Pitched Battle

by Larry Writer

  Now, alarmed by the violent protests in the southern states and resigned to a repeat of the mayhem in Queensland, that state’s police commissioner, Ray Whitrod, called off the annual Queensland Police Ball, which had been scheduled for the outset of the Springboks’ visit. And he cancelled all police leave for the 12 days the South Africans would be in Queensland. By the time the Springboks arrived, much more extreme measures would be enacted by Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen to protect the Springboks, rugby fans, the general public, and the Queensland way of life.

  While the Springboks enjoyed a private cruise on Sydney Harbour, supping on seafood, soft drinks, beer, and wine, New South Wales police commissioner Norman Allan announced measures to prevent interruptions to the Springboks–New South Wales game. To deal with the anticipated 6,000 protesters, 1,000 policemen, a seventh of all the officers in the state, would be assigned to the SCG, and traffic police would patrol outside, their vans ready to accommodate the arrested. Ten police stations were on standby to hold and process those taken into custody. Liberal premier Robert Askin, a blunt 64-year-old sports-lover and gambler (who trailed a whiff of corruption that he was never able to shake) warned protesters that they were in for a thumping. ‘Inevitably, there will be a few odd ones who will go too far. They cannot blame anybody but themselves if the police take action.’

  And another precaution. If things got really perilous during the match, referee Kevin Crowe would blow a special whistle, one supplied to him by police in England, whose volume and pitch was such that it could be heard above the demonstrators’ din. When the referee blew his super-whistle, instructed ARU president Charles Blunt, players had to stand statue-still wherever they were on the field and resist becoming involved in incidents.

  Peter Hain wouldn’t be at the game. He was required in London to face more charges arising from his demonstrations against the Springboks the previous year and at the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Before he flew out, he told followers that he was sure now that the rugby tour would not be able to continue and that the cricket tour of Australia by South Africa would be stillborn. He declared the Australian anti-apartheid protest movement in the best of hands. (Back in London, Hain would pen an article for The Guardian reflecting that among the Australian public he had found scant awareness of international or moral issues. ‘Materialism and an almost 19th century form of capitalism hold the stage, together with a fanatical devotion to sport’, but, noted Hain, the Springboks controversy had tapped a moral conscience that was generally not thought to exist.)

  After being arrested, hauled around the SCG, spat upon, and charged, Meredith Burgmann was cheerily unchastened. She expected to have the book thrown at her in court, but she would still be doing all in her power to disrupt Saturday’s Springboks versus New South Wales match, and was confident that there would be twice as many demonstrators in attendance. Peter McGregor once more gave his guarantee that demonstrators would not resort to violence, nor throw tacks and broken glass onto the field. Acting police commissioner Fred Hanson was sceptical. ‘We won’t play it rough,’ he growled, ‘if they don’t.’

  Ominous, too, for the anti-apartheid campaigners were whispers that rugby supporters from district clubs would turn up in greater numbers than at Tuesday’s match to, as the saying went, ‘dong a demonstrator’. To curb the vigilantes’ zeal, Charles Blunt stated that anyone taking the law into his own hands was not a true rugby man, and, besides, the police could handle the demonstrators. ‘The demonstrations have had no real effect on the tour,’ he said defiantly. ‘It’s quite possible that they might have kept a few people away in the early stages when people were afraid of what might happen. All the police have done is enforce law and order and protect the rights of the public to enjoy a rugby match in comfort and freedom without the threat of danger. If you believe that law and order should prevail then you don’t care how many police are there; if you believe in anarchy in the community then you will say that the police shouldn’t be here. I believe in the former. I believe in law and order. I ask all patrons of rugby to give three rousing cheers for our South African friends.’

  Perhaps more so than at any time in its history, Australia was a nation divided.

  Australians from all walks of life had a firm point of view, which they were not backward in putting forward. The ructions over the Springbok tour led television and radio news broadcasts, and monopolised newspaper front pages. TV and radio crews roamed the streets of Sydney recording the diverse thoughts of people in the street.

  One fellow with a heavily Brylcreemed short-back-and-sides haircut offered, ‘Those young Springboks came to this country to play rugby, and they have every right to be here. Their passport is stamped with an Australian visa. That automatically entitles them to every privilege and protection this country can offer. They are on the same footing as Australians, we accept them as equal citizens … and it’s deplorable and execrable that they’ve been treated the way they have been. The demonstrators have been manipulated by people who are politically biased and are seizing the pretext of this tour to make political mileage.’

  A bearded, tousle-headed student was thankful that ‘the demos have made people concerned not only about blacks in South Africa, but Aborigines in Australia’.

  One policeman mused that ‘Most of the demonstrations we’ve had to deal with are opposed to law and order, and that is the issue, the demonstrators are there to provoke you into doing something wrong because you are representing the law which they are challenging. The apartheid issue is just the excuse.’

  And from another police officer, exasperated and angry: ‘[The protesters] call out obscenities, they say your mother’s a prostitute, you’re a pig, and we have to control ourselves, and that’s a very hard thing to do because you feel you’re losing your manhood. We have to sacrifice our principles and vanity. Every man has a certain amount of admiration for himself as a man, but when you hear a person singing out obscenities, you have to contain yourself because they want you to arrest them so they can then accuse you of police brutality. That’s a known tactic. I’ve seen police being abused, ridiculed, and if my brother ever thought that I’d stood there in front of that crowd and allowed them to call my mother a prostitute, he’d say to me, “Well, what a great galoot you are, you stood there and allowed that fella to call your mother a prostitute.”’

  Yet another policeman told how demonstrators provoked police into arresting them ‘by kicking him in the private parts, pulling his hair, taking his cap, spitting in his face, and then, in front of the public and media, pretend we’re hitting them … the men and women scream out so it looks like we’re being brutal’.

  A sergeant admitted, ‘We’re not used to dealing with demonstrations in this country … there has been violence, in some instances excessive violence. Police are having their authority challenged in the street and I don’t think they’re quite ready for it. There are violent demos and there are violent police.’

  One protester explained, ‘We’re challenging what the Boks stand for … the police have to protect government interests and therefore they charge us. I agree police have been insulted, but if they can’t deal with that they shouldn’t be policemen.’

  A churchman was glad that the controversy was ‘waking people up to Australia’s immigration policy and how we think of our Aboriginal welfare. These serious moral issues are now being addressed. And the Springbok tour is the catalyst. The demonstrators are with the conscience of the world. This tour is exported white racism. Australians are looking at race more than ever before. The United Nations has spoken, the world’s sporting bodies have spoken, and they’re not playing against South Africa.’

  A Labor voter feared that the unions’ support of the anti-apartheid ‘guttersnipes’ would ‘put the Liberal Party in for the next 20 years’.

  A bellicose bloke in a giggle hat and sunglasses rounded on the interviewer. ‘You want my opinion of the demonstrators?’ he
ranted. ‘You really want to know? Hairy goons! Hairy goons, mate.’

  An equally furious elderly man with a red face and a white moustache that seemed to bristle with an anger all its own harrumphed that the protests were ‘absolutely disgraceful. Shocking.’

  Another man gleefully suggested making the protesters play a rugby match against the Springboks. ‘That I’d like to see!’

  ‘The demonstrations have crystallised negative feelings not so much about the demonstrators but the organisers of the demonstrations,’ said another Sydneysider. ‘People don’t like to be pushed around. We have the right to watch a football match in peace. The cricket tour won’t go ahead because it’s so much harder to police a cricket game over five days than an 80-minute football match.’

  Tony Miller, the former Wallaby who had confiscated Meredith Burgmann’s banner at the Wallaby trial in May, was a rugby union man through-and-through. He supported the Springbok tour, and would vent in The Bulletin of 19 July 1971, ‘I’m all for South Africans touring here, black or white.’ Rugby was the be-all and end-all, and was being subverted by foreigners. ‘The South African side is the best in the world, and I know I want to see them. I mightn’t agree with their politics, but that’s a thing I don’t want to enter into. I only want to look at it as a sportsman, that’s all, because this is a sporting side … Protests against the touring rugby players reflect on the average Australian. Australia is supposed to be a sporting nation and we’re not showing our sportsmanship the way these people are carrying on at present. I don’t give a damn what team it is; once it’s on its way and it’s in the country it should be left alone. Now that the boys are touring Australia, I don’t think it’s fair on them as individuals. I can’t see why people want to go around and disturb them, stop them from sleeping. I think this is very childish … A lot of these blokes, the people who do this, are just complete ratbags. Where do these people get their finance from in the first place to come out here and disturb people? I heard it’s been in the Middle East somewhere via Russia or one of these places. That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know how true it is, but anything’s likely. There’s nothing much I can do about the protests, and neither can the average Australian, probably. The police are the only ones who can step in and do something on the field.’

  As to the likelihood of rugby fans taking matters into their own hands and attacking the protesters, as had happened in Adelaide and Melbourne, Miller thought this was entirely possible.

  Passions boiled on both sides … One apoplectic young protester accused Australians of being so blinkered by their own racism as to be incapable of seeing the injustice of apartheid. ‘They’ll go home to their well-fed stomachs tonight and their piggy little wives and they won’t think twice about it,’ she spluttered, on the verge of tears. ‘They think it’s funny that blacks are dying, they think it’s funny that people take time to stand out in the street with pamphlets. I don’t think they give two minutes thought to how evil apartheid is. They don’t give a bugger about anyone but themselves. I seriously doubt that [protesters] can do any good because we don’t have the power to penetrate their apathy.’

  Academic and Indigenous- and human-rights lawyer Garth Nettheim suggested in a letter to The Daily Telegraph that because the ARU had buried its head in the sand and refused to acknowledge the issue of apartheid, the Wallabies should in future be known as the Ostriches. It was the height of irresponsibility, in terms of Australia’s international relationships, for governments not only not to oppose the Springbok [rugby and cricket] tours but also to actively support them. For the sake of domestic political small change, they were squandering international reserves of moral standing. It was those who opposed the Springbok tours, such as the demonstrators, who were salvaging Australia’s good name.

  Representative of the division in the community was the publication in the paper, right alongside Nettheim’s letter, of an equally forceful one from a man named Joseph Firth, which read, ‘The question of demonstrations against the Springbok rugby tour no longer has anything to do with the rights and wrongs of apartheid. The question is simply: Is a small group of incredibly conceited egomaniacs and anarchists to be allowed to forcibly prevent a much larger number of reasonably intelligent adults from watching a football match if they choose to do so? … [If the protesters] succeed in preventing the Springbok tour from continuing, the next move will be to ban any theatrical performance with which they do not agree. Any play that dares criticise the leftist viewpoint will not be allowed to open, killed by boycotts, sit-ins and disruption. Any book that fails to toe the Socialist-Marxist line will be banned, and any shop selling it will be declared “black” will have its windows broken, and so on. Already, at Sydney University, freedom of speech and discussion has been destroyed by a small well-organised group of anarchists …’

  The number of newspaper pages devoted to letters to the editor were increased to accommodate the volume and fervour of the correspondents. And the editorial writers worked overtime. The Sydney Morning Herald pilloried protesters on Saturday 10 July, the day of the Springboks–New South Wales match. The writer predicted that the troublemakers, ‘homebred or imported for the occasion’, would be at the match ‘with their larrikin tactics …

  They should be warned that the patience of the community has been strained to the point where they can expect no sympathy, whatever measures are taken to curb them. They are quite deliberately inciting and inviting violence; they are quite deliberately challenging the rule of law; they are quite deliberately seeking to impose the will of a minority on the community in defiance of the law. The community, not to put too fine a point on it, is fed to the teeth with them.

  Apartheid, believed the Herald writer, had little to do with the issue.

  The louts who carry weapons and dangerous explosives and have shown they are prepared to use them with a reckless disregard for other people’s safety are not crusaders against South Africa’s abhorrent race policies. They are out to stir up trouble against authority and one pretext is as good as another. Those others who pretend to deplore violence are in fact condoning and encouraging it by supporting those who employ it. Those who sincerely delude themselves that they are influencing the South African Government by making public nuisances of themselves are simply discrediting the cause they espouse — and which is espoused by a great many more level-headed Australians.

  The immediate aim of the protesters, ‘whatever their real motives’, was to force the cancellation of the remainder of the Springbok tour.

  Many Australians, disgusted by the spectacle of sporting events held perforce under heavy police guard, and embarrassed by the persecution to which sporting guests have been subjected, will not be sorry to see the end of the tour. But there cannot be and there should not be any question of cancelling it or curtailing it. There is a matter of principle involved here … No community can afford even the appearance of a surrender to the intimidation of a violent and unscrupulous minority. No Australian needs to be reminded of the other instances in which intimidatory tactics have been employed by minorities determined by hook or by crook to impose their will on the majority. No Australian should need to be reminded that to yield on one is to encourage all.

  At the match, the police commissioner’s promised 700 uniformed police, bolstered by 200 more in plain clothes, stood shoulder to shoulder around the oval, facing down the jeering, surging demonstrators who hurled the usual projectiles and tried to run onto the field. The Police Rescue Squad doused the fireworks and flares in sand pits dug at intervals around the ground, and collected the sharp objects. Around 40 large black balloons inscribed ‘Don’t Play With Apartheid’ were released, only for the breeze to blow them back over the demonstrators’ heads and out of the arena into the wilds of Paddington and Moore Park. Some protesters wore motorcycle crash helmets, which served the dual purpose of disguising them and deflecting truncheon blows; some carried cutters to sever the barbed wir
e. Where there was a concentration of demonstrators — the Hill, the Brewongle Stand — the police were two lines deep.

  One protester broke the cordon, and swerved and sidestepped his way like a quicksilver centre three-quarter onto the playing area. After a frantic chase, he was caught and placed in custody. Other protesters who succeeded in climbing over the barbed-wire reinforced-picket perimeter fence were immediately tackled and thrown back over the fence, marched to a detention centre under a grandstand, or locked up in paddy wagons parked on the field. Peter McGregor was kicked in the genitals by a policeman, who dealt him a couple more swipes of his boot as McGregor crumpled groaning to the ground. Denis Freney, who had defied a restraining order that he stay 100 metres away from the SCG, was spotted by a couple of police and ejected. Police operations were directed by senior officers with walkie-talkies perched high in the M.A. Noble Stand, until protesters scrambled the wireless signals with a miniature transmitter inside a matchbox that they left near the grandstand.

  The noise of protest, once more, was high-decibel.

  Nearly 150 demonstrators and a handful of rugby vigilantes were arrested. Many on both sides were bleeding. Those in custody included 39-year-old Jack Mundey, secretary of the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation and future hero of the Green Bans against Premier Askin’s developer mates. A 20-year-old clerk named Phelps was tackled and charged with throwing a ‘hand-grenade’ onto the field; Phelps was later at pains to explain that what he actually threw was a marine flare. Two police officers’ heads were split by flying bottles. When a rugby fan threw a can of beer at a demonstrator, in a reversal of roles, the demonstrator beat the fan senseless.