Pitched Battle

by Larry Writer

  Bolte, in fact, hadn’t been at the rugby, but at Flemington races, where, he said, ‘People watching the game on TV cheered every time they saw a lout or larrikin taken away.’ Victoria’s acting police commissioner, Reginald Jackson, was defiant: ‘Police had a job to do and they did it. Ratbags and louts aren’t good enough names to call the demonstrators.’ The governor of Victoria, Sir Rohan Delacombe, was another who lauded the police for ‘a magnificent job’. Delacombe didn’t think the police exercised undue force. ‘If people break the law they must be controlled,’ he reasoned. ‘I think the police handled themselves with the greatest tolerance.’

  The bloody confrontations at Olympic Park led every news bulletin in Australia that night and, as Robert Mayne feared, were reported around the world. The Victorian Council for Civil Liberties received complaints from people claiming to have been ‘needlessly assaulted’ by the police. Victorian Opposition leader Clyde Holding, in calling for a Royal Commission into police brutality, felt that ‘ordinary Victorians who saw the incidents on television or in a newspaper must be horrified at the way the police handled the demonstrators. It is even worse when one realises this brutal action was taken against Victorians in the defence of the racist policies of another country.’ Holding also castigated police for entertaining a number of Springboks at a police function after the match, and Sir Rohan Delacombe for attending the game and meeting the Springboks, saying that by his very presence he was supporting apartheid.

  Premier Bolte laughed off Holding’s call for a Royal Commission. ‘Mr Holding and his crummy followers received their greatest setback ever,’ he crowed. ‘I commend the police for what they did and I am proud of them. A Royal Commission could better be held into the people who are organising this sabotage. I may be inclined to do that. We might have a look at university students and some staff who are sabotaging Australia.’

  The Melbourne police were provoked: definitely. Some of them, inexperienced and in their teens and clearly terrified and out of their depth, were targeted by missile-throwers, king-hit from behind, sworn at, and spat upon. Yet criticism of their reaction — rather, over-reaction — is justified. Demonstrators who attacked police should have been arrested with only as much force used as necessary, and taken away in wagons to be charged, not sadistically beaten, as many were.

  The Age editorialised that this blighted tour should be put out of its misery. The Springboks should return home immediately. ‘It is clear now that there can be no winners on this tour. The idea of friendship-building international competition loses out. How can it survive the spectacle of wild brawls between demonstrators and police and their dubious helpers in the vigilante squads. The South African Government loses the use of the tour as a propaganda weapon. What advantage are headlines telling of 80 arrests at a game? The process of dissent loses out. What place have stones and fists and smoke bombs in the armoury of people opposed to violence and intolerance? In defence of the demonstrators, it must be said that they have been greatly provoked. The rugby team is all-white, in keeping with the racist policies of the South African Government. The Australian Rugby Union invited them here, ignoring the immorality of the selection criteria, the stand of other world sporting bodies, and the opposition of many Australians …’

  At some stage during the Melbourne mayhem, a student named Thomas Healy complained to police that he had been assaulted by Hannes Marais. Healy claimed that Marais had ‘threatened, punched and pushed [him] against a car and in so doing [Healy had] suffered severe bruising to his right eye, bruising and abrasions to his face, chest, ribs and back, accompanied by pain and shock’. Ironically, it was Marais who, when asked early in the tour what he would do if personally confronted by an angry spectator, replied, ‘Do? I would smile at him. Of course.’ Marais, known by all as a hard but decent man, was incredulous when told of Healy’s accusation. Nevertheless, police were compelled to issue a summons for Marais to face the charges, which, if proven, would see him pay Healy $3,999 damages and $6 costs. With all that was happening, it may be that the summons was a low priority for the police, because it was never served on Marais while he was in Melbourne.

  A red mist hung in the Melbourne air. On 4 July, the Sunday after the Springboks–Victoria match, police wielding batons and riding horses ploughed into 200 demonstrators who were throwing rocks and smoke bombs at the South African Trade Commission on St Kilda Road. Nine protesters were arrested and around 15 required hospital treatment, among them a detective in plain clothes who was baton-clobbered by a colleague who mistook him for a troublemaker. Age reporter Mark Lawrence also found himself in the line of fire. ‘I was hit twice with a baton around the shoulders. I shouted out, “Press! I’m a reporter from The Age.” As I got to my feet I was kneed in the groin and struck two or three times with a baton. I fell to the ground again after being pushed by two policemen. I again said I was from the press and the reply came back, “I couldn’t care who you are, you bastard.”’

  After the 9,000-tonne cargo ship Safocean Adelaide, waiting in the Melbourne docks to carry goods to South Africa, was declared black by wharfies, a group of 20 students crept onto the dock and painted the words ‘Paint Them Black, Send Them Back’ in bright yellow on its hull. When the freighter’s captain, Johan Voigt, surprised the defacers, they threw paint over him. Voigt was treated for shock.

  That day, the Springboks flew out of Melbourne for Sydney. The campaigns against them, they knew, would continue to escalate. Yet they must have taken some heart from knowing that at last they would be in true rugby union territory, Sydney and then Brisbane, where their supporters would be larger in number than in Australian rules–centric Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne, and where at last they would face worthy opposition.

  Tom Bedford was particularly glad to leave Melbourne. He told me, ‘In the end, for us it was about survival and being mentally and physically able to keep playing and see the tour through. We were continually battered by the demonstrators, the police couldn’t fully control them, and that made us put aside whatever our individual philosophical differences the team members may have had and, as in the UK and Ireland, this bound us more firmly together as Springboks. Again, I could not reconcile myself to the way these particular Australians were behaving towards us when I knew from my previous visit in 1965 to the country and from my many encounters against the Wallabies that this hatred towards us did not reflect the feelings of all Australians. There was a team edict not to acknowledge the demonstrators, just ignore them, but it was so hard to do that when they spread tacks and glass on the field that were not just going to cut us but the Aussie players as well.

  ‘With a fair number of us having experienced three months of demonstrations just 18 months before, our laager mentality had this time made us mentally harder and more determined than ever not to lose (as we had done in the UK and Ireland). I, however, found myself repeatedly asking myself how the South African Rugby Board could possibly have sanctioned this tour knowing that it was going to be pretty much a repeat of the same situation as in the UK? With Peter Hain flying to Australia specifically to help orchestrate the demonstrations and assist the organisers across the Commonwealth, they should have known, and the Australian Rugby Union should have known it wasn’t going to be a plain and simple rugby tour. It was going to be another full-blown demonstration tour as well, and because of this fact, one would have thought the South African management and the Australian officials would have prepared themselves to have answers to rebut the demonstrators and [to] air in the media at press conferences. Unbelievably this was not the case.

  ‘The Australian tour was unrelenting hard work. Every day we were under pressure. There was nothing we could do except play rugby. We couldn’t socialise too much or see too many of the sights. It’s one thing organising a tour in Cape Town, but it’s a different situation when you’re in the front line, as we were.’ Australian protesters, happy to believe that every Springbok was a racist, targeted Bedfo
rd, despite his opposition to apartheid and dislike of the South African government. And among the Springbok team, he wasn’t alone in holding such sentiments. ‘One part of me wanted to beat the Aussies at rugby and another part just wanted to go home. Being hated takes a toll.’

  On 15 July, a magistrate heard charges against demonstrators who had been arrested during the Melbourne leg of the tour. A tense exchange provided a telling postscript to the Springboks’ unfortunate visit to the city. Barrister Peter Faris asked stipendiary magistrate Victor Proposch to disqualify himself from hearing the charges, on the grounds that he was biased against the demonstrators and so they would not receive a fair hearing in his court. Proposch refused, while conceding that ‘In the past I have made remarks about students, demonstrators and unionists. I have made the remark that unionists act as fascists in certain cases, and if they act as fascists they should be called fascists.’ This cut no ice with Faris, who repeated his request that Proposch stand down. ‘This is no indication of bias,’ continued the magistrate. ‘I am not biased. I will hear the matter on the evidence. I will judge on the evidence.’ Proposch later declared that to him there was no difference between the anti-apartheid demonstrations and the National Socialist rallies in Germany in the 1930s. ‘The Nazi Party took over by holding demonstrations and fighting with police. I occupied five years of my life fighting against them. Can you see any difference between the fights against the police in Germany and a rally that fights against police here? The rallies in Germany were politically motivated and directed against authority.’ At the hearings, an unemployed man named Joe Montero was sentenced to three months’ jail for being caught at the Springbok match with a stash of 12 lead-encased fireworks.

  At the West Australian Liberal Party’s state conference, Prime Minister McMahon made his strategy clear. As far as he was concerned, the tumultuous Springbok tour should be regarded as a blessing for the Liberals, and they would be going to an election at the earliest opportunity on a law-and-order platform. The silent majority was appalled by the violence carried out by anti-apartheid demonstrators, who were the ‘unkempt rent-a-protest puppets of the trade unions led by Bob Hawke and the Labor Party’ and who, if given the chance, would plunge the nation into anarchy. The sooner that Australians were able to make their feelings known at the polling booth — rather than, as the protesters were doing, by running riot in the streets — the better.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘I SAW PURE HATRED IN THEIR FACES’

  Excruciatingly constricted as the experience was, the time the Springboks spent high in the sky in their little fleet of light aircraft travelling from city to city was sweet, if brief, respite from demonstrators and controversy. Back on the ground, in Sydney on 4 July, the grind began anew.

  On the players’ arrival at 3.15 p.m., a bus rendezvoused with their planes on the tarmac at Kingsford Smith Airport and, escorted by police, took them to their hotel in Newland Street, Bondi Junction. They had evaded airport protesters again, but the players’ hotel had been long known, and when the bus pulled up outside the modest Squire Inn Hotel-Motel at 4.15, it was engulfed by a mob, who taunted the players and banged the sides of the vehicle. Police roughly cleared a path through the crowd so the footballers could scurry into the hotel.

  The Squire Inn had been outed a week before, when trade unions refused to supply liquor there while the Springboks were guests. John Montague, the chairman of Cockpit Hotel-Motel International, lessor of the Squire Inn, employed an armed guard with an equally menacing German shepherd to deter vandals and unwanted visitors.

  Camped in a car park across the road from the hotel, some 300–400 chanted and yelled, sang ‘We Shall Overcome’, and blew whistles. Contributing to the din were the tin moneyboxes then issued by the Commonwealth Bank that the campaigners part-filled with coins and rattled. The shattered Springboks resigned themselves to more sleepless nights. Two new chants — ‘Don’t Scrum With a Racist Bum!’ and ‘Hey You Coppers/You Better Start Shakin’/Today’s Pigs/Tomorrow’s Bacon!’ — were aired. Sekai Holland taught demonstrators Afrikaans swear words to avoid obscenity charges while upsetting the Springboks. Signs stuck to the wall of the Squire Inn read, ‘Go home Springboks … and take McMahon with you!’ and ‘Come to Swinging South Africa … one black hangs every three days!’

  There was a chorus of boos and curses from protesters when a few of the footballers appeared at the windows of their rooms to wave, blow kisses, and take photos. (Another time at the Squire Inn, a couple of Springboks defied their management to appear on a balcony and exchange expletives with the mob, who took sanctimonious affront that they were receiving a dose of their own medicine.)

  That first night, police arrested eight demonstrators. By the time the South Africans’ stay at the Squire Inn was over, many, many more would be hauled away. Among them were Denis Freney and future ABC correspondent Roger Allebone, as well as an inebriated man named McNamara, who was collared for driving past the Squire Inn screaming, ‘Go home, you mongrels, go home!’ — although no one, and least of all him, knew if his advice was directed at the Springboks or the protesters.

  Standing apart from the hubbub, keeping silent vigil, were 40 members of the Black Sash women’s protest group.

  When six National Socialists with their swastika armbands swaggered into the melee, the anti-apartheid campaigners caked them with flour bombs and booed them just as loudly as the footballers.

  The racket continued until 9.30 p.m., when police invoked the Summary Offences Act to restore quiet. Protesters, dwindling in number as the hours wore on and the temperature dropped to single figures, huddled under blankets, ate mealie-meal — a corn porridge fed to prisoners in South Africa — and kept the noise down. By 3.00 a.m., Newland Street was clear.

  Guests at the hotel that night were Sekai Holland and her husband, Jim, a 24-year-old cadet engineer whose father, Sir Thomas Venables Holland, was Australia’s deputy high commissioner in Bombay. (‘I don’t think Jim had ever worn a suit in his life,’ says John Myrtle, ‘so he went down to St Vinnie’s and bought a really spiffy one that he wore to the Squire Inn. Sekai, of course, wore her African dress and looked immaculate.’)

  It was no accident that the Hollands checked into the Squire Inn at the same time as the Springboks. They planned to make a point as potent as any of their fellow anti-apartheid campaigners in the street. Says 72-year-old Sekai Holland today, ‘By moving around the hotel before the Springboks’ eyes, kissing passionately in front of them, by dining together in the same dining room while the New South Wales Rugby Union was hosting a dinner for them, we wanted to make the Springboks uncomfortable and show them that in Australia, unlike South Africa, a black woman and a white man can love each other and be together. Jim and I were ashamed of nothing. We tried to talk to the players to remind them that back in South Africa, we could both be jailed for seven years with hard labour merely for making love, but they turned tail. They didn’t want controversy. Our protest was one that most Australians would not understand, but the Springboks would. It must have seemed unthinkable to them that I, a black person, was a fellow guest at the hotel in a position of equality. They only knew blacks as servants.’

  During their stay, the Hollands were in a lift when the doors opened and in stepped Tommy Bedford. They chatted, because Sekai later told John Myrtle that Bedford seemed ‘quite depressed’. He didn’t elaborate, but she gathered that he was conflicted by his love of playing for the Springboks and his dislike of his government’s apartheid policy that was causing him and his teammates such grief.

  When the Squire Inn’s John Montague realised that the Hollands were allied to the anti-apartheid demonstrators (according to Sekai Holland), he put them in a room directly above the throng, hoping that the hubbub would drive them out. ‘Little did he know,’ she says, ‘that that room was perfect. We were able to go out onto the balcony and sing protest songs with the people below.’

 
(In his book Political Football, Stewart Harris relates how he interviewed Hannes Marais in his room at the Squire Inn and asked the Springbok captain if he would meet Sekai Holland. Marais had replied, ‘No, because it would serve no purpose. We know what she is doing here. Everything I said would be used against us. If she was impartial, of course I would have a chat.’ In that interview, one of the very few he gave on tour, Marais told Harris that his men supported the South African government and all had been free, if they opposed apartheid, to make themselves unavailable for selection. Harris finished his interview and asked Marais for a personal favour: would he mind asking the team to sign autograph cards for his sons? A few days later, Harris opened his mail to find two complete sets of autographs dedicated to his boys. ‘Marais was the only Springbok I got to know, even a little,’ he wrote, ‘and I liked him.’ The gentle anecdote supports Tom Bedford’s contention that had the Springboks been allowed to show their human side, they may not have been regarded as quite the robotic racist demons they had been portrayed by the anti-apartheid campaigners, and much of the animosity they suffered may have been lessened.)

  While the Hollands managed to dine in edgy proximity to the Springboks, members of the Rugby Seven — Jim Boyce and James Roxburgh (and their wives) and Paul Darveniza — tried but failed to book a table at the Squire Inn restaurant during the Springbok visit. ‘We weren’t even going to approach the South Africans,’ says Boyce. ‘We just wanted to be handy in case they chose to ask us why we’d taken our stand.’

  At the NSWRU reception at the hotel-motel, to which beer and wine had to be brought in, Charles Blunt said the demonstrators were not true Australians. They might call themselves Australians, but they weren’t behaving in the way Australians had become known throughout the world. New South Wales rugby’s Charlie Eastes apologised for all the ‘nonsense and insults’, and hoped that despite it all, the players were relieved to be in hospitable rugby territory at last; a relief perhaps not reflected in the players’ tense body language and grim expressions, especially when they caught sight of Sekai and Jim Holland canoodling at the rear of the room. Flappie Lochner thanked the Sydney Rugby Union in advance for making sure that his team would not be ‘pestered’ at next Tuesday’s match against Sydney.