by Larry Writer
Non-whites, disadvantaged in every regard, were simply not welcome at the rugby, described by Bishop Desmond Tutu as ‘the white man’s, indeed the Afrikaner’s, game’. Abrahams believes that ‘Playing for South Africa had a mystical significance for the Afrikaners. Donning the green-and-gold jersey with the springbok on the breast was an intense experience for them, mainly because they were defensive about their way of life and threatened by their circumstances, and the us-against-the-world mentality took hold.’ Like Superman when he dons his cape, the Springboks seemed to ascribe supernatural powers to their jersey, and played above themselves when they wore it. As their 1971 winger, Syd Nomis, once said, ‘The thought of pulling that green-and-gold jumper over your head, words cannot adequately describe it, it’s a magic, magic moment.’
Again, as had been the case with the 1963 Wallabies, with the numbers of foreign countries prepared to play against them dwindling, the South African government and rugby officials used publicity opportunities with the Wallabies to try to con the outside world into believing that South Africa was a civilised, tolerant, sophisticated — and misunderstood — society whose system of apartheid, rather than oppressing blacks, allowed them to thrive. To impart this bogus impression, photos were published of the Wallabies cheerily interacting with smiling non-whites at barbecues and visits to zoos, beauty spots and stage-managed functions where they joined the locals fondling wildlife and performing tribal dances. The authorities hoped that when the photographs and film clips appeared in Australian newspapers and screened on TV, they would provide proof that all was well within South Africa and that those who would freeze them out of international sport were ignorant, with no appreciation of the workings of this blessed land.
To the frustration of their hosts and to their own credit, by and large the Australians refused to play the flim-flam game, refusing to stifle either their yawns or grimaces on occasions they knew they were being cynically manipulated. When Wallaby Hugh Rose saw an Afrikaner bus driver throwing coins at black children and laughing as they scrambled for them, he barked at him, ‘They’re not animals, so don’t treat them like animals.’
The spin doctors were dismayed by the Australians’ undisguised scepticism when they were taken to Sharpeville, scene of the 1960 massacre. ‘That was the most flagrant example of us being used as pawns,’ says Abrahams. Their hosts assured the Wallabies that Sharpeville was now a wonderful non-white community that had come far since it was a rancid slum where blacks starved and died of disease. Behold the well-maintained homes and how the inhabitants now live here happily and safely. Paul Darveniza remembers being taken to ‘what they said was a typical African house in Sharpeville. Only it wasn’t. It was some kind of chief’s house, and as soon as the bus pulled up we could see that it was totally atypical. I thought, “I’m not going to trudge through that place.” Pretty much all of us refused to get out of the bus.’
One local reporter, Fred Labuschagne, writing in the Johannesburg Sunday Times, called the non-compliant Wallabies ungracious, aloof, and intellectually snobbish university students, college and city boys who rudely disdained South African hospitality.
‘We were being used, there was a political dimension to our tour,’ says Anthony Abrahams. ‘South Africans were forever asking us how we liked their country, and then before we had a chance to say, telling us how terrific it was. They were trying to have us leave South Africa raving about the place. There was a deliberate effort made to limit our exposure to the real black and coloured communities, and the only official function at which we had any contact with them was one at Montrose Sports Club, a club designated for coloureds in the Cape area, which was the result of some well-meaning people to expand the dimensions of the tour — the blacks performed a vaudeville-style show for us — but it was so token that it was laughable. Generally speaking, any contact with non-whites was stage-managed by the Afrikaners.’
Abrahams was never going to be a stooge of the regime, and he went out of his way to ask questions, trying to make sense of South Africa. He refused to adhere to the pre-departure edict from ARU president Charles Blunt that the Wallabies not criticise South African life, and had no qualms about taking boastful Afrikaners to task and socialising with anti-apartheid activists and the victims of apartheid. ‘I was asked by one Afrikaner woman how I liked her country and I replied, “Well, if you’re asking me if I think it’s a beautiful country, I do. But I also find it a benighted place … ” and I told her why.’
Whether the Wallabies were in Cape Town or Johannesburg, Pretoria or Potchefstroom, Vereeniging or Oudtshoorn, there were compulsory, inevitably dreary civic receptions in their honour. ‘We sometimes had receptions in a town more than once because our itinerary had us criss-crossing South Africa,’ says James Roxburgh. ‘You got so sick of them because the first question the locals would ask you was what you thought of their country, and what do you say? We’d been told not to offend, but I wasn’t about to lie and I came right out and told them that I disliked their political system. They’d bristle up and then would start an argument you’d never win because you were a guest in their land.’
When the Wallabies attended a barbecue at a farm on the veldt, another public-relations exercise to impress on them how well the black farm workers were treated by their white masters, Anthony Abrahams didn’t bother chatting to those who’d been ordered to parrot the government line but sought out a black teacher at a rudimentary school for the children of the farmhands. ‘She was trying to tell me how terrible life was for her and the children without being too overt and attracting the attention of our hosts. She trembled and there were tears in her eyes as she described how oppressively she and her pupils and their parents, who were nothing more than indentured labour, were treated, how the kids had no schooling materials. I found her story almost unbearably sad.’ Abrahams’ discussion with the teacher did not go unnoticed by the authorities and for that, and his past and continued investigations on tour, he believes he was shadowed by a member of the infamous Security Branch.
Paul Darveniza befriended a Cape coloured woman and visited her at her home for a family dinner. Wearing civvies, Darveniza caught a bus to the fringe of the coloured living section, where he rendezvoused with his new friend and together they caught a bus — sitting apart because it was a segregated service — to her home. There, the footballer met the woman’s parents, brother, and sister, and he discussed the problems facing South Africa’s coloured people with the mother, who was a Cape Town teacher. At the end of what Darveniza remembers as a hospitable and interesting evening, the father drove him home to the team hotel.
Darveniza hadn’t realised that he had been trailed by police, who reported his activities to the Australian team management. ‘Next morning I got a call at 6.30. Charlie Eastes and Des Connor wanted me in the manager’s room immediately. They said they’d been informed by the South African Rugby Board that the Secret Police had told them what I’d done last night, whom I’d met, where, and when.’ Darveniza says that Eastes was obviously embarrassed about being made to carpet him, and was appalled that the secret police had involved themselves in a private matter, yet the welfare of the team was his top priority. ‘He warned me that if I transgressed in this way again, I’d be sent home in disgrace. That would have been terrible, but having been in South Africa for a bit, I was more worried about the safety of the girl and her family than I was about myself.’
Darveniza believes that a number of the ‘liaison officers’ appointed by the South African Rugby Board to travel with the team were spies, keeping the rugby administrators and the Security Branch apprised of what the Wallabies were thinking and doing. ‘As the tour went on, we figured out who were the operatives.’
It was clear to Barry McDonald that ‘blacks had no rights at all. They were not allowed to assemble, no more than three at a time in a public place, they were beaten and imprisoned and moved from their homes, they were totally oppressed … What I
saw in South Africa wasn’t right, and it hurt me … purely in hindsight, because I didn’t know enough to be offended when I was a young bloke. What I find amazing was that our invitation from the South African Rugby Board was to go over there and play against racially selected sides, and we weren’t supposed to speak to anyone who didn’t have a white face, and if we did we’d be sent home in disgrace. We couldn’t select an Aboriginal in our team unless we had the approval of the South African government. You only accept an invitation like that if you’re racist yourself. Ignorance is no real excuse. I didn’t think of myself as being racist, but the fact is that I accepted those terms as normal, and I can’t get away from that. We saw the light on the tour, but we accepted that invitation because we came from a racist society, with our White Australia Policy and bad treatment of Aboriginals, who until recently couldn’t vote, buy alcohol, or own land or stock. We were conditioned by our background.’
‘Almost on a daily basis I came up against situations in which non-whites were brutalised and marginalised that made me cringe,’ says Abrahams. ‘I felt that just being there compromised me, and that it compromised the Wallabies and Australia itself. I didn’t press my views on apartheid on my teammates, simply chatted to those who wanted to listen to the things that I believed, and circulated my copy of the book The Seeds of Disaster among those who were interested in reading it, until someone left it on a hotel reception desk and it was lost.’
Abrahams says he ‘continued to give it my all on the field. I was able to separate my political activities and conscience from football … but, for me, being in the midst of apartheid cast a pall over the entire tour. You’re a human being before you’re a sportsman. What I learned from that tour and the anti-apartheid campaigning I did later was that no matter how important a sport may be, you can’t put a game before your conscience, especially when the issue is human rights and race. Your obligations as a human being don’t stop at the turnstile of a rugby field. If those two interests clash then obviously you have to make a choice.’ Largely because he was distracted by South African politics and apartheid, Abrahams played in just ten matches on tour and was not chosen in the test side.
He was no longer conflicted. The Wallabies should not be playing against the Springboks so long as their teams were racially selected. ‘I knew in my heart that this was the last time I’d play against South African rugby teams, and if that meant I was never picked for Australia again, so be it. As it happened, after the tour, life and career kept me away from Australia for many years, so the issue never arose. It did, however, arise for some of the other guys.’
During the Wallabies’ South African odyssey, ARU president Charles Blunt — who was counting the minutes until the Springboks’ tour of Australia in 1971, two years hence — joined the team. Abrahams buttonholed Blunt on two occasions to make his feelings known, ‘and each time Blunt fobbed me off, saying, “We’re still going to play ’em, Tone.” There was no question of compromise on his part or that of the organisation he led.’
Happily for Abrahams, manager Eastes and coach Connor were not as hardline. When he sought Connor’s permission to meet members of the Black Sash, an upper-middle-class white women’s movement protesting the disfranchisement of the coloured people of the Cape (and which became a major social-welfare organisation for Africans in the cities), Connor gave his blessing, saying, ‘That’s OK, Ant. I wish I were a fly on the wall.’ And both acceded when Abrahams asked, as a matter of principal, not to be considered for selection to play against Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe). Nor did the team leaders prevent Abrahams spending time with victims of apartheid or anti-apartheid campaigners such as the Helen Suzman (at the time, she was the Progressive Party’s sole MP), Colin Eglin (who was the non-parliamentary leader of the Progressive Party and who would be very involved in the drafting of the constitution of the Rainbow Nation in 1994), Alan Paton (author and former president of the anti-apartheid Liberal Party), and Laurence Gander of the Rand Daily Mail.
‘These people — I had dinner with Helen Suzman and her husband and with Alan Paton and his wife — gave me in-depth information, which I didn’t have before I left Australia. In Soweto, I met with Rose-Pearl Serote, who was a journalist with the Rand Daily Mail, and we were going to have a coffee together till we realised there was nowhere a black woman could sit and drink coffee with a white man. I met members of the Black Sash.’ Abrahams invited Roxburgh and Darveniza to his meetings with the South Africans, but they were leery. ‘They agreed that what was happening in South Africa was bad, but they took the view that they were there to play rugby, and as guests they didn’t want to plunge the Wallabies and the game of rugby into anything unpleasant, so they reluctantly declined to join me.’
Yet if Eastes and Connor were happy for Abrahams to delve into the dark heart of South Africa, ‘Our Afrikaner hosts were very much opposed to me mingling with their enemies and asking questions.’ As stated, Abrahams remains convinced he was followed by police to his assignations. ‘The progressive people I spoke to supported sporting boycotts, and especially rugby boycotts because rugby was the national sport of white South Africa, a religion. However, less-progressive folk feared that sporting boycotts would only serve to fuel even more of a laager mentality. I learned that the National Party had introduced a raft of laws to stifle any opposition to their policies. For instance, they could detain people for up to 180 days without trial, and that period was renewable. Human rights were routinely denied. While we were there, the Bureau for State Security passed a law which the wits called the Boss Act, whose Section 27 stipulated that an accused could be prevented from giving evidence in his or her defence if it was deemed that that evidence compromised the security of the state.’ As a qualified lawyer himself, Abrahams was outraged by Section 27. ‘The judiciary, to its credit, refused to conduct trials in those circumstances, but the government got around that by allowing a minister to sign an order jailing the defendant without trial. That law was a watershed ruling in the breakdown of human rights in South Africa.’
When Abrahams was invited to speak at the Cape Town Law Society, he advised the Afrikaner president of the Law Society that he had no intention of giving the anodyne speech expected of him about the similarities between Australia and South Africa, such as both countries’ beautiful beaches and love of rugby and cricket, and instead would be talking about the undermining of the rule of law in South Africa. ‘The president,’ laughs Abrahams, ‘suddenly came down with what I’d call a bad case of diplomatic flu.’ The Australian expected that at the end of his speech, a stinging indictment of Section 27 of the Boss Act, he would be greeted by stony silence. In fact, ‘I received a standing ovation. It was very moving and made me think that South Africa was not quite a lost cause.’
Abrahams was invited to a dinner party at the Cape Town home of Colin Eglin. A fellow guest was ‘an austere, dignified coloured lawyer in his early 60s. Colin told me he adored classical music, and an exception was made for people like him to attend concerts at the concert hall in Cape Town … so long as he sat in a roped-off segregated area. It was not illegal for this black man to dine with whites at the level we were at, but association was always suspect, and if word got out he’d be liable for investigation by the authorities. And, of course, any form of affectionate or sexual contact across the colour line was banned completely.’
Despite the everyday ghastliness, those 1969 Wallabies to South Africa were a happy, close team, as their photographs and team member Dick Cocks’ home movies attest: the players skylarking in a boat on the Zambezi River, at Victoria Falls craft village, merrily embarking and disembarking tiny planes, posing with elephants; Paul Darveniza sticking his hand down the throat of an ostrich; guys wearing funny masks; a groaning and grimacing Barry McDonald crawling across a dusty track like a man dying of thirst; Geoff Shaw and Roy Prosser looking dumbfounded at a man nailed to the floor through his cheek at one of the curious entertainments put on for their benefit;
the players, administrators, and Australian media carousing together; popular journalist Norm Tasker being de-pantsed on a bus …
Terry Forman developed a lifelong love of African culture and art on tour. ‘We were introduced to an Afrikaans art dealer and rugby pundit named Zandberg Jansen, who took me to various galleries and private collections and made me understand that the African artist paints the way he does not because he can’t create in the same way as a western artist, but [because] he sees things in his own way. He tunes into the imagination rather than the material and the defined. Zandberg, an epicurean character who lived in London, became a central figure to me, Anthony, James, Barry, John Hipwell, and Rupert Rosenblum. Zandberg was an unapologetic supporter of the National Party, but he could talk to me and Rupert about art, to Barry about music, and to Ant and James about history, politics, drama, and literature. He was a marvellous big-game photographer. A couple of us thought he may have been gay and was coming on to us, but he never did anything untoward. Ant reckoned he was a plant from the National Party to infiltrate our university group and report back on what we were talking about. I returned home wanting to be an artist. Weighing against this, of course, was the terrible oppression we saw, the segregation in shops and offices, banks, on benches in parks. We all tried to engage with non-whites, but many were so unused to white people saying “G’day”, they didn’t know how to react. The tour was a life-shaping experience, a coming of age for me in so many ways.’
Journalist and first-grade rugby coach and referee Norm Tasker had been assigned by Sydney’s Sun and Sydney Morning Herald to travel with the Wallabies and report on the tour. ‘We were just a bunch of young blokes together on an adventure that was both wonderful and appalling,’ he says today. ‘We were treated very well and saw some fantastic sights, and we saw some horrific examples of apartheid. You couldn’t escape seeing blacks maltreated. On the first week of the tour, we stayed at a resort on the banks of the Vaal River. An Afrikaner drove us to a party in his Mercedes-Benz — all the way he was complaining about the “fucking kaffirs”. He told how he’d hit one in his Merc and it cost him a small fortune to get the dent repaired. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I assumed a kaffir was some kind of animal. Then one of the fellows said, “No, kaffir is a derogatory term for a black.” That bastard ran over a black man and was more concerned about his damaged car. He hadn’t stopped, then drove a further 160 kilometres before he informed the police, who told him to forget everything except having his precious car fixed.
