Pitched Battle

by Larry Writer

  The Australian Council of Churches, compelled by conscience to oppose the Springbok rugby and cricket tours, backed Crowther. The Council did not blame the Springbok players, ‘who were being used by their Government as ambassadors of apartheid’ regardless of the players’ personal feelings. ‘The central issue of apartheid should not be confused by disputes over victories whether on the playing field or between police and demonstrators. The real victory concerns the moral issue: Whether the dignity, freedom and economic opportunities of men and women were to be determined by their colour or by fundamental human rights.’ The Council urged the ARU, the Cricket Board of Control, and the prime minister to seriously consider the moral issue and the disruption of public life, and to cancel the tours.

  With the tour about to commence, battle lines were drawn by those who welcomed the visitors and those who did not. The tour dominated debate all over Australia, in federal and state parliament, in the media, in pubs and around kitchen tables. Family members and old friends fell out. Should the Springboks come or stay home? Should sport be kept separate from politics? Was hosting the Springboks condoning their government’s policy of apartheid? Commentator Don Aitkin reflected in a column in The Canberra Times, ‘All this Springbokery has had at least one healthy effect on the Australian body politic. It has made it briefly interested in politics. Now, the regrettable facts are that most Australians are not particularly interested in politics. They do vote, and most prefer one party rather than another, and they all know who Bob Menzies was. But serious politics, what governments ought or ought not to do, and why, tends to bore them. The important thing about all the fuss and bother and demonstration is not that it brought politics into sport, but sport into politics. Men looked at Mr Hawke and Mr McMahon with new eyes, and listened, and argued.’ Aitken doubted that there had been any issue in the past few years that had caused more political talk in the electorate at large than the Springbok tour.

  At the vanguard of support for the Springbok tour was Prime Minister William McMahon, 63 years old in ’71, who had been a successful treasurer for many years but, after ascending to the prime ministership in March 1971 on the resignation of John Gorton, struggled for credibility in the top job. His privately whispered entreaty to the South African government to include two blacks in the Springbok cricket team to placate the anti-apartheid activists had been brusquely refused. Even more vociferous in their support for the rugby tour were ultra-conservatives Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, New South Wales premier Robert Askin, and Victorian premier Sir Henry Bolte.

  Broadly speaking, conservative older Australians — those who had kept the Liberal Party in power federally for 22 years and right-wing governments in control of the most populous states — echoed their masters: apartheid was wrong, but the Springboks must come.

  McMahon, a decent man with an equivocating manner who, whether he was or not, could give the impression that he was out of his depth in the country’s top job, knew that a significant majority of Australians backed the tour — polls taken before the tour commenced put the figure variously from 60 to 85 per cent — and saw a chance to harness that public support to discredit the Labor Party and the ACTU and especially Bob Hawke, who was becoming every day a sharper thorn in the Government’s side.

  When Hawke wrote to the prime minister criticising the government’s non-negotiable support for the tour, McMahon, on 2 June, sent a hectoring response to his antagonist, taking the stance that allowing the Springboks to tour would in fact be striking a blow against apartheid. McMahon reminded the ACTU leader that

  I have made a public statement expressing our abhorrence of racial discrimination, a view with which I note the ACTU executive fully agrees. I have publicly repeated my Government’s views on this matter several times since then. However the Government holds the firm view that it is not appropriate for us to attempt to lay down particular courses of action in domestic affairs which South Africa or any other country should follow. The principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations is basic to the preservation of national sovereignty among independent nations. We ourselves would not tolerate intrusions by other countries into our domestic affairs whether they be matters affecting governments, trade unions, or other organisations, however this in no way implies support for the policy of apartheid … Press reports also suggest that many trade unionists have no enthusiasm for the prohibitions planned by some unions with the tacit approval of your Executive. A great deal of good can flow from international sporting exchanges, no matter what differences exist on other issues, and it would not be right in our view to limit the exchanges in the way your Executive proposes. It could mean missed opportunities for a better understanding between nations. For all these reasons, the Government considers it would be wrong to refuse entry to teams from South Africa … to do so would hinder rather than advance the efforts being made on many fronts to reduce racial discrimination and to lower the barriers that impede fuller contact between nations and peoples.

  Also furious that some elements of society were jeopardising the tour were rugby union–loving Australians who had long looked forward to the Springboks’ visit. These rugby true believers ascribed to the slogan that their football code was ‘the game they play in heaven’ — and therefore floated celestially above politics.

  Barracking for the Springboks, too, was a large proportion of the general public who had never seen a rugby match and had little or no interest in the sport. These were Australians who were blue-ribbon conservatives who’d lived through World War II and the Cold War and liked life as it was and who were ideologically opposed to the opinions, whatever they may be, of the left in general and obstreperous trade unionists and long-haired student demonstrators in particular.

  Those in public life who aligned themselves against the tour were Bob Hawke, Labor MP Barry Cohen, and federal Labor leader Gough Whitlam, who promised that a Labor Government if elected in 1972 would not grant entry visas to racially selected teams and called the McMahon Government racist for sanctioning the tour — ‘If, as the Prime Minister has gratuitously urged the Australian public, the visitors were given a warm welcome, we would be branded throughout the world, not least in South Africa itself, at best as a people who put passing pleasure before the rights of millions of human beings, at worst as a country avowedly sympathetic toward apartheid.’ Whitlam and Cohen were at this stage lonely Labor voices against the tour as many in the party shied from opposing the Springboks’ visit for fear of alienating swinging voters at next year’s federal poll.

  Labor MP Barry Cohen was never one to put an election win over principle, but although he despised apartheid, his temperate opposition to the tour annoyed more radical members of the anti-apartheid movement. Meredith Burgmann attended a gathering of campaigners in a lecture theatre at the University of Sydney. ‘Barry was one of the very few MPs who was vitally involved in the anti-apartheid movement, yet he was dead against our confrontational approach,’ she remembers. Civil disobedience — running onto the field mid-match, exploding fireworks and flares during matches, and sabotaging goalposts, all of which Burgmann, McGregor, Freney, and company were planning to do — was anathema to Cohen, who advocated passive, lawful protest to combat apartheid and win over middle Australia to the anti-apartheid cause. At the meeting, ‘Barry argued strongly that we were being absolutely dreadful to even think about direct-action tactics to stop the games, so naturally we thought he was terrible and vigorously opposed him,’ says Burgmann. ‘But credit to him, Barry was one of the few Labor MPs who seriously engaged with us, and, of course, MPs had to take the position that breaking the law isn’t smart.’

  Jim Boyce was disappointed by the Labor Party’s tepid support for the anti-apartheid cause. ‘Only the Labor left even acknowledged that there was an issue. The dominant right wing of the party was either terrified of an electoral backlash, ambivalent, or in favour of the tour. Barry McDonald and I addressed the New Sou
th Wales Trades and Labour Council in Sydney Trades Hall, and Barrie Unsworth, a future premier of New South Wales, called us “pinkos”.’

  Activists employing guerrilla tactics to stop the Boks included the Sydney-based Burgmann, McGregor, and Freney; HART’s Melburnian leader Gregor Macaulay, who was president of the Australian Union of Students; and the academics Dan O’Neill in Brisbane, Chris Swinbank in Canberra, and Rupert Gerritsen in Perth. In the anti-apartheid ranks, too, while grinding their own Indigenous-rights axe, were Aboriginal activists Gary Foley, Billy Craigie, Paul Coe, Kevin Gilbert, Gary Williams, Lyn Craigie, Roberta Sykes, Dennis Walker, Kath Walker (who would adopt the name Oodgeroo Noonuccal in 1988), Lilla Watson, and Sam Watson. The demonstrating masses, the marchers and placard bearers, the object hurlers and the slogan chanters, were largely the same student and trade-union shock troops who took to the streets to protest against the Vietnam War and other issues over the past four years. Also opposing the tour were die-hard Labor voters and some clergy, joined by Trotskyists and anarchists (many of whom, it must be said, were advocates of social revolution in general rather than specific opponents of apartheid).

  Peaceful, though equally impassioned, opposition to apartheid came from CARIS’s John Myrtle, John and Margaret Brink, Father Richard Buchhorn, and the Rugby Seven, former Wallabies Boyce, Abrahams, Roxburgh, Darveniza, Taafe, McDonald, and Forman.

  Of course, in prosperous, complacent, conformist Australia circa 1971 — a Lotus Land where sport was the opiate of the masses and Love Story was the most-seen film of the year, where ‘The Pushbike Song’ and ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ vied for Number One position on the Top 40 charts, and the terms ‘abo’, ‘boong’, ‘dago’, ‘slopehead’, and ‘wog’ were still casually used — many people were apathetic.

  Those eagerly awaiting the Springboks’ arrival were on tenterhooks, fearing the worst, and understandably so. The various anti-apartheid groups were making no secret of their intentions to disrupt and, if possible, stop the tour. In his notebook, Peter McGregor revealed AAM strategy: ‘As the year developed, militant groups advocating disruption were established in most centres where the Springboks were to play. The press helped greatly in spreading the nature of our tactics around, although they would mention pitifully little about the reasons WHY people were prepared to disrupt …’ The intention of the AAM militants was to have a continuous presence of demonstrators around the Springboks wherever they should be, and this presence should orchestrate non-violent direct action against them. ‘In terms of getting people onto the fields we need a structure something like this: 1. One group of people prepared to be the suicide squad, to cut the fence, jump over and be immediately apprehended — allowing another group directly behind the first the chance to penetrate the police ranks thus further opening the police lines to enable the more hesitant section of the crowd to follow on. (Plenty of people [are] prepared to run on provided there [are] openings). 2. The use of decoy groups or action to distract police attention from other more effective groups or action. 3. Various attempts to utilise technology … there are often more likely ways of achieving specific results. 4. An (if possible) coordinated overall strategy of multiple tactics eg 1, 2, 3 and 4 above all together.’

  In mid-June, one week before the Springboks’ were due to land, The Sydney Morning Herald commissioned a poll, the findings of which were spun in their own favour by pro- and anti-tour campaigners. The poll’s confusing findings included that only a few per cent of Australians unequivocally backed white-only teams, with 49 per cent preferring that South Africa send sporting teams of mixed colour to Australia. However, 42 per cent believed that South Africa had the right to pick its own teams, and they would accept the South African government’s decision.

  Bob Hawke interpreted the poll as proving that ‘an extremely small proportion of the Australian population — 3 per cent — specifically identify themselves with wanting visiting South African sporting teams chosen on the basis insisted upon by the South African Government, that is, white only. Second, virtually half the population express their explicit desire that visiting South African teams should be chosen on a multi-racial basis. Most other governments in the world, recognising and acting upon convictions of this kind, have said that they want nothing to do with South African sporting teams until those teams are free to be chosen on a multi-racial basis. The Federal Government is almost uniquely inept and reactionary at attuning itself to the facts of international life … Hopefully this poll will do something to show that the attitude of the Government [in allowing the tour to proceed] does not reflect the general feeling of the people.’

  In the opposite corner, Melbourne Cricket Club secretary Ian Johnson, who was looking forward keenly to a big-money South Africa versus Australia test series later in the year, had a different interpretation from the trade-union czar. ‘From the poll it is quite obvious that over 80 per cent of people want sport with South Africa. The number who would like mixed coloured teams is of interest, though predictable. The guideline here, of course, is that all who are selected have the ability to warrant their selection. All Australians would like the team which represents any country to be the best available …’ In saying that ‘every indication is that at this stage the best South African teams in cricket and rugby would comprise all white players’, Johnson overlooked the ugly truth that lack of opportunity to play sports, sub-standard facilities, and segregated competitions made it impossible for blacks to attain the standards achieved by white South Africans. Of course, even if they ever did, they would never be considered for selection in the national team.

  South Australia’s Labor premier, Don Dunstan, warned that the Springboks would not be allowed to use public transport when they arrived in his state on 28 June, and his opposition to the tour was supported by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Adelaide, Archbishop Gleeson, who suggested that those in favour of the Springboks playing in Australia would do well to consider the human-rights violations being perpetrated against black South Africans by the Vorster Government, which seemed proud that the Springboks were a racially selected team. ‘This means, in their own terms, that white teams are chosen and sent overseas as acts of white domination and supremacy … The degrading exclusion of non-whites is a vastly more objectionable purpose than that of groups from communist totalitarianism … The communist groups are not usually chosen as an act of oppression, whatever the other crimes of their regimes. However admirable the attitudes of individual team members may be, South Africa’s all-white teams are forced to come here as an example of the policy to humiliate black Africans.’

  On 18 June, Prime Minister McMahon called anti-tour campaigners ‘stooges of communists’ who would subvert the Australian way of life. How dare trade unions forbid Australians to watch the South African footballers and cricketers? His Government would fight for the tour to proceed without interruption so Australian sports-lovers could see the best sportsmen in the world in action. McMahon even offered his glamorous wife, Sonia, to kick off in a Springbok match if required.

  Premiers Bolte, Askin, and Bjelke-Petersen all promised to be good hosts to the visitors from the veldt. They would take extreme measures if necessary to prevent breaches of the law ‘by rabble-rousing communist ratbags’ while the Springboks were in their state.

  Victorian premier Bolte agreed with the prime minister that anyone who would halt the tour was in cahoots with ‘communist-dominated unionists’ who would destroy the elected Government. ‘Hawke and his henchmen have taken the law into their own hands. If ever a Labor Government took office, Mr Hawke would have all the influence and power.’ Federal navy minister Dr Malcolm Mackay ramped up the scaremongering when he called the ACTU president ‘a prototype of a dictator’ who saw himself as a ‘potential president of a new kind of Australia’. To New South Wales attorney-general Kenneth McCaw, the actions of the unions in opposing the tour signalled that Australian society was approaching a decision on whether it wanted
parliamentary democracy to be supplanted by anarchy. ‘The danger signs are clear’, and chief among them was ‘the emergence of threats and coercion, bringing the risk of violence, to stop a sporting group from visiting Australia’.

  Hawke, as was his wont, hit back. The reason the trade-union movement was being accused by conservatives of ‘running the country’, he chortled, was because the present federal government’s ineptitude had left a vacuum and ‘like a law of physics, it is inevitable: If there is a vacuum it will be filled.’ The feisty future prime minister allowed that he could understand those who were accusing the ACTU of setting the national agenda in attempting to stop the Springbok tour, but his members had every right to do so. ‘Nobody would say that a capitalist shouldn’t say that he would not invest in and derive his income from an enterprise to which he had a moral objection. If a capitalist had a moral objection to alcohol, nobody would say he doesn’t have the right to decide that he will not invest in a brewery. That is the basis of the decisions we have taken — that a trade unionist has a right to decide he will not derive his income from supporting something to which he has a moral objection.’

  After canvassing ministers and then convening an emergency late-night meeting of senior advisers at his Bellevue Hill, Sydney, home, the prime minister offered the 25 South African players and their coach and manager the use of RAAF Hercules aircraft to transport them from city to city. Gough Whitlam said the offer proved that McMahon was racist, and would make people all over the world believe that Australia approved of South African apartheid.