by Larry Writer
‘There was cross-over between the tactics used in anti–Vietnam War and anti-apartheid campaigns — Denis, Peter, and I were involved in both — but the main anti-apartheid organisers were different from their anti-Vietnam counterparts. In the anti-Vietnam days, there was Mike Jones and Bob Gould in Sydney, in Queensland Brian Laver, and in Melbourne Albert Langer, all strong leaders, and while they were not exactly dictators, what they said went; whereas the anti-apartheid movement was very collegial. We all felt a bit naughty.’
McGregor and Freney inspired Burgmann. ‘The anti-apartheid movement made us really good friends. We were a good team. It was the time of collective activity and anti-hierarchical structure, and that worked well for us. Denis had all the strategic and organisational smarts. He understood organisation and how to get things done. He was an enormous influence on me. We had an interesting friendship in that I was young and heterosexual and he was older and gay. Everyone realised that, even though he wasn’t out at the time. He saw in me someone he could nurture into a good organiser. He never lectured me, just imparted his wisdom as if by osmosis. Perhaps it was something in his curries. Denis was fun, he enjoyed life. He was a bit obsessive, but aren’t we all?’ Freney, like his AAM colleagues, was perfectly willing to break the law, be arrested, and take whatever punishment the court dealt him. The AAM leaders knew, too, that ASIO was surveilling them.
Peter McGregor was another crucial cog in the AAM. ‘A kind man with a huge anger about injustice,’ says Burgmann, ‘he was so dedicated that he resigned his job as a high-school teacher to be a full-time AAM convenor, coordinating the daily campaign organising. His voice was quiet and tentative, he did not ooze charisma, but you could totally rely on him. If he undertook to do something, he did it. He was well organised — an odd trait for an anarchist! — and, like Denis, he was always fun to be around. Any of us who had a little money gave it to Peter.’ McGregor was happy to accept around $20 a week.
There were other quiet achievers in the anti-apartheid forces, says Burgmann. ‘John Myrtle, and the rugby guys James Roxburgh, Jim Boyce, Paul Darveniza, Bruce Taafe, Barry McDonald, and Anthony Abrahams. They were thoughtful, quiet, strong gentlemen who wanted to achieve an end to apartheid … We were all so close and most of us remain friends today.’
As well as demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, Burgmann had marched for women’s and Aboriginal-land rights. ‘There was a lot to be angry about in those days,’ she chuckles. ‘With Indigenous and women’s rights, Vietnam and conscription, South Africa, censorship, gay rights, the White Australia Policy, civil liberties, sexual freedom, the discrimination against young people (especially those with long hair) by the old. An activist was kept very active! In the new prime minister, William McMahon, and state premiers Sir Henry Bolte, Robert Askin, and Joh Bjelke-Petersen and their ministers and police, we had reactionaries in power across Australia. We were still mired in conservative, monocultural attitudes, born of our fear of the twin terrors: communism and the “yellow hordes” of Asia. Most Australians then would never have met an Aboriginal, and if news of the South African government’s policy of apartheid in South Africa ever seeped into our bulletins, most Australians would have considered it a good way of keeping uppity blacks in their place. We were a scared and reactionary society, which is not an environment in which social reform thrives.’
Not that Australia was so different from other white western societies. ‘In lots of ways, America was worse,’ says Burgmann. ‘They shot their long-haired students. And I was in Britain in 1968, involved with the London School of Economics, where my sister was studying, and the hatred there of the long-haired academics and anyone with a leftist view of life was huge. In 1968 alone, there were student revolts in 40 or 50 different counties … Britain, France, and America; Peru, Japan, Chile.
‘I’m terribly glad I was at university at that time, and especially at Sydney University, which was the headquarters of the protest movement, and could take the fight to these people who were demonising ordinary Australians, trade unionists, students, and church people who believed in social justice as communists and crazies trying to subvert law and order and bring Australia down. They believed that middle Australia would keep them in power forever. History proves they underestimated the Silent Majority and that they shot themselves in the foot. Vietnam taught us that if we campaigned hard, we could change people’s views. In 1965–66, 90 per cent of Australians supported the war; by the early ’70s, it was 30 per cent.
‘Many of us in the AAM had once, in the early Vietnam moratorium days, believed that if you presented your case to people in authority and you had a good case, you might persuade them to see things your way and bring about change. It gradually dawned on us that authority didn’t listen to reason, not about Vietnam, and not about apartheid. The South African government had no intention of dismantling apartheid, and our government was happy to accommodate their racially selected sporting teams. We had no choice but to engage in non-violent civil disobedience. We were all willing to break the law, be arrested, and go to court and prison if need be.’
Burgmann would be arrested more than 20 times in her protest years. ‘I ended up battered and bruised and physically and emotionally exhausted, but I didn’t care, none of us did. My parents backed me. Mum said to me, “I don’t mind you getting arrested, but you must never get arrested for using bad language” … and I never was!’
Peter Hain and Dennis Brutus were the patron saints of the Australian anti-apartheid movement. On their speaking visits here for SADAF, then CARIS and the AAM, their message was that no matter how gifted a non-white rugby player or cricketer may be, no matter how much they merited inclusion, the prevailing system of apartheid would prevent them being selected. Brutus and Hain explained how the Afrikaner authorities inquired into a player’s colour and the colour of his or her parents and grandparents. Australians who continued to play against racially selected South African teams, they said, were betraying themselves and their sport. Australian sportsmen were not playing against a true South African national team, only a white South African team representing three million, not 18 million, people. Wrote Brutus, ‘By [competing against a racially selected South African team] an Australian sportsman is accepting racial discrimination, the political exclusion of non-white people. He knows he is not playing a team selected on merit. This must be hard for a true sportsman to live with.’
To Meredith Burgmann, the decision to follow Brutus’s and Hain’s advice to target something as deeply embedded in the South African regime’s psyche as rugby and cricket ‘was bleeding obvious’. The proponents of apartheid were becoming increasingly isolated, in culture, trade, sport … and the latter was the most painful stab in the heart. ‘We could see how they were hurting as country after country refused to compete against them. There’d been a call for sporting boycotts by the ANC and it was an easy and very effective way to express our opposition to apartheid. We gave South African minister Jan Haak a hard time of it whenever he visited, and in the AAM’s early days we protested endlessly outside South African Airways because they didn’t have an embassy in Sydney, but the South Africans didn’t pay us much heed and nor did the silent majority of Australians. Sport, however, was a different matter, and it was a lightning-bolt moment when we decided to disrupt and halt South African sporting tours of Australia. To white South Africa, nothing was more important than rugby union and cricket, and it just so happened that these were the last sports in which South Africa’s racially selected teams were still competing internationally.’
The resolve of Burgmann, Freney, and McGregor and their fellow AAM activists was strengthened by their conviction that apartheid was evil and unjustified in any circumstances and that opposing it was right. ‘It was a grand adventure,’ says Burgmann today. ‘We were all young and all idealistic and very dedicated. People in war zones have heightened emotions. We truly thought that we’d be able to make a difference and strike a
huge blow against the racist South African regime. Our confidence and, I suppose, the fun we were having planning our strategies and carrying them through made us fearless. There wasn’t one of us not prepared to be battered for our beliefs. We were a strike force. We left the reasoned debate to CARIS.’
Burgmann says she was afraid of being targeted by police, Nazis, and rugby supporters, and feared being seriously hurt, but should such have happened it would have been worth it. There was no better tactic than direct action. After one arrest, she told a reporter, ‘I hate demonstrations … you know people may get hurt or arrested, you march for miles, you hear the same boring speeches again and again, and you probably end up with laddered stockings and sitting on the cold ground. But I go along because I have to. I join demonstrations, and sometimes organise them, against Vietnam and apartheid and for Aboriginal land rights because they have an effect: the publicity changes minds and puts pressure on the Government.’
CHAPTER 9
TESTING THE WATERS
Denis Freney claimed in his 1991 autobiography A Map of Days: life on the left that it was his idea for AAM to target the South African sports teams that toured Australia in the 18 months leading up to the June 1971 Springbok rugby tour. These teams were for minor sports, but they were racially selected and all-white, and protesting them would serve as a trial run for the campaign against the Boks. ‘I put the idea to Sekai, Meredith, Peter McGregor and his mother Alice who was an excellent organiser and tireless worker despite a permanently disabled hip.’ Freney’s colleagues eagerly came onboard. Local teams planning to visit South Africa would be targeted, too.
The stark difference between the modus operandi of CARIS and AAM was abundantly clear on 27 February 1970, when a swim meet was held at Drummoyne Pool in Sydney at the Australian Swimming Championships to select a team to compete in South Africa. In the lead-up, CARIS’s John Myrtle penned a flyer inviting the public ‘to participate in our peaceful and disciplined demonstration and thereby make a stand against racialism in sport’. The brochure implored the competing swimmers to make themselves unavailable for the South Africa trip. ‘Will there be any swimmer with the courage and integrity to take a stand for morality and against repressive racism?’ While a sporting trip to South Africa was ‘a very attractive proposition, it is still wrong [and] before you make your decision whether or not to be a member of the team to tour South Africa, we strongly suggest that you talk over the whole matter with your parents and friends …’
Recalls Myrtle, ‘We gathered outside the pool and handed out our leaflets and engaged the athletes and spectators in largely congenial conversation.’ Meanwhile, Meredith Burgmann and four friends were throwing black dye into the pool.
‘That was AAM’s first protest,’ she says. ‘It was easy. Helen Randerson, Susan Dixon, Peter Landau, Jeremy Gilling, and I stood on a bridge overlooking the Olympic pool and lobbed paper bags filled with dye into the water during the women’s 200-metre butterfly event.’ The dye turned the water in four of the seven lanes black. The race was stopped when the swimmers were unable to see and their eyes stung from the dye. The races continued while swimming officials frantically attempted to dilute the dye, and when they were unable to, the entire meet was called off.
The sporting establishment was outraged. ‘It was a pure act of hooliganism … a thoughtless and disgraceful act which didn’t prove anything,’ lamented Australian Swimming Union president Bill Berge Phillips. ‘I understand the demonstrators handing out leaflets at the entrance of the pool had nothing to do with it.’ Just as aggrieved was the defending men’s 200-metre freestyle champion, Neil Rogers, who placed third after his vision was impaired by the dye. ‘I had my Australian title at stake,’ mourned Rogers, who was drawn to swim in lane four, the lane most affected by the dye. ‘I protested but I was told: either swim under the conditions or don’t swim at all. What could I do? I lost my title, and I lost trips to South Africa and the Commonwealth Games.’
After they’d thrown the dye into the pool, Burgmann, Landau, and Gilling sped off in two cars and laid low at the Forth and Clyde Hotel in Balmain. Unfortunately, says Burgmann, ‘someone took the number plate of our car … The police came to the pub and took Peter and Jeremy away …’ After questioning Landau and Gilling, they turned them free for lack of conclusive evidence. ‘It was a remarkably effective exercise, and that’s when we realised we could stop sporting events.’
The front page of The Sydney Morning Herald on 19 May 1970 ran the disturbing headline: ‘Woman Kicked in Head at Wild Meeting’. The woman was Meredith Burgmann, who, with eight colleagues, including Sekai Holland and Peter McGregor, repeatedly interjected during an address by right-wing South Australian Liberal MP John McLeay at a meeting of the Australia–Rhodesia Friendship Society at the Federated Ironworkers’ Association hall in Sydney’s George Street. Members of the Australian National Socialist Party, notably New South Wales head Keith Gibbett and stormtroopers Albert Parziani and Ross ‘The Skull’ May, were at the meeting to support McLeay, who had recently backed trade with Rhodesia and wanted the Australian Communist Party outlawed. When the Springbok tour was announced, Gibbett had warned, ‘If the commies think they’re going to demonstrate against the Springboks … they’ll be in trouble … There’ll be blood flowing in the streets.’ Now, at the Australia–Rhodesia Friendship Society, The Skull — bellowing, ‘Kill the Reds! Kill the Reds!’ — kicked Burgmann unconscious.
Ross May was nicknamed after the American professional wrestler Skull Murphy and once said that he shaved his head because baldness was a sign of brutality. He was tall and muscular, and wore thick glasses, as he’d been born with cataracts in both eyes. He had trained in karate and claimed a love of Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, and the Beach Boys. He was a passionate fan of the St George Dragons rugby league team. He also had a record of violence against women, men, and teenagers whose ideologies differed from his. Australian National Socialist Party leader Arthur Smith told author David Harcourt in 1972 (for his book Everyone Wants to be Fuehrer: National Socialism in Australia and New Zealand) that left-wing demonstrators were terrified of The Skull. ‘He’s very basic and that’s what makes him dangerous to these people. He doesn’t think about what he does, he just goes and does it. He’s almost suicidal in his determination to stop them. He’s always after Meredith Burgmann. He’s given her a good kicking a couple of times. He’s got a thing about her — probably because he detests women in politics, particularly left-wing women.’
When David Harcourt interviewed The Skull, he told how he targeted Burgmann and ‘that bitch, that black monkey’ Sekai Holland. At the Australia–Rhodesia Friendship Society meeting, said May, ‘This Meredith Burgmann started her act. She started screaming about the poor black monkeys in Africa. The others started as soon as she got going … trying to break up the meeting.’ The chairman ordered that the protesters be removed from the hall, and May didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘Someone had tipped [Burgmann] out of her chair … and she just lay there in me road. She was just lying there waiting to be carried out so I gave her a good kicking. I kicked her as hard as I could. I remember bruising me toe. I screamed out, “Kill the reds!” a few times. Boy, did the papers write that up! Holy hell! I was crowded by people. I moved back and gave the Beard [a demonstrator, probably Peter McGregor] a good kick in the stomach. A couple of the others dragged Meredith Burgmann out. I remember it was a warm night, but she was wearing a fur coat. Get that! A fur coat!’
Burgmann winces as she recalls being attacked by The Skull, who avoided arrest. After she regained consciousness, she says, ‘I was woozy, and the police wanted me to go to hospital for a concussion check and press civil charges against him. I did neither because I was young and dopey … also, I made the reasonably sensible judgement that he would become even more obsessed with me if I sued him.’
The Skull terrorised anti-apartheid protesters, as he had terrorised those at Vietnam Moratoriums, Communis
t Party meetings, and women’s liberation rallies. At one anti-apartheid demonstration at Sydney’s Central railway station, he threw an orange smoke flare directly at a young woman. He beat up Denis Freney and Peter McGregor at every opportunity. As May told David Harcourt in Everyone Wants to be Fuehrer: ‘I’d seen them coming down through Belmore Park and I decided to catch “Pig” Freney if I could. Freney saw me and the cry went up that The Skull was there. I just walked around for a while and then I caught this idiot who I now know as Peter McGregor. I see him giving out these pamphlets … so I raced up and whaled into him. I hit him in the face a couple of times. As soon as I hit him he dropped his box of badges and I gave it a good kick and kicked him in the head.’
For that episode, May was sentenced to two months’ jail, and served six weeks before he was released for good behaviour. Meredith Burgmann says that while there was a sense of relief among the protesters that The Skull was in jail, some were sad to see him off the scene. ‘Without his violence, the anti-apartheid movement lost a lot of free publicity.’
Freney was driving in Sydney’s inner suburb of Ultimo when he noticed new graffiti on a wall. He recounted in his memoirs, ‘“Aust Nazi Party Welcomes Sth African Sportsmen in ’71” it read, followed by a swastika. I couldn’t believe it. It was the sort of publicity that could only swell the ranks in the anti-apartheid protests.’ He persuaded Noel Hazard, the Tribune’s photographer, to shoot the graffiti and run the photo on the front page of the next issue of the Communist Party newspaper. ‘The night after it came out, I proudly displayed it at an AAM committee meeting. Meredith and her friends burst into laughter. They had painted up the slogan the night before I saw it. But the message it contained was certainly true.’