Pitched Battle

by Larry Writer

  Around 80 CARIS demonstrators peacefully picketed the Melbourne Women’s Athletic Centre when the all-white South African women’s basketball team played the Victorian team. Then a group of protesters, some believed to be from Halt All Racialist Tours, smashed the centre’s windows, burned a South African flag, and tried to burst into the arena, shattering a door whose broken glass struck and cut a South African referee. More than 20 uniformed police repelled them. On 10 June 1970, the AAM protested the team’s arrival at Sydney Airport. This was followed by a protest, with a number of arrests made, when the basketballers played in Sydney.

  Towards the end of 1970, Peter McGregor wrote, printed, and distributed an AAM leaflet that was both a call to arms and a plea for financial support:

  While other countries support South Africa by supplying arms, Australia provides wholehearted moral support and encouragement by allowing many sports teams — always all-white — to tour … The United Nations has declared 1971 International Year to Combat Racism and Discrimination. In blatant disregard of this, at least four South African sports teams have been invited to tour Australia this year: surf lifesaving, rugby, golf and cricket. Such tours are a direct support of racist whites in South Africa, who have been condemned, excluded and denounced by almost every national and international sports body in the world. Australia stands condemned in the eyes of the world as South Africa’s friend and strongest ally. These 1971 tours must be opposed and actually brought to a halt by Australians who genuinely care about racial discrimination. There is a good chance that the cricket tour will be cancelled (as it was in England) if enough opposition is shown to the other tours, especially the rugby one. We must see the surf lifesaving tour as a trial run for the rugby tour. We must learn from the successful British Stop the Tour movement. Their success represents one of the greatest achievements by protest movements in recent times. One reason for its success was the flexibility and action-oriented nature of the movement. It was based on militant, non-violent direct action. What we need is a mass mobilisation of people — as in the [Vietnam] Moratorium — with a wide base of support from different unions, student bodies, anti-war groups, church leaders etc who would sponsor the campaign. To mount a mass campaign against the Springboks, much finance is needed. We urgently ask you to become a sponsor of the campaign. Time is short. $2 for sponsorship; $1 for students; $5 for organisations … Come to the demonstrations, meetings and vigils planned. Do your bit in stopping these racist tours and acting in support of the black Africans fighting for their liberation.

  The AAM was out in force in the first high summer days of 1971 when South African tennis players Laura Rossouw and Brenda Kirk contested the New South Wales women’s titles. Police were called to quell the demonstrations at Sydney’s White City and Melbourne’s Kooyong. On 20 January, HART protesters broke into Kooyong tennis complex and smeared pink paint, oil, and turpentine, and dug holes in the grass of tennis courts where Rossouw and Kirk were to play in the Victorian women’s titles. CARIS deplored the attacks on the Kooyong courts. ‘This extreme action, in our view, will not improve Australia’s standing in the eyes of the world,’ reasoned John Myrtle. ‘On the other hand, it is understandable that certain people will undertake rash action out of frustration when sporting groups remain so unconcerned with what is a matter of extreme human importance. I am afraid even worse violence may occur if the Springbok rugby tour goes ahead.’

  Safely home in Johannesburg, Brenda Kirk reported that her visit to Australia had been a ‘nightmare’. She claimed that while the Australian public, tennis players, and administrators were ambivalent about apartheid and caused no problems, the demonstrators ‘were the ugliest, scruffiest, dirtiest things I’ve ever seen. They know nothing about tennis. One of the officials in Melbourne told me they were paid to come and demonstrate.’ Kirk told reporters that she and Rossouw had spent their tour in hiding, under the protection of police and private detectives. One Australian who did extend hospitality was Australian tennis champion Evonne Goolagong. ‘Everything flows with her, she is a natural,’ said Rossouw. ‘She is very friendly and easy to get along with and I’m glad she is coming to South Africa.’ The great Indigenous Australian player had accepted an invitation from the Southern Africa Lawn Tennis Union (SALTU) to play in South Africa … as an ‘honorary white’.

  John Myrtle, under a CARIS letterhead, wrote to SALTU national secretary M.N. Pather, saying the ‘honorary white invitation’ was ‘an insult to [Goolagong’s] Aboriginal race’. Pather was defiant, replying that Goolagong, as a ‘dark person’, ‘will be treated like the Iranians — Honorary Whites’. As such, she would be allowed hotel accommodation, to attend ‘private, closed functions’, and, ‘when she is not occupied’, to sightsee because ‘being a woman not much fuss would be made over her internal visits’.

  Gary Player, the South African golfer, was a regular visitor to Australia in this period, and Meredith Burgmann delighted in harassing him. ‘He was a silly man,’ she says. ‘He wrote in his autobiography that he supported apartheid, but denied he was a racist.’ In his memoir, Player had written, ‘I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid … a nation which is the result of an African graft on European stock and which is the product of its instinct and ability to maintain civilised values and standards among the alien barbarians. The African may well believe in witchcraft and primitive magic, practice ritual murder and polygamy; his wealth is in cattle. More money and he will have no sense of parental or individual responsibility, no understanding of reverence for life or the human soul which is the basis of Christian and other civilised societies. A good deal of nonsense is talked of, and indeed thought about “segregation”. Segregation of one kind or another is practiced everywhere in the world.’ After the book was published, Player would disassociate himself from the comments, blaming a ghostwriter.

  ‘Player brought a black caddy [Vincent Tashmala] to Australia to carry his clubs and fetch his golf balls to show what a generous and enlightened human being he was. The irony never occurred to him,’ says Burgmann, who was often arrested for yelling out just as Player was about to attempt a crucial putt. ‘I was probably lucky to be arrested because if the golf crowds had got hold of me I might have been lynched.’

  When Player was in his prime, the only other South African golfer of comparable skill, Sewsunker ‘Papwa’ Sewgolum, was forced to accept his trophy for winning the South African Open standing outdoors in the rain because, being non-white, he wasn’t allowed into the club house.

  The rabble-rousing Daily Mirror columnist Jack Darmody accused Player’s tormentors of ‘inverted racism’. Player had told Darmody that he had done nothing wrong. His conscience was clear. He had done much for black golfers in South Africa. ‘If people want to demonstrate and make threats on my life, what can I do? I just have to go ahead and play golf.’ Darmody reported how Australian demonstrators had called Vincent Tashmala a ‘black dog’, and when the black president of the South African Golf Association, Hamilton Mbatha, had refuted Sekai Holland’s claim that the South African regime was using Player as an ambassador for apartheid, Holland had shouted at him, ‘In a few years, we will be in South Africa and you will be shot.’ (Holland denies ever saying this.) Darmody attacked Holland as ‘This topsy-haired-styled woman with the witching smile … who last night threatened with shooting a visiting black who is here to counsel against anti-apartheid demonstrations.’

  Darmody, who had been a war correspondent, would have been discomfited to find himself on the same side as the Nazis. The AAM and its National Socialist nemeses clashed again on 23 March 1971, when around 100 anti-apartheid protesters, mainly students, chanted and brandished anti-apartheid placards to welcome an all-white South African surf-lifesaving team that had landed at Sydney’s domestic air terminal on an Ansett flight from Brisbane. The lifesavers were bussed out of the airport, and mercifully missed the brawl that ensued. The Nazis, wearing grey un
iforms with swastika armbands and heavy steel-toe-capped leather boots, charged into the male and female students with fists flying. The Skull was prominent in the fighting.

  The Tribune in its edition of 31 March 1971 gave what may have been an over-egged account of the fracas, as its author was none other than Denis Freney. Freney recounted in the newspaper, and again later in A Map of Days, how the demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to head off the lifesavers’ bus, only to collide with the Nazis and a television-news camera crew. Ross May had punched a cameraman, who punched him right back. May had then knocked a woman to the ground. Freney then became the hero of his own account. He told how The Skull had punched him in the head from behind, sending his glasses flying, and he had then retaliated, tackling the enormous Nazi to the ground. ‘I grabbed The Skull’s thick-lensed glasses. If the bastard had broken mine, I was going to do the same to his. I ground them under the heel of my shoe, making sure the lenses were smashed. I then began kicking his bald head. My rubber-souled desert boots bounced ineffectively off it as he whimpered like a child. I looked up and saw a police sergeant observing the melee. “Naughty, naughty,” he said, wagging his finger at me.’ A number of demonstrators had then piled stacks-on-the-mill style onto the fallen Skull, and held him until police arrived, when they demanded he be charged with assault. As he was led off, he gave the Nazi straight-arm salute and yelled, ‘I’m not ashamed of what I done. I did it for my country.’ May’s henchman Albert Parziani punched a number of demonstrators before biting off more than he could chew, according to Freney, when he engaged a ‘small Chinese student who grabbed him by the arm and threw Parziani in the air with a magnificent judo hip throw’. Photos on the front pages of next day’s newspapers showed Albert Parziani bleeding from the mouth.

  National Socialist leader Keith Gibbett said his men had wanted to protect the brave South African lifesavers from the troublemaking protesters, who were nothing but ‘a bunch of commos who needed to be taught a lesson’. To this, Meredith Burgmann, now nursing a new set of bruises and cuts, scoffed to a reporter, ‘That’s rubbish. The Nazis laid an ambush for us but they will not stop us from demonstrating against racialism. The one we call The Skull has attacked several of us — including me — in the past. [The Nazis] aren’t interested in the bravery of the South African team or anything else. They just wanted trouble. They came equipped for it with their arm bands and jackboots. They attacked us, and four of us, at least, have been injured … And it wasn’t just the men they attacked. At least two girls were kicked and one was knocked to the ground. All we wanted to do was demonstrate within the law. We were not looking for trouble.’

  Years later, when she read her ASIO file, Burgmann came across a list of the people who’d come to the notice of police at demonstrations, including the 23 March 1971 set-to at the airport. At first she didn’t recognise a number of the names, and then it dawned on her that the police had made no distinction between the National Socialists and the anti-apartheid people and had lumped them all together.

  Burgmann — holding aloft a sign that read ‘If You Could See Their National Sport You Might Be Less Keen to See Their Surfing. Stop The Tour!’ — leapt to her feet at a meeting of Randwick Council, and called out to Mayor Popplewell: ‘I would like to bring up a matter of extreme urgency and I would like the mayor to allow the council to hear our case.’ And then, not waiting for Popplewell’s response, she pressed on, ‘The United Nations has declared 1971 as a year against racial discrimination, yet this council has selected this year to allow an all-white lifesaving team to use Coogee Beach.’ Popplewell warned Burgmann that if she didn’t resume her seat, he would have her thrown out.

  On a wet and windy 27 March, a team of South African surf lifesavers (who the previous week had faced the Australians at Lorne in Victoria and been heckled by 100 HART demonstrators) competed against an Australian squad at the International Surf Lifesaving Championships at Coogee. The meet was supposed to have been held at North Cronulla, but Sutherland Shire Council, whose president was Arthur Gietzelt (a future Labor senator), put the kibosh on that arrangement with what Gietzelt called ‘an act of conscience’. Said Gietzelt, ‘They’re a racially-selected team and they can’t have our beach. Full stop!’ Fellow councillor (and future Labor MP) Maurie Keane echoed this sentiment: ‘People have to give some thought to South Africa’s policies. South Africa is using her sportsmen to whitewash the revulsion produced by her political policies.’

  The different protesting styles of CARIS and the AAM were highlighted yet again at Coogee. The former’s members kept a respectful distance from the lifesavers, content to hold up placards and distribute literature explaining why apartheid was unacceptable. They struck up conversations with the lifesavers and attempted to engage the spectators in earnest dialogue with varying degrees of success. Meanwhile, the AAM-aligned protesters, some of whom had blackened their faces, took a hostile tack. Around 300 defied police orders and poured onto the sand. The protesters, who pulled down barriers and tried to damage lifesaving equipment, were pummelled by police. Maroubra surf-club members volunteered to carry the South Africans’ surfboat into the surf after the demonstrators tried to take it from the visiting surfers. Maroubra boat captain Albert Kennedy said, ‘The South Africans were afraid to carry their boat, so we did. I told my team to get ready and then charge. We sent the demonstrators flying in all directions.’

  Burgmann had by now ‘worked out that you’ve got to think laterally in demonstrations. There was a big barrier erected to keep the protesters from coming into contact with the lifesavers who were marching with their lines and reels along the beach. So four of us, Fran Letters, Helen Randerson, Julie O’ Brien, and I, all in our street clothes, swam out into the breakers and dog-paddled in on the other side of the barrier. We emerged from the surf like Ursula Andress in Dr No and threw ourselves into the sand at the feet of the lifesavers, who marched right over the top of us. They didn’t miss a beat. I grabbed a surf reel, and the lifesavers just dragged it, and me, along. We were grabbed by surf-club members and police, arrested, and charged with offensive behaviour. I have always thought it must have been a funny spectacle, these four crazed women throwing themselves at those magnificent specimens of lifesavers marching semi-naked on the sand.’ The Movietone newsreel commentator said of Meredith being carted away by each limb, ‘Hey, how’s that for hanging four!’

  Burgmann quipped to one of the officers who arrested the four women (plus Mikolaj Saj and Haskel Musry), ‘There are 200 or 300 of us here today, but just you wait. When the footballers come, there’ll be 500 of us at the demonstrations.’ Of course, she laughs today, ‘When the Springboks came, there were more than 20,000!’

  ‘Up to the time of the surfing tour,’ exclaimed Peter McGregor, ‘It was thought that a minority of the demonstrators would support AAM tactics and that the majority would only be prepared to use CARIS’s more peaceful approach. The surfing tour showed us that the AAM would be the majority movement.’

  The decision taken by Sutherland Shire Council to ban the lifesaving event on its beaches was by no means universally popular. Wrote John Harper of Mt Druitt in a letter to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, ‘Conscience is an amazing thing. It can be suppressed, salved and moulded to fit any particular situation. However, once it is paraded tender and bleeding for public inspection on race and human justice issues, one finds oneself on a sort of rollercoaster. The public has every right to expect that these anti-South Africa … crusaders will be out in force to end the tour of the Moscow Dynamos [soccer team]. The Russians got their police state underway when Hitler was just dreaming of his as a lance corporal. [The Russians] have such refined methods of suppressing those who demand freedom and justice … under tank tracks. We can hardly expect to welcome them and have them engage in sport with Australian teams. [But] perhaps there is some subtle difference of skin pigmentation that escapes me. Perhaps Eastern Europeans are a different species of human beings? But then, isn
’t the Berlin Wall a form of apartheid? There are so many rotten windmills of human nastiness in the world to tilt at …’

  Like marauding sharks, the Nazis returned to savage the demonstrators when they turned up en masse to yell ‘Go home racists!’ at the South African lifesavers as they took part in a march past at Bulli Beach, just north of Wollongong. The so-called Fourth Reich Motorcycle Club joined spectators to jeer the 40-or-so protesters. In the catcalling stakes, the AAM crew were giving as good as they were getting until Meredith Burgmann’s loudhailer fell silent. To her rescue came Merv Nixon, president of the South Coast Trades and Labour Council, who was among the demonstrators. ‘Merv said, “Leave this to me!” and he borrowed a bullhorn from a policeman and brought it back to me. I said, “Merv, how did you do that?” He said, “Don’t worry, dear, Wollongong is a union town.”’

  James Roxburgh’s low-key yet heartfelt speech impressed Burgmann. ‘It was the first time I had heard him speak in public,’ she says, ‘and he was just lovely because he is a gentle and modest man and was so emotional.’ Merv Nixon, who was an old Balmain rugby league player, introduced the rugby union international as ‘the famous Wallaby Jim Roxenburgh’.

  That month, too, with the Springbok tour just three months away, Peter McGregor led a dead-of-the-night raiding party that threw bricks through the plate-glass doors and windows of the Rugby Union Club in Crane Place, Sydney. McGregor and company also left the club’s front wall emblazoned with the slogans ‘Go Home Racists!’, ‘Australia Has Enough Racists Already, Don’t Support Whites Who Ignore Blacks!’, and ‘Aussies Be Good Sports, Stop the ’71 Tour Now!’ in white paint in letters a metre high. A letter claiming responsibility and signed ‘Sportsmen Who Loathe Union Tour’ was left on the premises.