Pitched Battle

by Larry Writer

  Under siege and prevented from sleeping, the Springboks would have relished letters of support from loved ones at home, but the Amalgamated Postal Workers Union had stopped mail deliveries to the team; 20 bags of letters and parcels addressed to the players were marked ‘return to sender’ at Sydney Airport and loaded onto the first plane back to Johannesburg. And the Sydney-based members of the Federated Liquor and Allied Industries Employees’ Union had now voted not to supply the Springboks’ Sydney hotel, the Squire Inn at Bondi Junction, with bottled beer or soft drinks during their upcoming stay. Only seven of the 395 unionists who attended the meeting had opposed the ban.

  Meanwhile, at their Adelaide University headquarters, student anti-apartheid protesters were plotting tactics for the game. Phones jangled incessantly as young activists out and about Adelaide updated the nerve centre on the Springboks’ doings and whereabouts. On a blackboard was scrawled in chalk the slogans to be learned and shouted, along with the phone numbers of lawyers to call in case of arrest. There were exhortations on the board to set fire to the goalposts, and, presumably if that failed, to chop them down with a chainsaw. Pamphlets explained how to make flour and petrol bombs. A notice reminded demonstrators that police had no right to search them unless they were under arrest, and to link arms and keep moving to make capture difficult. Peter Hain was there counselling the students on the dark art of disruption.

  On the evening of Wednesday 30 June, the Springboks played the South Australian team at Adelaide’s Norwood Oval. So much bigger were the Boks than their opponents that spectators gasped when the sides ran onto the field. (South Australia was having to do without the services of Jim O’Sullivan, a good player and a man devoted to working for Indigenous Australians; like the more-high-profile Wallabies, he had refused to play against the Springboks.) The South Africans were not only bigger, they were much, much better, and ran roughshod over the locals, scoring six slashing tries, five conversions, and five penalty goals in a 43–0 shut-out. Yet, again, after the game, the Springboks’ mastery was overlooked and the main topic of conversation was the riot.

  Even hours before kick-off, as fans and demonstrators gathered outside the oval, trouble roiled. While the 300 CARIS campaigners, who included Jim Boyce, handed out pamphlets explaining why the tour should not proceed and sang hymns and folk songs (‘Kumbaya’ and Pete Seeger’s ‘We Shall Overcome’ were protester perennials throughout the tour), more militant demonstrators blew whistles and horns, yelled ‘Racists go home’ and ‘Sharpeville, Sharpeville, 69 dead’, and waved placards. Concealed in some protesters’ backpacks were the skyrockets, bungers, and smoke flares they intended to use to ruin the match. While most of the 7,500-or-so spectators pointedly ignored the protesters, a number hissed, booed, heckled them or challenged them to fight. Neo-Nazis circulated malevolently in their khaki uniforms, with swastika armbands and jackboots, handing out their own pamphlets lauding the Springboks as esteemed members of the master white race who must be defended and allowed to play, and accusing Bishop Crowther and Peter Hain of being communists. Mounted police galloped about, and uniformed and plainclothes officers mingled with the crowd.

  Peter Hain received a death threat — ‘I have a gun. I am one of the best marksmen in Australia. By this time tomorrow night, you are going to be dead’ — via an anonymous phone call to the Adelaide Advertiser. Four decades later, in his office in Westminster, he told me, ‘That threat to kill me was very spooky. Despite having been threatened physically and verbally in the UK in 1969–70 during the Springboks’ tour of Britain, I’d never actually been threatened with assassination. Deep down I thought, “Oh, it’s just someone trying to intimidate me into backing off.” If they were really going to shoot me, surely they wouldn’t signal their intention beforehand by phoning the media. They would have just pulled the trigger. Still, walking around Adelaide, I felt uncomfortable thinking there could be a sniper with me in his gun-sights. It was terrifying, and when I reported it to the police they didn’t seem too interested in protecting me. What a surprise!’

  Half an hour before kick-off, uniformed police and motorcycle-squad members in white crash helmets, leather jackets, and heavy leather boots marched into the ground and lined up shoulder to shoulder inside the perimeter fence, backs to the field, facing the spectators. When the demonstrators massed in front of the southern grandstand in an area known as ‘the mound’, reinforcements moved to stand directly in front of them, eyeballing them fiercely, daring them to make a break for the playing area. Then the teams ran onto the field, shook hands, stood hand over heart while a police brass band played the national anthems of South Africa and Australia (the protesters’ boos overwhelmed the anthems), and took up their playing positions. The referee blew his whistle to start the game. The shrill blast was the pre-arranged signal for the demonstrators to give the Nazi salute and chant in unison ‘Sieg Heil!’ (which may have confused the pseudo-stormtroopers present); blow whistles, bang beer cans together, and jeer and boo; and light their crackers and smoke bombs, and hurl them, hand-grenade style, onto the field.

  While the Springboks were demolishing their opponents, the match was halted five times by field invasions. The police smashed the invaders to the ground in tackles as powerful as any by the players and hauled them away. As the Springboks scored again and again, the demonstration raged on. Combatants from all sides suffered injuries. Police numbers were swelled when reinforcements arrived from an earlier anti-Vietnam rally in the city. Despite the extra police, ground invasions by small groups continued. Officers were assisted by white-coated ground officials, who were, in reality, players from Adelaide rugby clubs; they had been commissioned by the South Australian Rugby Union and, according to ARU president Charles Blunt, the police. The official response was also joined by rugby fans, who had the time of their lives crash-tackling the generally young and skinny men and women into the turf. Each time a protester was flung to the ground, arms, legs, and hair flying, spectators cheered.

  Believing that their violence had official approval led some vigilantes and marshals to savage extremes. Men were beaten and some women protesters’ breasts were groped.

  The badly injured were stretchered from the field by ambulance officers and police, and those arrested who could still stand were dragged by their arms, legs, hair, and clothing into 12 police vehicles parked by the entrance gate.

  Protesters were shocked by the brutality of the attacks upon them, although it wasn’t all one-way: one policeman was swarmed upon by demonstrators and was carried from the arena half-conscious, his face covered in blood. One demonstrator had a skyrocket he was lighting blow up in his face; he was carried to an ambulance and rushed to Royal Adelaide Hospital, where his burns and damaged eye were treated. The media were targeted as well. Police punched a press photographer, and roughed up a reporter who sided with the photographer. When three white-coats cornered a long-haired youth who was scampering around the field, rugby fans cried, ‘Kick him!’ and the men took their advice. Two youths who had climbed over the fence and onto the oval carrying a sugar bag containing nine live rabbits set the animals loose on the field, but instead of skittering under the heels of the players as intended, the animals stayed put and nibbled grass. One field invader, a slightly built man with flowing dark hair, shaped up to the huge Springbok second-rower John Williams, who turned away and left him to the police. Tom Bedford, who was a metre from the incident, reflects today, ‘I thank God that John turned the other cheek.’ At 9.00 p.m., halfway through the second half, 100 women wearing the uniform of South Africa’s Black Sash racial-equality movement slow-walked into Norwood Oval singing ‘We Shall Overcome’. They were jeered.

  Like a scene from World War I, a thick and acrid pall of grey smoke from the fireworks and smoke bombs, pierced here and there by the floodlights, hung in the air.

  Till the final whistle, the Springboks continued to play the brand of rugby that made them world champions, at once beautifu
l and brutal, with its quicksilver attack and relentless, teeming, jolting defence. There were stellar performances from Piet Visagie, Frik du Preez, Tom Bedford, Joggie Jansen, and Piet Cronje, in a display that doubtless sent shivers up the spines of the Wallabies awaiting them in Sydney and Brisbane. At the end of the game, the cheering from the rugby devotees for the South Africans drowned out the whistling and chanting of the protesters, who seemed stunned by the violence.

  One of those arrested that night was Stewart Harris, an experienced and accomplished reporter for The Times of London who was covering the Springboks in Australia for his newspaper, and who would write vividly of his experiences in his book Political Football, which was published shortly after the tour. Soon after kick-off, Harris was interviewed by another reporter, for ABC-TV’s This Day Tonight. Asked ‘What is happening here tonight?’, Harris replied, ‘I don’t like it a bit. It simply confirms the fact that the Australian government was quite wrong to allow this tour to begin at all, and I think what we’ve seen here tonight will confirm this. If the tour should continue, more people are going to get hurt and the Australian nation is going to be divided, and it just makes me extremely angry to see this sort of violence going on. I think you will find as the tour goes east the violence will get worse, the organisation [of the anti-apartheid demonstrators] will get better, and I think the demonstrators are determined to stop the tour. I think it should be stopped, tonight, in case more violence happens further east, in the rugby union states.’

  Ten minutes later, Harris became the news. When he saw a protester — John Scott, state secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union — being carted from the field by his ankles and wrists by four rugby vigilantes, and then dropped by them from waist height to the grass and held fast while one drove his knees into Scott’s chest, Harris reported the thugs to the police. As he was doing so, he was overheard by a police superintendent named Eric Hender, who, in the ear-splitting hubbub, mistakenly believed the journalist was accusing police of brutality. Hender, ignoring Harris’s protests that he was a working journalist with every right to be reporting the assault, arrested Harris, who was hustled to a detention area at the ground. There, he stood in a queue of apprehended people waiting to be charged. Harris, 48, was amused to be the oldest person there and certainly the man with the least hair. Details taken, he was photographed and locked in a police wagon with around 20 others, including John Scott. Harris took off his coat and put it under the head of a battered young man lying on the hard metal floor of the wagon. On the way to the police station, Harris wrote his report for The Times on the back of his match program.

  Some hours later, he found himself standing in front of a table in a dingy office flanked by large policemen who stripped off his tie and belt and confiscated everything in his pockets, including his scribbled copy. The brutal frisking ‘made me furious’, wrote Harris. ‘There was no courtesy about it and none of the regard that one man should have for another. Of course the police were flat out that night with so many arrests, but many of them still managed to do their work decently … My fingerprints were taken, upstairs, outside the cells, and on the way I suddenly realised why my belt and tie had been removed … But I didn’t feel like committing suicide. Although I did get pretty worried when I saw the cells.’ Some hours later, Harris was released and ordered to appear in court the following morning, where he pled not guilty and was released on bail of $200 to appear again before chief stipendiary magistrate D.F. Wilson on 26 July. (At that hearing, the charges against him were dismissed.)

  At a press conference after the game, a spokesman for the SARU expressed his bitter disappointment that the match had been marred by the demonstrators. Hannes Marais announced that he had always believed Australia to be a democracy but was now reconsidering.

  When they learned that a wired crowd of anti-apartheid protesters had gathered outside Norwood Town Hall to spoil a post-match reception in the Springboks’ honour, the players begged off and in a bus escorted by police cars returned to the Mayfair Hotel to drink beer and watch a TV replay of the game.

  Next day, newspapers all over Australia gave front-page reports of the hand-to-hand fighting, the explosions, the blood, and the fury. An editorialist for the conservative and influential Canberra Times wrote that blood was being shed in a spurious cause. The young and idealistic were being misled by the anti-apartheid activists into believing that hosting the Springboks was an immoral act, and the newspaper blamed foreigners — notably Bishop Crowther — for polluting the waters of peaceful protest in Australia. The Springbok tour was already ‘a disaster’ thanks to ‘the Australian and foreign instigators of the violence and those who fell for their demands. It is unacceptable that an unscrupulous minority should dictate to a community, even when that minority is egged on by an empurpled bishop who [sits] in comfort surrounded by bodyguards while the youngsters he had indoctrinated mounted the barricades …’

  If Australians could be accused of being racists because they play rugby with South Africa, ‘the Chinese could be accused of opposing North Vietnam’s war aims because they played ping pong with the Americans and the Australians’. All countries used non-political means to gain approval and goodwill, and there was nothing sinister about that practice in itself: sporting teams, dancing troupes, films, books, information services, and cocktail parties were all ways of doing this. ‘No matter how people may disagree with the repressive political systems of the Soviet Union or China, with France’s testing nuclear weapons, with Kenya’s policy of discriminating against Asians, or with the role played by the Americans in Vietnam, they need not feel guilty about enjoying the artistry of Russian ballet dancers, the skill of Chinese ping pong players or the cultural achievements of any other nation.’

  Therefore, the use of authoritarian tactics coupled with appeals to high morality would likely fail in Australia. South Africa mixing its politics with sport was no justification ‘for mixing trade unionism with politics of the most blatant kind. And the motives behind the deliberate attempts to besmirch Australia willy-nilly with a racialist brush must be viewed with a good deal of suspicion. Our immigration policies have not always been free of racialism and they are even now at times applied with incredible clumsiness, but the truth is that today the Government’s attitude to migrants compares well with that of most countries.’

  More than 100 people, mostly university students, appeared in Adelaide Magistrates’ Court, where a production line of seven magistrates processed their charges, mainly for assault, trespass, and obscene language. There was farce. A 19-year-old unemployed man named Stephen Davey, who’d been nabbed for yelling obscenities at police, was unrepentant. When asked by Magistrate Nelligan if he regretted using such language in a public place, Davey responded, ‘I can’t say I do, Your Honour.’ Nelligan jailed him for seven days. Then John Simon, 27, told Magistrate Humby that he saw no need to plead either guilty or innocent to three charges, on the grounds that he did not recognise the authority of the court. When Humby asked Simon, ‘Do you wish to apply for bail?’, the defendant responded that he certainly did. Said Humby, ‘You do recognise the court, then?’ ‘Yes,’ shot back the accused, ‘I’m a hypocrite!’

  After running a taunting gauntlet of anti-apartheid campaigners as they emerged from the Mayfair Hotel, the tourists were bussed to Adelaide Airport, where, grim-faced and slump-shouldered, they squeezed once more into their tiny aircraft — first-class travel this surely was not — for the flight to Melbourne, next stop on this rugby tour from hell. Some surely wondered if it was all worth the trouble.

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAOS BY THE YARRA

  Victoria’s Liberal Government and the state’s rugby officials and their appointed (and unappointed) guardians of law and order were determined to smash the anti-Springbok demonstrators. Premier Sir Henry Bolte, who called the campaigners ‘rowdy, loud-mouthed juveniles led by a few misguided people’ who were waging ‘a rebellion against consti
tuted authority’, expressed his Government’s ‘faith in our police [who] will be playing it their way. There are no instructions being given to them. Anything they do to protect the Springboks and the rights of rugby fans we will support.’ In other words: open slather.

  Arriving in Melbourne, the Springboks again eluded the protesters at Tullamarine Airport. There were around 200. The light aircraft landed instead at Essendon Airport, eight kilometres from Tullamarine, just after midday on 1 July, and the players were driven by bus through a back entrance — Tommy Bedford felt like he was in a James Bond movie — to lunch at the Essendon Bowl restaurant in Fletcher Street, Essendon. They had just begun tucking in when protesters, who by then had tumbled not only to the airport switch but also to the location of the restaurant, massed outside, preparing to storm the restaurant. Just then, police cars skidded to a halt and blocked their path. The protesters were still out in the street when the players emerged from the restaurant and boarded their bus. New, nastier, chants had been added to the demonstrators’ repertoire: ‘Welcome to Melbourne, white trash!’ and ‘Where are your nigger slaves?’

  The Springboks, deprived of sleep, forced to fly in tiny aircraft, black-banned by unions, prevented from eating a meal together, and under constant police guard, were men under siege. They were prisoners in their hotels, where their only recreation was watching TV (a novelty because there was none in South Africa, but which soon lost its novelty value), playing cards, reading, and drinking beer. When they ventured onto the streets or to a pub or a restaurant, unless they went in twos and threes and in civilian clothing, they were abused by protesters — so mostly they stayed in.