by Larry Writer
Abrahams, Boyce, Roxburgh, Darveniza, and McDonald paid a visit to the Sydney-based French consul-general to Australia Cyril Le Bas. They asked him to deliver a letter they had written to Albert Ferrasse, president of the French Rugby Federation, deploring a planned French rugby tour of South Africa in May and June, just before the Springboks left for Australia. Le Bas gave the footballers short shrift. ‘He condescendingly accused us of being too young and inexperienced to understand the South African situation,’ recalls Abrahams. ‘He told us, “You either discuss sport, or you discuss politics — you don’t discuss them together.”’ Further, Le Bas went so far as to claim that apartheid was helping to educate backward non-whites. After lecturing the Australians, he mystified them when he surreally pronounced, ‘I have lived in colonial countries for 35 years where things are not up to the standard to which you are accustomed here … In those countries, you can’t treat certain people alike — like hygiene!’ The Australians left angered and scratching their heads. (The French tour of South Africa went ahead.)
Abrahams’ father did not survive his stroke. After Abrahams attended the funeral, with his leave of absence without pay from his Paris law firm running out, he had no choice but to depart Australia before the Springboks arrived. ‘I regret not being there, but I’d played my part in laying the groundwork for what followed, and I remain in awe of what my friends and teammates did in openly opposing and, in the case of James and Barry, refusing to play against the Springboks — a Wallaby jersey is a precious thing, not sacrificed lightly. Those men, and, of course, Jim Boyce, with their innate decency and dignified and calm approach, validated the anti-apartheid movement. Their involvement flew in the face of those who believed that all protesters were ratbags who were against everything and anything. Some of those guys had more to lose than me in refusing to play against the Springboks. I wasn’t even in contention to be chosen; I had made my life in Paris and I had given up all hope of playing rugby for Australia again.’
CHAPTER 8
THE ‘MADDIES’ AND THE ‘SENSIBLES’
At the end of 1969 and into 1970, as it became clear that neither the federal government nor the ARU had the slightest intention of halting sporting contact with South Africa and would continue to invite South African teams, including the rugby and cricket sides due to tour in 1971, a number of anti-apartheid groups joined Sydney-based SADAF and its CARIS offshoot in gearing up to oppose the visits. They included the Anti-Apartheid Movement, also based in Sydney, and the Melbourne-headquartered HART (Halt All Racialist Tours). These organisations, like SADAF and CARIS, had active members in other Australian states. Other groups were Canberra’s Anti-Apartheid Committee, Campaign Against Racial Exploitation, and Committee for Human Rights in South Africa, and Queensland’s Campaign on Racial Equality.
The activities of these organisations were closely monitored by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which, according to a background briefing, feared, with good reason as it transpired, that ‘attempts by Communist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Anarchist and New Left activists to use the anti-apartheid and racial issues [could] expand the scope of the radical protest movement. Such a development could eventually lead to a greater radicalisation of the Aboriginal Rights Movement …’ ASIO also fretted that the isolation of South Africa from the world community would ‘serve Soviet strategic interests in Africa and the Indian Ocean, particularly if relentless criticism of South Africa makes the sales of naval or military equipment to the Republic politically unacceptable’.
In contrast to CARIS’s lawful passive resistance, these maverick groups, whose numbers included veterans of the wild and bloody anti–Vietnam War campaigns, favoured demonstrating actively and breaking the law if that’s what it took.
Of them all, the most formidable and, in its anarchic fashion, best organised was the Anti-Apartheid Movement. At the AAM’s foundation meeting at Sydney’s Boilermakers’ and Blacksmiths’ Hall in Castlereagh Street in May 1969, attended by 25, it listed its aims: the withdrawal of all diplomatic, trade, political, and sporting links with South Africa; full support for South African liberation movements fighting for freedom from racial, economic, and political oppression; the cancellation of all South African tours, with focus on South African lifesavers and the rugby union and cricket teams; and the organisation of mass opposition to the visits to Australia of South African teams.
‘Although we shared the aim of boycotting South African sport as it was then constituted, and so enjoyed a synchronicity, CARIS and AAM made their presence felt in very different ways,’ says CARIS’s John Myrtle. ‘We would confine ourselves to peaceful vigils outside the grounds, distributing anti-apartheid literature and speaking at functions. The AAM considered that such passive and law-abiding protests were not sufficient to affect change, and employed what they called “non-violent civil disobedience”.’
‘The rugby guys did the right thing joining forces with CARIS,’ says Anthony Abrahams. ‘It would not have been right if they ran onto the field and threw smoke flares. That was the AAM’s role.’
Leading the AAM were Peter McGregor, who had defected from CARIS because he considered their methods meek and ineffectual, communist journalist Denis Freney, and student radical Meredith Burgmann. Other important players in the AAM were Peter Landau (treasurer), John Berwick (the self-styled theoretician of the organisation), and Bob Austin (who was good-humouredly named secretary because he owned a Gestetner printing machine). There were contributions, too, from Fran Letters, Helen Randerson, Di Talty, Nadia Wheatley, Mark Aarons, Deidre Mason, Graeme Watson, Ralph Pearce, Dick and Marie Persson, and Debesh Bhattacharya. The AAM’s members comprised mainly students, academics, and unionists, most of whom had taken to the streets in anti-Vietnam moratoriums in the ’60s. While prepared to do whatever it took in the name of their cause, Burgmann and McGregor both professed to support democratic government. ‘I’m a libertarian socialist,’ said the former at the time. ‘I want government to do as little as possible, but the right things very well. I want Australia to be a decent, caring country where people can achieve for themselves and also look after those who are struggling. I cringe at the thought that people overseas think all Australians are like [Queensland premier] Joh Bjelke-Petersen.’ Despite his anarchism, McGregor, one of two sons of a battling single mother who helped Aboriginal children to do their homework after school, wrote that he didn’t know ‘a better form of government than ours, but I want it to work the way it’s supposed to work, with equality of opportunity and justice for everyone’.
Born in 1947, McGregor attended North Sydney Boys High, then while at university devoted himself to left-wing causes. Before the Springbok tour of ’71, he campaigned against the Vietnam War and for Indigenous Australians, gay rights, and civil liberties. He was raised by his mother, Alice, and aunt May after his father left the family. Alice also supported her son in his activism, as did his partner, Johanna Traynor.
Freney, 11 years older than McGregor, joined the Labor Party at 16 before abandoning it for the Communist Party of Australia two years later. Then, feeling betrayed by Stalin’s atrocities and Russia’s invasion of Hungary, he switched allegiance to the Trotskyists, for whom he worked in Algeria in 1964–65, organising anti-colonial rebellion. A gay man, he battled in Australia for gay and lesbian rights and led anti–Vietnam War rallies. When the Communist Party disowned Moscow, he rejoined and wrote for the party newspaper Tribune.
McGregor spread the word that the AAM was ‘building a mass mobilisation of the general public to oppose the rugby tour. While our policy is non-violent civil disobedience we’re going to cause maximum inconvenience to those who support the tour by stopping matches and making life difficult. We have no intention of harming people, but football fields, goal-posts, property will be fair game. We want to see how far we can go.’
In his notes on his AAM involvement, McGregor wrote, ‘We didn’t believe in violence. We were f
ighting a system that was based on violence so it was important that we stood for something different. We decided to halt the games by running onto the field and throwing smoke bombs. If we hadn’t been prepared to do that the Government would have taken no notice of what we were saying and we wouldn’t have worried the sporting bodies on that practical level. We were a practical problem for [proponents of the Springbok rugby tour in 1971], but the ethical problem for them was the seven Wallabies who, after having experienced it themselves while touring South Africa, stood up and said No to apartheid. The fact that sports people were willing to put their careers on the line forced the public, politicians, sporting officials and people who loved sport to think hard about apartheid and why it could never be defended. By the end of 1970 it had become apparent to us that the time for militant tactics had come. There were two main reasons for this: The lack of response from sporting bodies to peaceful, non-disruptive protest, and the overwhelming success of the more militant tactics of non-violent direct action and disruption in the campaign led by Peter Hain against the Springboks in the UK in 1969–70. Therefore the Anti-Apartheid Movement was set up in late 1970 to oppose racist tours by means of non-violent disruptive direct action.’
Despite occasional frustration with each other’s modus operandi, Meredith Burgmann remembers enormous mutual respect between the AAM and CARIS. ‘We were the “maddies” and CARIS were the “sensible respectables”,’ she says. ‘The two organisations had very different methods of making our point — they were passive and we were extremely, shall we say, active — but were complementary.
‘After the Springboks arrived in 1971 and were playing their matches, CARIS would be outside the rugby ground handing out leaflets and singing protest songs and reasoning respectfully with the public, and we would be inside the ground trying to break up the game and getting bashed up and arrested. CARIS didn’t condone what we did, but nor did they condemn us, which was terrific, and we thought what they were doing was wonderful, too. They were supplying all the anti-apartheid literature and information, while we didn’t spend much time on research. We were into physicality. CARIS and the footballers had respectability and we didn’t. I believe in the multi-pronged approach because we realised that the authorities, when they concluded finally that they could no longer control the situation and that apartheid was doomed, were never going to be seen to give in to a bunch of whackos like us. Whereas they would entertain dialogue with the people of CARIS. However, it took what we did in literally putting our lives on the line and making people really angry in June, July, and August 1971 that created the situation where the establishment modified and then abandoned its pro-apartheid stance. The Australian media, too, which was largely reactionary in 1971, attacked the AAM demonstrators shrilly and portrayed us as lunatics, only speaking to us when they wanted an inflammatory quote, but editors also ran in-depth interviews with CARIS and responsible freedom fighters and academics, so the serious anti-apartheid message got out. So as the Springbok rugby tour progressed, the front page of the paper would show Peter McGregor throwing a smoke flare or me being dragged off the field by four cops, then inside there’d be a think piece about apartheid.’
Meredith Burgmann grew up in a humanitarian Christian family in Beecroft, Sydney, one of three daughters and a son of Victor and Lorna Burgmann. Her paternal grandfather was Canberra Anglican bishop Ernest Burgmann, known as the ‘Red Bishop’ for his left-wing leanings. ‘Beecroft was a terrific, leafy, safe place for kids to grow up and it was also middle class, protestant, and very boring,’ she says today. ‘I’ve always found it funny that I grew up in the most homogenous community in the world. I was 18 before I got to talk to a Catholic. Dad was a reserved, lovely guy, a scientist who ended up chairman of CSIRO. He didn’t talk politics much at home and I certainly didn’t inherit my passion for politics and social change in any direct way from him. Years later, I discovered he was a secret Labor voter. He was the son of the famous Red Bishop who was named as a communist spy in the Petrov inquiry. My mother was a Country Party girl who had a North-Shore-of-Sydney view of the world in the years when I was little. She thought [Liberal prime minister] Sir Robert Menzies was a great man and [Labor leader] Arthur Calwell was a bit common. All that aside, Mum and Dad raised my sisters and brother and I lovingly, and we grew up trying to be good citizens, decent and kind, and to believe that everyone — man, woman, black, white, gay, straight — was equal. All the Burgmann girls ended up with PhDs, and, while our father encouraged us to succeed at school, for my education I mainly thank my mother, who was obsessive about education because she had been denied an education by her sexist father. She wasn’t even allowed to go to school until her younger brother turned five; she was seven and her sister nine by then.’
Burgmann’s school days were spent at Beecroft and West Ryde public schools, Blackfriars Correspondence School, and Abbotsleigh Anglican private girls school at Wahroonga, ‘where I was head girl … a very proper little schoolgirl. I did well academically, and was a sports tragic. I played hockey and tennis, loved going to the big rugby league and cricket matches at, ironically in light of what would happen to me there in 1971, the Sydney Cricket Ground. I enjoyed watching Randwick play rugby union, and their Wallaby halfback Ken Catchpole was a hero. I have a wonderful photograph of me in school uniform standing in front of the Members’ Stand at the SCG, getting [Australian test-cricket fast-bowler] Graham McKenzie’s autograph. Also ironically, in the light of future events, Mum took me to Don Bradman’s final match at the SCG. I was a baby. She said she pointed my head in Bradman’s direction when the Don was batting. Despite her efforts, I can’t recall a moment of the great man’s performance that day. Like the rugby players who wouldn’t play against the Springboks, I, too, loved sport, and could not be categorised, as so many protesters were, as sport-haters.’
When she was 18, Burgmann attended a rugby match just before the 1965 Springbok tour, and afterwards in the car park she found a leaflet under her car’s windscreen wiper advocating a boycott of the South Africans’ games because of their government’s policy of apartheid. The leaflet made perfect sense to her and she attended no games on that tour.
At the University of Sydney, Burgmann gained a degree in history and government and began her master’s degree in government. She became a social activist and left-wing political radical known for her ability to inspire fellow protesters and lift their spirits and for her physical bravery at demonstrations. ‘At university, Vietnam changed me,’ she says. ‘I fell in with a bunch of Catholic radicals — Peter Manning, Father Ted Kennedy, Bob Scribner, and John Iremonger — who opposed the war, and blasted away the fusty post-war conservatism and social injustice epitomised by the federal Liberal Government and the establishment. I remember chirping to Geoffrey Robertson, who was a great uni mate, “Geoff, I think I’m a socialist!” And he said, “Meredith, we’re all socialists.” My socialist epiphany, and the realisation that the government was lying to us about Vietnam and therefore must be lying about other things, too, motivated me to change things. My parents, high-church Anglicans, always told the truth and had raised me to believe in the truth. So for me to discover that politicians lied was horrifying.’
As the Vietnam War ground to an ignominious halt, Burgmann and her colleagues found another cause worth bleeding for. Wide and deep reading about apartheid in South Africa — ‘including, of course, Cry, the Beloved Country’ — distressed Burgmann. In June 1969 when the South African minister for economic affairs, Jan Haak, arrived in Sydney for meetings, he was targeted by more than 400 demonstrators, including Burgmann. ‘We wandered around the city with big banners yelling, “Faak Haak!”’
In late 1969, Burgmann jerked upright in her chair when she saw on the TV news the anti-Springbok demonstrations in Britain organised by Peter Hain’s Stop the Tours group. The South Africans’ matches from Twickenham to Lansdowne Road and Murrayfield became, literally, pitch battles with protesters running onto the
field; fields and goalposts were damaged, and nearly 1,000 arrests made. Springbok winger Syd Nomis said years later that on the 1969–70 tour of Britain, his life and those of his teammates had been made a misery. ‘They’d fill a bottle with tacks and throw it onto the field. The bottle would break open and glass and tacks would be all over the field, then the game would be stopped to pick up the dangerous objects because if you fell on it you would be cut. In the back of your mind [you’re thinking] has someone got a gun? Are they going to shoot one of us? I had a baby nervous breakdown due to all the trauma and stress we were going through. I was taken to hospital in an ambulance. Peter Hain made my life a misery, plus 32 companions of mine on the tour. I had a huge dislike for him at the time.’ Hain and his campaigners reduced the rugby tour to a shambles, and as a consequence English cricket’s ruling body, the Marylebone Cricket Club, cancelled the cricket tour by South Africa set to take place in the summer of 1970. ‘Could what’s happening in the UK happen here?’ Burgmann wondered. Why not?
The Vietnam War protests taught Burgmann and her fellow activists how to mount an effective demonstration, and stood them in good stead in 1971. ‘Civil disobedience was the key to making a point that people took notice of. I learned not to fear police with batons. I learned how to energise people and make them laugh when they were feeling beaten and down, as we all did time and time again in the anti-apartheid campaign. I valued our activists and let them know it. People who feel valued are capable of great things. The key to being a good protest organisation is thorough preparation and establishing goals. It was important to me that everyone had access to the essential information because unless you have it you can’t make well-judged decisions.
