottle, beer can and ‘Fuck you!’ hurled in our direction. We didn’t know what was happening elsewhere. Later I would read that protesters closer to the game had been bludgeoned by the Red Squad.
Eventually we found ourselves on a field opposite the park. The game was now underway. I could hear the roars of the crowd in the stadium and the chants of protesters in the streets. A line of visored riot police, batons poised and twitching, stood facing us along the perimeter of the field, preventing us getting any closer to the park. As the match went on we held the line about ten feet away from the police, knowing what would happen if we took a step closer.
As I stood facing down the riot cops, I was no longer thinking about the twenty million or so black South Africans denied a vote, or Nelson Mandela in the nineteenth year of his incarceration for opposing the apartheid regime, or the black activist Steve Biko, tortured and killed by the South African security police. I was thinking about New Zealand, and the strange, violently divided place it seemed to be, a land where people who loved their country were in danger of being killed by other people who, you might say, loved it differently. And I was thinking about my father, and how much of his short life he had devoted to trying to make it a better place, a country built on kindness and imagination, which would give equality to women and men, Māori and Pākehā, workers and bosses, grandparents and children, gays and straights and carnival anarchists. That was the New Zealand that had been dreamed and debated in our living room when I was a kid. Now there was a war going on between that New Zealand and one that seemed to have its origins in some legendary pioneering past, and where our pride as a nation rested on the performance of fifteen men on a rugby field.
That war raged through the whole two months of the tour. There had been a moment after protesters stormed the field in Hamilton when I wondered if Muldoon might intervene and send the Springboks home, but after the battle of Molesworth Street it was clear his intention was to ensure the tour went ahead at any cost.
The final match was at Eden Park in Auckland. That night on TV the area around the park looked like a battlefield. The army had blocked roads with rolls of barbed wire and upturned skip bins. Protesters, dressed for battle with helmets and shields, fought with police in the streets around the grounds. Three protesters dressed as clowns were beaten senseless by members of the Red Squad. The field was flour-bombed from a plane piloted by a man named Marx. In Wellington I sat with hundreds of other protesters blocking a stretch of motorway. We listened to reports from Auckland on a crackly transistor radio. Our rage was tempered by a sense of relief: this would be the last march for now.
26
ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN
The tour found its way into much of the music that came out in its wake. In Wellington, Riot III had formed as a musical and theatrical accompaniment to the Springbok protests, employing the kind of punk iconography that was already a few years out of date. Their singer called himself Void (although we heard his real name was Geoff), wore a fetching combination of leather jacket and kilt, and was an unforgettable presence on the protest marches. The group’s single, ‘Subversive Radicals’, didn’t sound as dangerous as it should have. Much more sophisticated was Blam Blam Blam’s ‘There Is No Depression in New Zealand’. Recorded in July 1981 just as the Springboks were arriving, the song didn’t address the subject directly - it had been written before the catastrophic events unfolded - but Richard Von Sturmer’s lyric looked back with deep irony on decades of denial.
There is no depression in New Zealand
there are no sheep on our farms,
There is no depression in New Zealand
we can all keep perfectly calm.
Everybody’s talking about World War Three.
everybody’s talking about World War Three,
But we’re as safe as safe can be,
there’s no unrest in this country
We have no dole queues,
we have no drug addicts,
we have no racism,
we have no sexism, sexism, no, no
There is no depression in New Zealand
there are no teeth in our heads
There is no depression in New Zealand
we sleep in a well made bed
The Newmatics recorded ‘Riot Squad’ a month later. This song wasn’t really about the tour either - it was inspired by an incident of police brutality at a punk gig - but I could never hear its jaunty reggae without my mind playing images of the Molesworth Street batonings.
Nineteen eighty-one would also see the first release by Herbs, an Auckland group of Māori, Samoan and Pākehā musicians who innovatively combined reggae and Pacific rhythms. Reggae had begun to establish itself in New Zealand from the mid ‘70s, when the first albums of Bob Marley and The Wailers reached our shores. After Eric Clapton had an international hit with a cover of Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, an occasional New Zealand band could be heard approximating reggae’s distinctive offbeat, but only for a song or two. Chaos were the exception. In 1978 Rough Justice had done a few gigs with this pioneering group. Led by a pair of brothers from Porirua, Elmer and Johnny, Chaos played reggae
almost exclusively, perhaps the first local band to do so. Yet like so many others they never made a record.
By the time of Bob Marley’s visit to New Zealand in 1979, reggae had reached critical mass. Standing at Western Springs that warm afternoon, in a crowd as big as the one Dylan had drawn a year earlier, it became apparent how much this music resonated with New Zealanders in general and Māori in particular. Aston Barrett’s basslines pumped deep in my chest as Bob Marley swung his dreadlocks in a trance-like dance and exhorted us to get up, stand up for our rights, while smiling strangers passed me joints.
With its cover depicting the notorious police eviction of Māori protesters from contested land at Auckland’s Bastion Point in 1978, Herbs’ debut EP Whats’ Be Happen? offered a local version of some of the ideas Marley had sung about. Phil Toms’ song ‘One Brotherhood’ addressed Māori land rights. ‘Azania (Soon Come)’, written by Ross France, voiced direct support for the anti-apartheid cause.
But if the tour had a theme tune it was the sombre minor-key melody of Hirini Melbourne’s ‘Ngā Iwi E’. Thousands of voices could be heard singing it every time we protesters walked the streets, sometimes to the strum of a single guitar, other times a cappella. At the start of one march The Topp Twins led the chorus:
Ngā iwi e! Ngā Iwi e!
Kia kotahi ra te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa
E i a i e
Kia mau ra! Kia mau ra!
Ki te mana motuhake me te aroha
E i a i e
Wahine mā! Wahine mā!
Maranga mai, Maranga mai, kia kaha
E i a i e
Ta ne ma! Ta ne ma!
Whakarongo tautoko kia kaha
E i a i e
All you people! All you people!
Be united as one like the Pacific Ocean
Hold on firmly! Hold on firmly!
To your separate identity and to compassion
All you young women! All you young women!
Rise up, rise up, be strong
All you young men! All you young men!
Listen, support, be strong.
‘Ngā Iwi E’ was not a song about the tour or the evils of apartheid, but about New Zealand. Bob Marley had sung: In this great future you can’t forget your past. Hirini Melbourne, too, had been looking to both past and future. Although written and sung in te reo, his song was addressed to Pākehā as well as Māori.
‘Ngā Iwi E’ called for the people to be ‘as one like the Pacific Ocean’ yet retain our identities, our links to our ancestors. For Melbourne this meant his tribal roots in Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Kahungunu. For me it meant remembering my mother and her parents, refugees from Germany, and my father’s immigrant ancestors from Germany and Ireland. In entreating young women to rise up and young men to listen and support, the song also celebrated changing gender roles. Women could be leaders; men could be supporters. And to face whatever lay ahead, both needed to be strong.
Eleven weeks after the tour Muldoon won another election. Although his National Party had taken a hit in the main cities, it had surged in rural electorates. He had foreseen this, had known it would be the result of letting the tour go ahead. In the first-past-the-post electoral system he needed only the boost in rural support to win. But for many New Zealanders the tour seemed to have shaken something loose. There was a sense that if a thing was worth doing you’d better get on and do it, even if it meant a fight.
The pubs wouldn’t host the punk bands - they were too raw, too young, too dirty - so the bands had organised their own shows in community halls, warehouses and living rooms. Now, post-punk bands were starting to set up their own labels and make their own records. Reggae interpreters Herbs also had their own label, Warrior. In 1981 Blam Blam Blam and Newmatics records came out on Propeller, a small independent label started the year before by Simon Grigg, a young Auckland record store owner. A decade and a half later Grigg would oversee a worldwide hit with OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’.
In Christchurch, Roger Shepherd, who also worked in a record shop, started Flying Nun Records. The label’s second release was a single by a Dunedin trio called The Clean. Formed by brothers Hamish and David Kilgour, The Clean drew on a similar combination of punk and ‘60s pop as Toy Love, with an extra dose of psychedelia and Dylan. They were raw and their records had a home-made quality, but the choruses stuck like bubblegum and guitarist David Kilgour could coax a thrilling noise from his instrument.
Like Mammal a decade earlier, The Clean had come up with their own idea of cool, but in even greater isolation, without the thought or possibility of making a living but a determination to make music anyway. The spirit was summed up in the chorus of one of their songs: Anything could happen and it could be right now, the choice is yours to make it worthwhile. Before their first visit to Wellington a big hand-painted banner appeared in Dixon Street, pasted to the fence around a construction site. It read: ‘The Clean Is Coming!’ I was reminded of the Blerta posters I’d seen a decade earlier.
One night in the early ‘80s I was walking home to North Terrace after a movie in town. I’d climbed the Dixon Street steps and was heading up Salamanca Road with the gothic silhouette of Victoria University’s Hunter Building looming on my left. Suddenly I was swept back ten years by the sound of an electric guitar at full treble, playing psychedelic scales. With my next steps I could feel the pulse of drums and bass as well. It was Mammal playing in the adjacent Union Hall. No, it wasn’t. Mammal were long gone. This was The Clean on the Wellington leg of a campus tour, and as I got closer I could tell the difference. But for a moment, like a Mobius strip, the two ends of a decade had joined and become one.
EPILOGUE
With Muldoon back in government and the pall from the Springbok tour still hanging over New Zealand, I boarded a plane and went to see what the rest of the world looked like. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a musician any more but music was still the fuel that powered my life. I’d spent much of the ‘70s poring over records from faraway places - London, New York, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans - trying to figure out what made them sound so good, so unique. I was coming to realise that although music aspired to be universal, it was always the product of a time and place, that a Beatles’ single, a Memphis blues, a country ballad or a second-line strut from New Orleans sounded the way it did only because of the lives of the people playing it and the history beneath their feet. Now I wanted to see those places for myself, know what they felt and smelt like, what people ate and drank there, and hear the sounds in the cities that had formed them.
Arriving in America, I was amazed by just how much music there was. There were singers in subways, bands in bars, melodies drifting from parks and balconies. There seemed to be a great appetite for music, and an endless supply.
‘So what is your musical preference?’ a cab driver with a Creole accent asked me in New Orleans before I’d even mentioned that music was the sole reason for my visit. In that city it felt as though all the sounds of the continent had been washed down the Mississippi River, sloughing off anything unnecessary along the way, bringing only the best. There were brass bands, not the military or Christian ensembles whose plodding dirges I’d heard back home, but carnival combos where sousaphones pumped like the bottom end of a James Brown record. There was a trumpeter playing hymns on Canal Street, holding his instrument with one hand while accompanying himself on an electronic keyboard with the other, and a virtuoso busker in the French Quarter who had built his own drum set out of tins and boxes. Outside my hotel window, a preacher chanted sermons in blues cadences. In a neighbourhood bar I heard men who looked like farmers sawing fiddles and pumping accordions while middle-aged husbands waltzed and two-stepped with their wives. In another, a one-eyed pianist named James Booker seemed to have the entire history of music in his fingertips. He played Chopin and Lead Belly, and all of it sounded like he’d just made it up.
If a song was good and relevant to people’s lives, everyone seemed to be playing their version of it. ‘Jambalaya (On the
Bayou)’ had been written in the early 1950s by the Alabama-born country star Hank Williams in celebration of the rich cultural life of the French-speaking Cajuns, who had settled in Louisiana after being driven out of Canada and Maine by the British. In New Orleans I heard The Neville Brothers perform it as a funk tune, Hackberry Ramblers play it as a two-step, and James Booker make it a manic piano boogie.
The history of the American South is violent and bloody. It is as scarring as that of South Africa’s apartheid system, and marked by deeper divisions than those exposed in New Zealand during the Springbok tour. I could feel that history every time someone warned me not to set foot in a particular part of town. I could feel it when I caught the stare of a middle-aged man with the stars and bars emblazoned on his truckers cap, a T-shirt that read ‘SONS OF CONFEDERATE VETERANS’, and a look on his face that said, ‘Have you got a problem with that?’ And yet in the music there seemed to be a generosity, and the expression of some kind of collective spirit.
Perhaps I was viewing it all too romantically. After all, many of the musicians seemed to be working for as little pay as any I’d known at home, if not less. I saw amazing musicians who were junkies and derelicts. In New York I went to see a band led by Dannie Richmond, who had been the great drummer for Charles Mingus. I took a seat near the small stage. Dannie wore a tuxedo and looked lean and elegant. With him was a pianist whose brilliant playing could not conceal his tenuous hold on existence. He too wore the semblance of a suit but it was ill-fitting, the cuffs were scuffed, and I was close enough to see that the soles of his shoes were worn through to his socks.
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