by Larry Writer
PITCHED BATTLE
Larry Writer is a Sydney-based author whose books include Dangerous Games: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics; Razor (adapted into the hit TV series Underbelly: Razor); Never Before, Never Again; Pleasure and Pain (the official biography of Chrissy Amphlett); and Bumper: the life and times of Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell.
For their courage and compassion, this book is dedicated to
Anthony Abrahams
Jim Boyce
Meredith Burgmann
Paul Darveniza
Terry Forman
Barry McDonald
John Myrtle
James Roxburgh
Bruce Taafe
Scribe Publications
18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
First published by Scribe 2016
Copyright © Larry Writer 2016
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
9781925321616 (paperback)
9781925307658 (e-book)
A CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
CONTENTS
Prologue: What Was Lost
PART ONE:
CONSCIENCE RISING
1. The Education of Jim Boyce
2. Getting Organised
3. Anthony Abrahams Stands Up
4. Confronting Apartheid
5. A Letter Home
6. The Rugby Seven
7. Choosing Sides
8. The ‘Maddies’ and the ‘Sensibles’
9. Testing the Waters
10. Battle Lines
11. A Protester’s Primer
PART TWO:
INTO THE FRAY
12. The Wild West
13. No Charity in the City of Churches
14. Chaos by the Yarra
15. ‘I Saw Pure Hatred in Their Faces’
16. Interlude in Orange
17. State of Over-Reaction
18. Back to Reality
19. Punishment in the Capital
20. Police State
21. Last Hurrah
22. Dear Sir Donald
Epilogue: What Was Won
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
PROLOGUE
WHAT WAS LOST
South Africa’s National (or Nationalist) Party, a deeply conservative regime dominated by farmers of Dutch heritage and members of the Calvinist religious order, took power in 1948 after winning an election in which only whites could vote. It immediately passed laws to safeguard white supremacy: by segregation and denial of human rights to blacks and coloureds; by keeping for themselves the vast and bountiful land they believed had been bequeathed to them by God. The laws, which brutally and tragically oppressed the majority non-white population, were the cornerstones of the reviled policy known as apartheid. Literally ‘separateness’.
South Africa’s population was around 12 million then, only 2.4 million of whom were white. Land Acts reserved 77 per cent of South Africa for these whites. The remaining 23 per cent of land was divided into ten ‘homelands’, or reserves, where, the government decreed, those who had been classified by the government as black Africans (or Bantu, comprising 70 per cent of the population), coloureds (those of mixed race, 8 per cent), and Asiatics (chiefly Indians and Pakistanis, 2 per cent) had to live. To the ruling National Party, splitting non-whites into disparate, unconnected groups and denying them the vote ensured that its supremacy was unassailable.
Under the Group Areas Act, entire non-white communities (designated ‘undesirables’) could be uprooted from their suburb, where families might have lived for hundreds of years, and relocated in slum-shanty townships on the fringes of cities or in squalid ‘transit camps’ in the deserts or homelands, where disease, starvation, poverty, and violence festered. The inhabitants of these hell-holes invariably had to travel further to their workplaces and pay higher transport costs for the ‘privilege’ of doing so. Once the government had evicted and relocated non-whites, it sold their farms and city homes to whites at scandalously low prices. When Cape Town’s coloured District Six suburb was subsumed by whites in 1966, 5,700 families were evicted. In all, during apartheid’s sorry time, nearly four million blacks, coloureds, and Asiatics were forced onto the street.
Equally despicable were the Pass Laws. Under these, every non-white over the age of 16 was required to carry at all times and produce on demand a 96-page ‘reference book’ containing his or her identity card, tax receipts, employer’s signed verification, and other identifying documents. A police permit to move from one area to another was essential, and no non-white could remain for longer than 72 hours in any urban area where he or she was not born or did not work. By 1971, more than 2,000 arrests were being made every day under the Pass Laws. On 21 March 1960, in the black ghetto of Sharpeville, police fired on a crowd of around 6,000 non-whites who had converged on the local police station to protest against the Pass Laws. Some 69 died in the massacre and more than 190 were wounded. In the wake of this atrocity, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd blamed saboteurs trained in Cuba and Red China for fomenting the trouble, and his government cracked down even harder on opponents.
Apart from being dispossessed of property and belongings, non-whites were tortured and executed. For opposing apartheid, they could be imprisoned without trial for periods of 90 days or 180 days under the Terrorism Act. That period could be extended at the government’s whim. Non-whites were forbidden to vote or work in other than menial jobs. Marriage and sexual relationships between non-whites and whites were banned. Non-whites were not permitted to dine in the same restaurant or cafe as whites, drink hard liquor, or swim at a beach or in a pool used by whites. Public toilets, cemeteries, footpaths, and pedestrian bridges were segregated, along with public transport, hospitals, parks and playing fields, and schools. Non-whites could not operate a business or own land in white areas. The wages of non-whites were far lower than whites’, and any black man who went on strike was jailed. Non-whites were denied social services and health services, and the government spent ten times more on a white child’s education than a non-white’s.
Purely for appearance’s sake, the National Party begrudgingly allowed the existence of opposition political parties, such as the African National Congress (ANC), its offshoot the Pan-African Congress (PAC), and the Liberal Party, but their members were terrorised and the parties were eventually liquidated or forced to close. Which did not mean they ceased to act against the National Party. In 1963, a founder member of the banned ANC’s military arm — Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation — was arrested for treason and jailed for life. His name was Nelson Mandela.
Another area where blacks were shamefully discriminated against was sport. As in every facet of South African life, apartheid had spread its tentacles into the playing of games.
In the late 1960s, Zimbabwean Dennis Brutus, a man of Khoi, English, Dutch, Malaysian, German, and French ancestry and therefore classified as coloured, and who would be one of those who inspired the Australian anti-apartheid movement, proposed that striking at South Africans’ beloved sport would be an effective way to combat apartheid. Bru
tus knew well that sport — rugby union particularly — was extraordinarily important to South Africa.
The reasons? ‘One is the splendid climate all year round, making it possible to engage in so much outdoor activity, together with an abundance of open space. Another is the poverty of the cultural life, so there are few other pursuits to distract … There is the achievement of the country in team sports — South Africans claim to be champions of the world in both rugby and cricket. For a country largely cut off from cultural contact with other countries and subject to worldwide condemnation of its policies, sport has become the great link, as well as the great means by which the national psyche can find compensation. The glories of victory on the sports field contrive to reassure South Africans of their worth and to allow them to adopt a stance of superiority over those who condemn them. For someone not familiar with the South African scene, it is not easy to grasp the extent to which sport dominates the thinking of most South Africans. Perhaps the most graphic demonstration of this is the extent and the frequency of sports issues appearing in the headlines of most of the daily papers. Disasters elsewhere and international affairs are mere trifles compared to a rugby victory — and even anticipation of a victory.’
Afrikaners (white South Africans of Dutch descent) had long defined themselves by their nation’s international success in rugby. They embraced it because it epitomised what they liked to believe was their rugged and unyielding nature and win-at-all-cost spirit. The rulers of South Africa revered the Springboks as the paragons of their society, white guardians and standard bearers of their way of life. To them, in the face of growing criticism from the outside world, every Springbok victory over New Zealand, Australia, France, England, Ireland, or Wales validated their political system and, at the heart of it, themselves. Rugby, it was said, was the National Party at play.
‘Rugby is our God!’ declared Dr Danie Craven, president of the South African Rugby Board (SARB), who, in an interview with Australian journalist Alan Trengove, betrayed a hysterical laager mentality* in railing at any country critical of South Africa’s all-white selection policy. ‘Isolation will steel us. It will harden us. Make us vicious,’ thundered Craven. ‘If you don’t want to play with us, we will say goodbye. We will not crack. We will not change our way of life. The scenery from Johannesburg to Cape Town is as good as any in the world. We have beautiful girls, plenty of drinks, and our sportsmen can enjoy themselves as much in their own country as anywhere else, these days perhaps more so. We will be the greatest sportsmen in the world but if the world doesn’t want to see us then that is up to the world. But I think finally the world will react like a child hankering for an unattainable toy.’
[* A laager is a fort of encircled wagons behind which white South Africans in the pioneering days bunkered down to defend themselves — in this case, to ward off the perceived threat from non-whites and others who disagreed with what they were doing.]
The National Party’s policy of racial segregation consigned whites and non-whites to play in separate competitions. White sport was well-funded, with advanced fields, facilities, coaching, and press coverage, while the rest were starved of money, expertise, and equipment. The Afrikaner-dominated SARB administered white rugby and therefore selected the national Springbok team, so no non-white was eligible to play for the Springboks. Both Prime Minister John Vorster and Danie Craven were on the record as saying that no black man should ever wear a Springbok jersey. Also, the board forbade visiting international teams to field black or coloured players — unless, of course, they were prepared to come as ‘honorary whites’.
Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s prime minister from 1958 until his assassination in 1966, infamously declared that apartheid was so vital to the fabric of his nation’s life that New Zealand including a single Maori in its touring All Blacks team would be sufficient to sabotage South African society. Many sporting bodies buckled to the Afrikaners and left wonderful players at home to keep the peace with their hosts.
Censorship of the media in South Africa, and the outside world’s preoccupation with its own problems and pleasures, ensured that news of apartheid’s iniquities rarely made front pages around the world. Nevertheless, the injustices perpetrated by the National Party were becoming known, albeit in dribs and drabs, and more liberal — more enlightened — societies were growing appalled. Some countries began to impose political, trade, cultural, and sporting sanctions. (Not, however, Australia, which largely saw itself, and in turn was seen by South Africa, as a sibling nation: both southern hemisphere; both rough-hewn emerging nations, vast and sunburnt with glorious beaches; both sports-loving with a fierce long-term rugby union and cricket rivalry. Australia would be one of the last countries to turn its back on South Africa, and only then after one of the most divisive periods in its history, a period recounted in this book.)
Increasingly through the 1960s, international sports organisations began teaming with the cultural and trade groups to punish South Africa for its apartheid. The International Olympic Committee (with persistent and influential urging from Dennis Brutus) informed South Africa that it was persona non grata at the Olympics, and various countries’ sporting organisations were not allowing their athletics, badminton, basketball, boxing, canoeing, cycling, cricket, gymnastics, judo, netball, soccer, table-tennis, tennis, weightlifting, wrestling, and squash teams to compete against South Africa until its teams were chosen on merit, not race.
The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) was not among them.
When this story opens in 1963, in insular, conservative Australia, where the Liberal Party had ruled for 14 years and seemed likely to rule forever, where Indigenous Australians were marginalised and the White Australia Policy was rigidly enforced, and where mention of South Africa conjured images not of oppressed black people but of lions, elephants, and Springboks. Where hard-fought, thrilling rugby union test matches in which Australia’s Wallabies pitted themselves against the formidable men from the veldt were a highlight of the rugby calendar, much anticipated by players, officials, and the public alike.
For an Australian rugby footballer, testing yourself against the mighty Springboks was as good as it got.
PART ONE
CONSCIENCE RISING
CHAPTER 1
THE EDUCATION OF JIM BOYCE
Nothing in his life had prepared Jim Boyce for the injustices he witnessed on the Wallabies’ three-month tour of South Africa in 1963. ‘I grew up in a large house in Vaucluse, Sydney. We were reasonably well-off through old money. There was my mother; my twin brother, Stewart; and my elder brother, Dave. My father and mother divorced when I was fairly young, their marriage a casualty of the war, although they were not exactly well-suited. Dad lived in a flat in Kings Cross and saw us every weekday between four to six p.m. We saw Dad for most of the daylight hours on a weekend. It is fair to say that Stewart and I were spoiled rotten. It was hard on Dave because Dad was so focused on us and the playing of various sports. I see now that we grew up in a cocoon. There was little opportunity to fraternise with other boys and girls.’
A born athlete with a questing intelligence, Boyce had progressed from school rugby for Scots College to the Sydney University first-grade team (while studying economics there), to the New South Wales side and then the Australian national team, the Wallabies, where in 1962, aged 20, standing 185 centimetres and weighing 83 kilograms, he was a hard-running, hard-tackling winger and occasional outside centre. (Boyce’s twin, Stewart, was a teammate in their Sydney University club side and also became a Wallaby winger, although the two rarely played together, because of the demands of Jim’s commerce and Stewart’s medical studies.) Jim Boyce had played against the All Blacks in New Zealand, and his cool rugby brain, sure defence, and ability to score tries against quality opposition earned him selection for the Wallabies’ next tour, the June–September 1963 quest to South Africa.
For Boyce, that tour was the making of the man.
‘I’d had a humanistic education, and was opposed to social inequality and racial discrimination, and I knew a little about, and naturally disapproved of, what was going on in South Africa under the ruling National Party, which represented the white Afrikaner minority,’ Boyce says today. ‘I’d read [South African author] Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country [the 1948 novel that exposed the brutal treatment by whites of non-whites in South Africa]. I knew that non-whites were not eligible to play for the Springboks and, as in the case of Australian rugby player Lloyd McDermott and the English cricketer Basil D’Oliveira, the South African government and its rugby and cricket administrators dictated that visiting teams could contain no coloured players unless they agreed to tour as “honorary whites”. But, for all that, at that stage of my life I still couldn’t, or didn’t want to, see the link between sport and politics. What mattered to me then was representing my country against the Springboks, and I thought that if we did well against them it would be right triumphing over wrong.’
Before he left with the Wallabies, Boyce’s Sydney friends, the South African–born anti-apartheid activists John and Margaret Brink, counselled him to withdraw from the tour as a protest, but Boyce pressed on in ingenuous heart. Brink told Boyce of how the English batsman the Rev. David Shepherd withdrew from a series against South Africa in protest at apartheid. ‘I never forgot that conversation, and it played a large part in my future action to redress my playing against the Springboks in 1963 and 1965 by campaigning against apartheid.’
The 1963 Wallabies to South Africa team included players well remembered today. The captain was John Thornett, and his fellow forwards included Jules Guerassimoff, Peter Crittle, Greg Davis, Rob Heming, John O’Gorman, and Peter Johnson. Ken Catchpole was halfback, Phil Hawthorne fly-half, and Beres Ellwood and Dick Marks were centres. Stewart Boyce would have toured if not for his studies.
Another who did not make that trip was the Aboriginal winger Lloyd McDermott, who had refused to play in South Africa as an ‘honorary white’, the demeaning and cynical loophole employed by the South African government to allow certain non-whites to compete in their country. McDermott, who would earn degrees in science and criminology and became Australia’s first Indigenous barrister, told ABC Radio National’s The Sports Factor in 2001, ‘Blacks or coloureds weren’t allowed to tour South Africa, so I was placed in a very difficult position, where if I had been selected for the Australian team I might not have been allowed into South Africa because of the apartheid laws. On the other hand, they agreed to relax the laws if I was prepared to tour as a token white, an “honorary white”, for the period of the tour, which I didn’t find very tasteful at all. So I resigned from the Queensland squad and I forfeited, because of my beliefs, any chance of getting selected in the [Wallabies] team.’
