Pitched Battle

by Larry Writer

  ‘The segregation of blacks was so demeaning. Human beings should never be treated like that. I predicted that the place would blow up with the greatest bloodshed in history. Thank God, Mandela averted that. It was an almighty shock to most of us. We were fairly naive and uneducated. We came from a very different, insulated, and isolated Australia than the Australia of today. This was before random breath-testing, you still got the cane at school, [detectives] Ray Kelly and Bumper Farrell were still belting bodgies in Kings Cross every night. Few of us were aware of the difficulty of the South African situation. Except for the Sydney University intellectuals, the guys on tour grew up thinking rugby was rugby and politics was politics and apartheid was none of our business. We all came back feeling very different.

  ‘What we experienced together in South Africa in 1969 made us close mates. To this day, we stay in touch, holiday together. We have reunions.’ And at those reunions, Dick Cocks’ home movies get a screening, to Tasker’s eternal chagrin. ‘The vision of my bare arse in the bus … at least I was young and fit then. That footage gets around. I walked into the M.A. Noble Bar at the Sydney Cricket Ground and eight guys said, “I’ve seen you naked on the Wallabies bus.” I’ll never live it down. What happened was, John Cole and I took the chance to sample some beautiful Stellenbosch wines, and when we got on the bus I suggested to Jack that for a bit of fun we wrestle our way to the back. Well, the guys left Jack alone and set upon me, took all my clothes off and threw them out the bus window into the street.’ Tasker toured with the team, ate and drank with them, went sightseeing with them, stayed at their hotels, flew with them on their plane. ‘I filed stories most days, and refereed 19 curtain-raisers to Wallaby matches. At training, if someone was absent or injured, I packed into the scrum. I wasn’t a Wallaby, but those fellows made me feel like I was one of the team, and I still feel that.’

  CHAPTER 5

  A LETTER HOME

  Anthony Abrahams was now determined to oppose apartheid in any way he could, and so decided not to return to Australia with his teammates at the end of the tour. Instead, he would hitchhike through East Africa — Zambia, Rhodesia, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana — observing, listening, and learning so that forever after he could speak and act with authority. ‘After my journey, I would continue on up to London to try to find work in a law office. Because on tour the Wallabies were only paid 7 rand 50 a day, just about enough for a haircut and some biscuits, my teammate Bob Woods gave me his saved pocket money because he believed in what I was doing and suspected the money would come in handy on my trip. That was kind of Bob, and if he ever reads this, I hope he knows that when our paths cross again, I’ll pay him back with interest, whatever that is!’

  Abrahams farewelled his teammates at Jan Smuts Airport. ‘Ironically, considering the way I felt about them, I was standing on the tarmac with a group of South African rugby officials as the Wallabies’ plane taxied down the runway and took off. I was now on my own. Our liaison officer, Jimmy Ward, drove me to my hotel in Johannesburg. On the outskirts of town, there was a collision between a car driven by a well-dressed black man and that of an Afrikaner. The white guy took a jack from his car and was about to smash the black man’s car’s headlights. The pair shaped up to fight, which was a very brave thing for a black to do in that place at that time, when a policeman arrived. Without bothering to hear the facts, he went straight for the black, who, knowing he was on a hiding to nothing, abandoned his car and ran off. That scene summed up South Africa to me.’

  In his last days on tour with the Wallabies, Abrahams wrote a letter to the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, and on his hitchhiking trip he posted it from Rhodesia. ‘I didn’t post the letter in South Africa for fear that someone would see the address and open and destroy the letter, so I waited till I was in Rhodesia, where I thought it had a better chance of getting through.’

  The letter, headlined ‘South Africa and Sport’, was published in the Herald on 8 October 1969.

  Sir, The issue as to whether Australian sporting teams should compete against those of the Republic of South Africa has been raised on various occasions in your newspaper. As a member of the Australian rugby union side which has just completed a tour of the Republic, the opportunity has been afforded me to experience first-hand the problems involved in this issue.

  It seemed to me before departing from Australia, and it seems to me now, that Australian sporting bodies have failed to come to terms with the implications to their continuing to compete against South Africa under the present circumstances.

  The general attitude seems to be that their sole concern is with a sporting activity; that politics should not be introduced into sport; that their own house is in order and that they should not concern themselves with what is essentially South Africa’s business. What these attitudes add up to is that the importance of the sporting activity transcends any ‘subsidiary’ issues.

  In actuality, it is difficult to argue that sporting competition between South Africa and another nation exists in glorious isolation. It is known, or should be known, by all that teams competing against South Africa in South Africa compete against all-white teams in front of segregated audiences.

  In a number of cases on the rugby tour, the non-white representation in the audiences was nominal. In one case there was no representation at all. In addition, a rugby player — or any other sportsman — is not selected to represent South Africa on merit alone. He must also be white. Should a non-white player happen, despite inferior opportunities, to warrant selection, he would not be included under almost any circumstances.

  South Africa has thus made its political attitude manifest in the sporting sphere. Sporting teams of other nations competing on these terms are forced to, at least, tolerate or accept this fact. This obviously raises an important ethical issue, which other nations have been quicker to recognise than ourselves.

  It also involves practical considerations. The fact that politics is involved in sport in South Africa allows a political construction to be placed on the presence of a national sporting team in the Republic. Many individuals in South Africa do seem to infer from the sporting team’s presence some sort of Australian acceptance of apartheid. Doubtless this interpretation is made elsewhere.

  Whether Australian sporting bodies wish to accept the implications of current competition with South Africa is a matter that they and Australians generally must decide. But they cannot pretend that such implications do not exist.

  ‘My principle emotion in writing the letter,’ says Abrahams today, ‘was anger at what we’d seen and that nothing was being done about it. My words received pride of place on the Herald’s letters page, and on the same day its rival broadsheet, The Australian, ran on its front page a story — titled “Police Trail Wallaby” — reporting that I had been followed by security police while on tour. I found out about the letter and the article when I rang my parents from a post office in Zambia, and I went out the front and punched my fist into my hand, saying, “Right … It’s on! Apartheid in South Africa is now an issue in Australia!”’

  Abrahams’ letter sparked a flurry of correspondence to the Herald’s editor for some days. Many agreed with the outspoken Wallaby, many did not.

  As it happened, Abrahams’ African hitchhiking adventure was ended prematurely after three months by a war that made it impossible for him to travel in the northern frontier district of Kenya. He hastened to Nairobi and then London, where he lived for a year, playing rugby for Rosslyn Park club, then relocated to Paris, where he was employed by law firm Clifford Chance and pulled on his rugby boots for Paris’s Racing first-division side. Abrahams would remain in Paris for 25 years, practising business and human-rights law.

  As we will see, however, he made some notable visits home to Australia to further the anti-apartheid cause that he now championed.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE RUGBY SEVEN

  In the late 1960s, larg
ely because of the urging of overseas anti-apartheid activists Peter Hain and Dennis Brutus, John Brink’s SADAF sprouted a separate arm, Campaign Against Racism in Sport (CARIS), to orchestrate sporting boycotts against visiting South African sportsmen and -women. CARIS’s executive team was convenor John Myrtle, left-wing activist Peter McGregor, and South African–born anti-apartheid campaigner Logan Moodley. ‘Anthony Abrahams told me it was rare to find someone like me who was equally passionate about both sport and beating apartheid,’ says John Myrtle. ‘Mind you, he was that way himself.’

  From the start, the CARIS approach was low-key and respectable. ‘We were unequivocally non-violent and careful never to break a law,’ says John Myrtle. ‘We were negotiators, not activists, but dedicated to achieving our aim: Australia at that time was the last major nation accepting all-white South African sports teams, and we were determined to cut those ties. We also were insisting on “non-racial” rather than “multi-racial” teams, because race should never enter sport. The most talented player should be selected, regardless of colour. CARIS embraced low-key awareness-raising achieved at peaceful vigils where the public would be engaged, and by distributing pamphlets and press releases. We held meetings where prominent anti-apartheid activists spoke, and assembled delegations of clergy and other public figures to confront sporting bodies over projected sporting tours to or from South Africa. Our followers were generally liberal-thinking, middle-class Australians with sufficient social conscience to oppose apartheid and be worried about the right-wingers in power in Australia then. The Rev. Alan Walker and the Rev. Ted Noffs supported CARIS. I had enormous respect for Walker, despite his giant ego. Walker and Noffs competed to lead some of our anti-apartheid delegations, and I was amused by their competitiveness. In 1967, when exiled chief Albert Lutuli, the ANC leader who in 1960 had taken refuge with John Brink, was killed when run down by a train while walking on tracks near his home — foul play was suspected — Alan Walker preached a moving and impressive sermon about Lutuli’s life and sacrifices at the Central Methodist Mission in Sydney.’

  Before the advent of CARIS, SADAF attracted around 150–200 people to meetings, more if there was a guest speaker such as Dennis Brutus or Bishop Edward Crowther. CARIS’s well-planned passive opposition to visiting South African sporting teams and individuals — netballers, lifesavers, tennis players, Gary Player the golfer, and later, in 1971, the South African rugby players and cricketers — gave the SADAF spin-off focus and, Australia being a sports-mad country, greater traction with the public and the media.

  ‘In 1969, I worked closely with Father Richard Buchhorn, an activist Roman Catholic priest who served in various parishes in northern New South Wales and had been introduced to me by John and Margaret Brink,’ says Myrtle. ‘Richard was a remarkably energetic and innovative campaigner. Early in ’69, in another propaganda exercise, the South African Rugby Union invited, and funded to the tune of $50,000, an Australian under-17 schoolboy team to play against youngsters in South Africa in August.’ The tour came to Myrtle’s notice when he was teaching at Marist Brothers Auburn. ‘One morning around 11, I was sitting in the staff room and in a copy of The Daily Telegraph there was a short article by the rugby union writer Phil Tresidder about the under-17 Australian schoolboys’ trip to play against the South African boys. My ears pricked up. I showed it to a brother sitting next to me, who by happy coincidence had worked at the Brisbane rugby nursery Marist Brothers Ashgrove. He said, “I wonder if they’ll pick Aloysius Borle.” He explained that Aloysius was a talented 15- or 16-year-old young Papua New Guinean footballer who deserved to be picked in the Australian schoolboys team. Knowing that the South African rugby people would not allow a black person to play in their country, I asked the brother, “Does Aloysius have dark skin?” and he came back, “Aloysius is as black as the ace of spades.” I immediately realised how significant this was and pursued the matter with Dick Buchhorn.’ The selection trials staged by the kowtowing ARU ensured that no offence or embarrassment would be caused to their South African hosts by the inclusion of non-white players, and Aloysius Borle was overlooked. ‘We confronted the rugby authorities over his exclusion and won some publicity for our cause without there being any changes to the composition of the team. Peter McGregor and I were at Sydney Airport when the team departed. I was arrested but released without charge.’

  Back on home turf after the Wallaby tour, James Roxburgh, Paul Darveniza, Bruce Taafe, Barry McDonald, and Terry Forman, who had all read and endorsed Anthony Abrahams’ letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, agreed that although they weren’t political activists, they had a moral responsibility to publicly oppose apartheid and that if given a forum they would do so. Says McDonald, ‘I’ve always respected Rox, he and Darv are still great friends of mine … we three started to discuss our hatred of apartheid … We never thought it would blow up into what it did.’

  Roxburgh, Darveniza, Taafe, McDonald, and Forman now accepted the argument that to play against the Springboks was to condone the apartheid system, and spoke among themselves about refusing to play if they were chosen to face the Springboks when their Australian tour got underway in June 1971.

  Terry Forman, anyway, had arrived home from South Africa thinking that rugby was not what he wanted to do anymore. ‘After visiting Berkeley, the British Isles, South Africa, I wanted to study fine art and drawing, I wanted to paint, to travel overseas, to learn about life. I scored a try in Sydney University’s grand final win in 1970 and that was the last game of rugby I played in Australia. Then the anti-apartheid activist Sekai Holland came into my life. She rang me one day, and said she was aligned with CARIS and the AAM [Anti-Apartheid Movement] campaigns and asked me to have a cup of tea and talk about apartheid. I was taken with Sekai, with her enthusiasm and integrity. She was beautiful, just a really nice person, down to earth, I was honoured to be invited. She asked if I’d be willing to take a stand against apartheid with the Springboks scheduled to tour here in 1971, and I said, “Yes. I’m planning on going overseas, but would be glad to help.” I wasn’t prepared to demonstrate, because violent protest rallies can play into the hands of the people you’re demonstrating against by giving them something to oppose, but I was happy to speak if required and put my name to anti-apartheid brochures. So Sekai included my name on the brochure. That’s pretty much all I did. Right after, I went to Bali and learned to paint, to carve wood, to play the Balinese flute. I saw myself as a modern-day Gauguin. I went to Thailand and Laos. I was in a cafe in Vientiane where I met some rugby players who were playing for Laos against a New Zealand team, and I asked if I could have a game, and I played five-eighth for the Kiwis, and that was the last game of rugby I ever played. A nice way to go out. I was 23.’

  Meanwhile, with Terry Forman following his muse in Asia, the opportunity Roxburgh, Darveniza, Taafe, and McDonald had been hoping for was presented by Geoffrey Robertson, a future Queens Counsel, international human-rights barrister, author, and host of the popular ABC-TV series Hypotheticals. Robertson was then a Sydney Law School classmate and friend of Roxburgh, who remembers him as ‘an innocuous-looking skinny guy with a big, deep voice, very, very intelligent, and someone I’ve always respected’. He was also the editor of Blackacre, the journal of the Sydney University Law Society. Robertson invited the Wallabies to be interviewed by him for Blackacre about their time in South Africa. They agreed. ‘We went to the university library, which is pretty quiet,’ remembers Roxburgh. ‘We sat around a table, and Geoff had all the questions, which basically followed the format of his article. We all knew we disapproved of apartheid and wanted to tell about some of the things that had troubled us on tour, but none of us knew exactly what the others were going to say.’

  The article that resulted from the interview, ‘Political Football’, took readers into the heart of white South Africa and described the horrors of apartheid. Recalls Barry McDonald, ‘It was so weird … One minute we were sitting down being interviewed by Robertso
n for his Blackacre article, and the next it was published in The Australian [on 21 May 1970] and our views were being read by hundreds of thousands. The article was supposed to only appear in Blackacre, until the editor of The Australian, Adrian Deamer — who personally opposed the Springbok tour and wound up being sacked by [The Australian’s proprietor Rupert] Murdoch while the South Africans were on the Queensland leg of their visit as punishment for the anti-tour stories published on his watch — did a deal with the university, and the piece ran in The Australian before it ran in Blackacre. Deamer promoted it on the front page. Robertson asked us if we planned to play against the Springboks in 1971, and we looked at each other and agreed that after what we’d seen how could we possibly play? So we said we wouldn’t. Our beliefs made the decision for us. To play would have been hypocritical. It was most crucial for Rox and me. We were current members of the Wallabies test team.’

  The article was a springboard for much of the organised opposition to the Springbok tour that would follow, and deserves to be reproduced here at length. Many who read it became instant converts to the anti-apartheid cause.