by Larry Writer
On that gruelling tour, with hard, grassy playing surfaces and hostile Afrikaner crowds, the Australians won two of the four tests. In all, the Wallabies played 24 matches, winning 15, losing eight, and drawing one.
Yet when Jim Boyce returned to Australia, it wasn’t the creditable Wallaby displays in the tests, his appearances in all four of them, his seven tries, or his selection in 17 games (the most played by any Wallaby on the tour) that was foremost in his mind. It was the racism he had witnessed close-hand for the first time in his safe and civilised life.
‘The blacks, when they were admitted to the grounds at all, were herded into tiny, cramped areas behind the goalposts or in the corners with the worst possible view of the game. We were all startled to hear them cheering for us rather than their countrymen … and soon realised that to them the white South Africans personified the repression they faced every day. At the end of a game three weeks into the tour, the crowd was allowed onto the field, and there was a black guy, he might have been a bit drunk, who approached and congratulated me. Then out of the blue a hulking Afrikaner policeman grabbed him and drove him 15 metres into the crowd. I was stunned. In the dressing room, our manager, Bill McLaughlin, took me aside. “Jim,” he admonished me, “don’t let situations like that develop. If blacks come near you, walk away.” I thought, “Wait a second. That fellow did nothing wrong. It was the policeman who deserved to be chastised for assaulting him without cause.” It troubled me that Bill, a good old school rugby man, either couldn’t see the injustice or was under instructions not to upset the government or our rugby hosts. The incident left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. It may have been the catalyst for my activism.’
Or, more likely, one of many catalysts.
When the Wallabies ran onto the field for the 24 August Third Test at cauldron-like Ellis Park in Johannesburg, in front of 70,000 parochial Springbok fans, they were presented to State President Charles Swart and then lined up alongside their South African opponents for the traditional singing of each team’s national anthem. ‘The Springboks belted out theirs with gusto,’ recalls Boyce, ‘and then the game commenced. Our hosts just didn’t see the need to play our anthem, theirs was the only anthem that mattered. I shouted, “What about our anthem?” The insult was definitely a factor in our 11–9 victory that put us ahead 2–1 in the four-test series.’
After the match, the entire National Party cabinet came to the Australian dressing sheds. Minister for Justice (and future prime minister and president of South Africa) John Vorster regaled the Australians with a grisly tale about the fate that awaited a couple of escaped political prisoners when they were caught, as they surely would be.
Then there was the fourth and final test at Port Elizabeth on 7 September. The game was played, as had been all the other games, in a tense atmosphere, but this match, with Australia one-up in the series, was a powder keg. Until now, the Springboks had not lost consecutive tests since three defeats by the British Lions in 1896, and an Australian series win, after their victories in Cape Town and Johannesburg, would be an ignominious disaster for rugby-obsessed South Africa. The Afrikaner fans were desperate that their heroes win the final test to draw the series, and the non-whites in the crowd were praying for a Springbok defeat, so they barracked passionately for the visitors.
When a riot erupted, Jim Boyce and the other Wallabies huddled together behind the goalposts for safety, wishing they were somewhere, anywhere, else. ‘I had never seen such savagery. The police and white fans just laid into the blacks. It was berserk,’ the former champion winger remembers today. ‘The trigger came 15 minutes from full-time, when the referee missed a knock-on that led to a try to South Africa. The pass was thrown directly in front of the area reserved for non-whites — a small corner stand with no cover and the worst view of the field — and because they so badly wanted us to win, they booed the ref and voiced their disapproval. The police and the Springbok fans in the open and comfortable grandstands exposed to the sun who had been drinking heavily started throwing bottles at the blacks and coloureds. Alsatian police dogs were turned loose on them. I wondered, “What the hell is going on?”’
What happened that hot and windy day in Port Elizabeth won the apartheid system an implacable enemy in Jim Boyce. ‘Many of those being beaten were waiters at our Marine Hotel, with whom we’d been joking just hours before — they had a much better sense of humour than the white South Africans — and who’d come to cheer us. By this point of the tour, we’d been in South Africa for nearly four months, and over the course of that long tour most of my teammates and I had grown increasingly angry, but I had never in my life seen anything like what I saw at Port Elizabeth. After that test, I had a personal connection with non-whites who were suffering from apartheid, and decided I didn’t want to stay in that country one day longer. Frankly, I just wanted to get out of the damned place.’
The Springboks won the match 22–6 and, to the relief of white South Africa, drew the series.
That night, the Wallabies, still shaken by the violence and disappointed at not wrapping up the series, were required at a reception, where they mingled with the Springbok players and, awkwardly, with the SARB officials and politicians, departing as soon as it was not rude to do so. Boyce, and a number of the Australians, men for whom rugby was a wonderful sport but neither a religion nor a reflection of their soul, were annoyed by the Springbok administrators’ gloating swagger and the blatant politicisation of rugby by the politicians. The local police chief crowed that ‘three or four’ blacks had been killed in the streets on their way home from the match. Says Boyce, ‘This bloke believed that we’d be impressed by this appalling news and tell him, “Well done!”’
Jim Boyce now knew that in South Africa, sport and politics were inextricably bound together. ‘For these people, rugby was more than a game. It was life and death. If they were the best at rugby, which they were then, they believed that it followed that their way of life, which venerated apartheid, was also superior. On any sporting tour, the hometown bias of the supporters, media, and officials often develops a siege mentality in a touring team and a negative image of opponents. The Springbok players, by and large, were dour and arrogant about their rugby prowess but fairly good blokes. It was their smug and unpleasant supporters who got to me. A number of the white South Africans we met had grown up believing they were a superior race and they deserved to rule, so democracy was irrelevant. Apartheid was a policy based on fear, a way of keeping the minority whites in power and from being overrun by the black majority. The Afrikaner National Party thought that what was good for white South Africa was good for all South Africa. If you think about it, it’s not too far removed from National Socialism. I tried to politely engage Afrikaners in debate about apartheid, but they were only interested in their own point of view.’
The Wallabies’ itinerary included a brazenly stage-managed visit to the township of Sharpeville, where, just three years before, 69 black African men, women, and children were massacred by police. ‘Blacks had been rounded up and ordered to cheer us when we disembarked from our bus,’ says Boyce. The footballers were organised to pose for the cameras with local police and villagers, and the happy snaps ran on newspaper front pages in South Africa and Australia the next day. When one Wallaby was asked by a reporter what he thought of the black welcoming committee, he guardedly replied, ‘Well, they seem happy enough.’ His half-hearted response was portrayed as an endorsement of apartheid. A provincial governor actually instructed the Australians to repay the wondrous hospitality that had been shown to them by taking their ‘good impressions’ home to Australia and being good crusaders for South Africa by correcting misperceptions.
As the Wallabies flew in their aircraft to a new city or town every three days, they saw how the whites treated the non-whites as non-people, and were angered and saddened. ‘Nobody told us before we left Australia that this was how it would be. The Australian Rugby Union told us it would be
the trip of a lifetime,’ says Jim Boyce. ‘Your typical rugby administrator in those days was a deeply conservative middle-aged or elderly man from the banking, accounting, or legal professions. Their parting advice to us was that South Africa was a strange country and South Africa’s politics were no concern of ours. We were there for one reason only: to play rugby. Not a word about apartheid, or how blacks were ineligible to play for the Springboks or the provincial teams. Travelling around, we found the country vast and the scenery spectacular, and in some regards not unlike the Australian bush, but we felt like strangers because we were so different from our hosts. The vicious Port Elizabeth riot typified the maltreatment of blacks that we witnessed again and again.’
Boyce continued to play for Australia, notably against the All Blacks in New Zealand in 1964 and South Africa in Australia in 1965. The Wallabies, with the Boyce twins starring, won the latter series. Jim Boyce derived satisfaction from the victory over the Springboks and, as he saw it, apartheid.
In ’65, there was as yet no conception that sporting boycotts were an effective weapon against apartheid, and so there were no calls to cancel the tour or for players to make themselves unavailable for selection. There were only a few minor anti-apartheid demonstrations against the Springboks in Australia in 1965, led by John and Margaret Brink, and also by a young Gareth Evans, future foreign minister in a federal Labor government. Evans, wearing a rugby jersey and black face paint and carrying a placard, led a student protest against the Springboks at Essendon Airport. ‘We were pushed back by the police beyond a wire fence, too far away to be actually noticed by those great burly players with shoulders almost wider than the doorway of the plane from which they emerged,’ he would remember. ‘So in my first act of protesting heroism, I jumped over the fence and ran towards the plane with my team of protesters following a little more hesitantly — only to be crash-tackled to the ground by an equally huge policeman, held in an agonising arm-lock, and thrown back over the fence.’ It was at that painful moment when Evans decided to devote his life to peaceful protest rather than the adventurous kind.
On retiring from rugby at the end of 1965, aged 24, Jim Boyce left Australia to study business administration and finance at the University of California Berkeley for two years. This further honed his moral compass. ‘I learned that racism and injustice was far from confined to South Africa. What I saw before my eyes in South Africa was appalling, and then my experiences in the United States made it important that when I returned home I would try to help make sure those excesses did not happen in Australia.’ Boyce was not a little alarmed to realise that he himself was unwittingly guilty of casual racism. ‘At Berkeley, off-hand racist comments that would go unremarked in Australia, and certainly in South Africa, were deemed offensive. Using an old Australian saying, I once told a girl I was seeing that I’d been “working like a black” and she called me on it. I genuinely didn’t realise I’d said anything out of order. Another time, I was abrupt with two black couples who came into the bar where I worked part-time — I said nothing overtly rude, just addressed them in a sharp tone — and after they’d gone, I realised I’d been less than respectful to them, and felt ashamed. Had I not been in South Africa, and taken offence at people who routinely did what I’d just done, it may not even have occurred to me.’
In the summer of 1966, Boyce was employed in a Berkeley bar, where he befriended black co-workers. ‘Willie, who was a dishwasher, told me about Malcolm X, of whom I’d never heard. One night, there was a commotion on the back stairs of the restaurant, and Willie and I ran out to investigate. We saw a fellow, the captain of the university gridiron team, beating a guy’s head against the metal rim of the stairs, while a group stood back and watched. I grabbed the gridiron player and Willie took hold of his victim and we pulled them apart. I asked one of the bystanders why he’d done nothing to stop the attack, and he said, “Oh, gay guys are so overt!” as if that explained the assault. Not all discrimination was racially based, but whatever form it took, it made my blood boil.’
In a break from study, Boyce hitchhiked across Canada. First stop was Toronto, where his family had friends. ‘Once I was hitching late at night and was picked up by members of a West Indian dance band, and over a three-hour drive we talked cricket; they wanted to know about Don Bradman and Colin McDonald. I found Canada a more racially tolerant society than Australia in 1965, and still have an affection for the place.’
Waiting sometimes hours for a car to pick him up left Boyce with ample time to think about issues that he had never considered. ‘I pondered over all that I’d seen in South Africa and realised that Australia had a racist streak. We were cavalier about how we treated people of different races. White Australia rarely thought about Aboriginal culture.’ In all his years at school, he had never been taught Indigenous history. ‘With embarrassment, I remembered how in 1959 in an exam I was asked to write an essay on the life of the Indigenous artist Albert Namatjira. I did poorly because he was never mentioned in history or art at school. I knew more about American Indians.’
To replenish his dwindling finances, Boyce took a job delivering cars in Canada and the United States. ‘One time, I teamed up with a bloke and we drove from Detroit through Tennessee to a town in Mississippi called McCool, where we had to collect a car and drive it to Los Angeles. McCool is 20 kilometres west of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil-rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by local police and the Ku Klux Klan two years previously. The crime was the basis of the Gene Hackman film Mississippi Burning. My co-driver told me that he had been in the search party looking for the then-missing civil-rights workers, and his redneck superiors had told him that if he saw freshly turned earth, “keep walking”. Our mission was to locate and meet the car’s owner, whose name was Judge Dodson. “Whoa, perhaps he really is a judge, and he might have a cocktail bar in the boot,” we hoped. No such luck. Our man’s Christian name actually was Judge, and all there was in the boot of his four-on-the-floor Oldsmobile was a spare tyre. Judge was a black man, and when we arrived in McCool and asked where we might find him, the whites gave us a surly response, as if to say, “How come you white guys are working for a black?” Nasty welcome. Racism was ingrained and institutionalised in the Deep South. As I’d seen in South Africa, I saw blacks discriminated against, refused entry to cafes and restaurants, made to sit in segregated seats at the back of the bus. The South was a very different place to enlightened California, which, while some racial discrimination was still being practised there, was becoming a hotbed of equal rights, a movement driven by the students.’
Back in Berkeley, Boyce was with white fellow students in the Steppenwolf folk-music bar when someone in his group ‘said something nasty and stupid to two black patrons. In a case of mistaken identity, I was king-hit by one of the blacks in the toilet. I fell and there was blood everywhere. I came to, cleaned myself up, and went to the university clinic for an X-ray, which revealed a depressed fracture of my cheekbone. Oddly enough, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. There were so many distractions in Berkeley that I’d been slow writing my university paper on the foreign exchange. Confined to the hospital right by the Berkeley university library, I knuckled down and finished the paper. Because the bar community in Berkeley was close-knit, I had many visitors, black and white.’
From the United States, Boyce went to England, where, 26 years old now, he strapped on his rugby boots again. ‘I played rugby for London Scottish under dubious circumstances: I advanced my grandmother two generations. But I’d lost the fervour to play.’ His disenchantment was exacerbated by the racist comments his teammates directed at a black player who’d tackled Boyce and smashed his teeth. ‘My sympathies were more with the guy who’d broken my teeth than my teammates or myself. Rugby is a tough game and injuries happen, but racism, I now knew, can never be excused.’
By the time Boyce returned to Australia to live in late 196
9, he was no longer the innocent and blinkered young man who had left with the Wallabies in 1963. ‘I wanted to do something about injustice, so I got involved in human rights.’
CHAPTER 2
GETTING ORGANISED
Jim Boyce returned to Australia a different man. ‘My outlook was no longer that of a rugby man. I felt I was more mature and that being away had given me a better-developed sense of what Australia was, why I valued its character, and where I saw it in relation to the rest of the world. One of the reasons I returned is that I hankered for its landscape, its sounds and smells. An enduring memory of growing up was waking in a caravan outside Blayney in the central west with a heavy autumn ground mist along the river and the lovely warbling sound of a magpie. In England, I had missed seeing the sun set across the hills, and the descending dew and the smell of gums, and, sometimes, sheep.’
One of the first things Boyce did on arriving home was resign his membership with the exclusive Royal Sydney Golf Club, where his family had played for decades. ‘In my previous life, I was to a certain extent aware that Royal Sydney excluded Jewish people from membership, but it had never worried me overly. Now it worried me a lot,’ he says. ‘I spoke to the secretary, and he assured me that there was nothing in the club constitution banning Jews, but I was not convinced and I resigned.’ It especially irked Boyce that prominent Liberal Party politician (and future prime minister) William McMahon, whom he’d often seen playing at the gold club, was a member of a club that excluded people on racial grounds. Media moguls, too, such as members of the Fairfax and Packer families, were members, which may explain why the club’s policies were never exposed in the press or on TV. Members of Boyce’s family continued to play at Royal Sydney but respected his decision not to. ‘When you move out of one milieu and into another, you do not ask that your family and friends follow you, but you hope they understand your reasons and that the ties that bind survive such disruptions.’
