1981 Springbok tour: Protesters recall violent 'battlefields' and vicious punches
Friday, 13 August 2021
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A man who nearly lost an eye, a woman who went to prison, and a leader who became a target of fury. Forty years on, these people still remember the heart-stopping moments when they protested against the 1981 Springbok Tour, and the tour’s ongoing impact on their lives. Steven Walton reports.
For about three months in 1981, Pauline McKay couldn’t live in her own home. As a woman living alone and a leader of the most prominent group opposed to the Springbok Tour, she felt unsafe.
“We were targets,” she says.
The eight-week tour that began in July 1981, saw about 150,000 people take part in at least 200 demonstrations nationwide. Some 1500 people were eventually charged with crimes as a result.
**READ MORE:
* Remembering the day the 1981 Springbok tour came to Taranaki
* ‘Wellington’s darkest hour of the tour’: 40 years since violence erupted on Molesworth St
* 1981 Springbok tour 40 years on: 'I wanted my photographs to say what was happening'
**
Pauline McKay was the national chairperson of Halt All Racist Tours (Hart). She remembers how constant the protests were; twice a week, to coincide with each tour game. The strategy was to mobilise nationally, so the police would have to stretch resources. She says those who took to the streets came from all parts of society. There was no such thing as a typical protester.
“That was its strength,” McKay says.
The clashes were constant and violent. “It [was] all a bit surreal,” McKay says. “Places that were very familiar suddenly became battlefields.” Hamilton saw a pitch invasion and several protesters badly beaten after the match was called off.
In Wellington, police armed with batons clashed with about 2000 protesters in a violent showdown on Molesworth St, outside Parliament. During the third test in Auckland, violence broke out around Eden Park while a small plane flew over the pitch and dropped flour bombs. The match had to be paused when one of them struck All Black Gary Knight.
McKay’s scariest moment came in New Plymouth, four days after the infamous Hamilton match. She marched around the ground with a much older and calmer crowd, certainly not a group that would invade the pitch, she says. “It was very scary … because people had been hunted down after the match [in Hamilton] and attacked,” she recalls.
Protesters feared it might happen again, a feeling only amplified for McKay when she saw a bus she claims had the words “kill a protester” written on its side.
Protests in smaller, rural communities like New Plymouth were always met with more pushback, McKay says, because those who took part had nowhere to hide. At a demonstration in the small North Island town of Eltham, only 12 people turned up. To McKay, protesters in these communities were among the bravest and most heroic.
McKay says she always thought the demonstrations would eventually peter out. In reality, the momentum just kept building. “It built, and it built, and it built up until the last test match,” she says. “I think that if it had gone any longer, someone could have got killed.”
‘I was scared’
“You’ve got to leave,” the policeman yelled at John Denny. “We cannot protect you.”
Rugby fans and protesters were streaming out of Hamilton’s Rugby Park. The match had been called off – and 35,000 expectant fans would not get to see Waikato take on the Springboks.
Denny, an Anglican priest, was one of the local protest leaders. He was not among those who invaded the field but was protesting outside the ground with his wife Gillian as the drama unfolded. Protesters were chased and beaten by rugby fans, who used beer cans as weapons. Twenty-three people ended up in hospital.
During the chaos, Denny became separated from his wife as he retreated to a house being used as the local anti-tour headquarters. Meanwhile, Gillian made it back to the family home to look after their four children, aged 9 to 15.
Neither place was safe.
Two rugby fans found Denny and other leaders, including John Minto, at the headquarters and a fight broke out. Denny recalls the men trashed furniture and attacked an already-bleeding Minto. “I managed to get to a phone to ring the police, who said that there was no way they could come and help.” Eventually,, Denny says, the sheer number of protesters forced the men out.
Meanwhile, at the Denny home, a large, angry crowd of rugby fans were out front, throwing bottles through windows. In the lead-up to the protests, John Denny had been interviewed by media and identified as a protest leader – so his address was no secret. A scared Gillian escaped through a back door with their children and sought refuge at a friend’s house.
When John Denny arrived home that night, the crowd was still there. Some students from Waikato University, where Denny was the warden of a hall, had occupied his house to protect it. Police later clashed with the angry crowd. Amid the confrontation, two of Denny’s students were beaten by rugby fans and then taken to hospital.
The next week, Denny was told he had to leave the cathedral he worked at because too many people had threatened to withdraw their pledges. He kept his job as a warden but only after a meeting with the hall’s board.
For months after the tour, Hamilton was deeply divided. People kept ringing the Denny home with threats. Their children were told at school to avoid drawing attention to themselves. John Denny became paranoid and was careful about who he spoke to. In social situations, he was often cold-shouldered.
Gillian Denny says there are still “raw edges” about the Hamilton game in the community. She has suffered small consequences, even years later. Once, a surgeon refused to treat her for a knee replacement, because of her involvement in the tour.
“There were all sorts of things like that,” she says.
‘I was hurting and bleeding’
Three hundred people were huddled together in the middle of Rugby Park in Hamilton when the loudspeakers announced the game had been cancelled.
Protesters had broken through a flimsy fence and stormed the field, though police later said they were also worried about the threat of a small plane crashing into a grandstand.
Cancelling the game ratcheted up the tension. A roar reverberated through the 35,000-strong crowd as the announcement was made. Angry fans began shouting, directing their fury at the protesters who remained on the field with their arms linked. Only a meagre number of police separated the two groups.
Among the on-field protesters was Richard Mayson. He remembers the shouting was laced with expletives and threats. Some fans were shouting that they would kill protesters with beer bottles.
In the end, police had to escort the protesters from the pitch. But getting off the pitch and getting out of danger were different things. As Mayson emerged from the ground, a man appeared suddenly and landed a punch square in his left eye. As fist met face, the man unleashed “a profane litany of what he thought of my ancestry,” Mayson recalls.
The punch broke his eye socket. Mayson picked himself up off the ground, spotted a taxi nearby, bolted for it and “[got] the hell out of it as quickly as I possibly could … it was very, very painful.”
Mayson bandaged himself up that night and decided the next morning to go to the hospital. When he got there, he claims nurses, surgeons and doctors expressed their strong pro-tour views.
“They said, ‘you may not like our advice, but our advice to you is to stay away from protests from here on in’,” he recalls. “[The staff] were extremely agitated, they were pro-rugby.” The doctors told him he was lucky his retina had not been severed by the punch. If it had, he would have lost his eye.
The 1981 tour was not Mayson’s first foray into such protests. In the mid-70s, he was a backbench Labour MP and among those who helped cancel the proposed 1973 Springbok tour of New Zealand.
Mayson grew up in rugby-mad, blue-collar Hastings, and his social justice principles sometimes caused angst within his own family. After the ‘81, tour ended, his son walked out on him. They have since reconciled.
In 2019, Mayson saw an optometrist and was told he needed a cataract operation. The optometrist commented that it was a bit odd that cataracts were only in Mayson’s left eye. Usually, they appeared in both.
Mayson recounted his story of his encounter with the rugby fan in Hamilton, 38 years earlier.
“Ah,” the optometrist said, “Therein lies the cause.”
‘There was lots of abuse’
People know Gordon Jackman by his walk.
During the violent protests of the 1981 tour, Jackman is sure this distinctive gait – a limp contracted from polio in childhood – was his undoing. It led to an arrest and conviction for which he is still suffering the consequences.
On August 15, 1981, the day of the first test between the All Blacks and Springboks in Christchurch, Jackman was at the other end of the country, among about 80 protesters who broke away from a larger march and occupied an Auckland motorways.
Jackman remembers being kitted out in a thick Swanndri and a helmet. Others used newspapers as extra padding. According to reports from the time, the group set up a temporary roadblock, complete with barbed wire and drums.
“There was lots of abuse,” Jackman says. “Cars honking, angry people getting out of their cars and shouting at us. But we all just sat down.” For the next two hours, the motorway belonged to the protesters. But then, police began rounding up protesters, arresting the majority of them. They were marshalled away.
Jackman is a bit hazy on what happened next. The police presence lapsed – newspaper reports from the time noted that some officers were called away to another protest at Auckland Airport – and Jackman remembers there was a chance for some motorway protesters to shed helmets and change clothes, making them harder to identify.
Jackman says he was the only protester on the motorway who was identified and charged with a crime. “[The police] said to me, ‘Oh well, we know you because you had a limp',” he recalls. He was charged with obstructing a carriageway. For Jackman, the discrimination was clear. 'I was the only one convicted because I was disabled,” he says, “which has always f…ing pissed me off.”
Still, Jackman was unworried. “It was like, what was happening to the people in South Africa? I thought [what happened to me] was pretty minimal.”
And though not life-changing, it has had a lasting effect.
Three years ago, when travelling to the United States, Jackman had to declare his conviction. When he got to Auckland Airport, he remembers being pulled aside and thoroughly searched. Once he arrived in the US, it happened constantly.
“Every time I went anywhere [in the US], I was taken apart, searched, everything emptied out … honestly, it was just awful.”
‘We were always expecting to be picked up’
Hinengaro Davis woke to a knock on her door.
It was early one morning in October 1981, a few weeks after the Springbok tour had ended. When Davis opened the door, she saw police officers. She quickly realised they were at her back door too. They had a warrant and were searching her home. Davis hurriedly rang a friend and told them she was about to be arrested.
“We were always expecting to be picked up,” she says.
Davis was a member of Patu – the anti-racism protest group of predominantly Māori and Pasifika activists. A few weeks earlier, she had been a marshal as the group protested the final game of the 1981 tour, the infamous flour-bomb test at Eden Park. “I was picked up because I was obviously one of the marshals,” Davis says. “I was deemed to be one of the organisers of Patu who were more aggressive.”
At the police station, Davis learned she was one of a number of anti-tour protesters arrested that day. She puts the number at about 30. In the end, 14 people, including Davis, were charged. After a trial, Davis was convicted of unlawful assembly. In 1982, she and the 13 other protesters were sentenced to either six months or a year in jail. Davis got the lesser term.
During sentencing, the judge said the protesters needed to be made an example of. He singled out Davis as a “disruptive influence” and a stirrer. (She later took her case to the Court of Appeal where the conviction was overturned).
Davis only spent two months in prison and was relieved to get out. Her parents had been looking after her 6-year-old daughter. “My mother would’ve rather that I stayed home and looked after my baby,” she jokes, but says that her parents, family and kaumātua supported her unreservedly.
“My brother was a staunch rugby league and rugby player … [and] not once did we have a confrontation,” she says. “It was like: ‘that’s what you do, and good on you … you’ve got the balls to follow it through’.”
Davis believes the 1981 protests helped to expose and end the appalling racism of South African apartheid. Forty years on, she is less complimentary of her own country’s willingness to change.
“Racism is still alive and kicking in [New Zealand],” she says.
“I don’t think we’ve gone far forward.”