You couldn't escape the Springbok tour, but I still managed to miss most of the action

Monday, 12 July 2021

Police with batons clash with anti-tour demonstrators clash in Molesworth St, Wellington, in July 1981.

OPINION: ‘’1,2,3,4, We don’t want your racist tour. 2, 4, 6, 8, Graham Mourie is our mate.’’

Exactly 40 years ago the Springbok rugby team from apartheid South Africa began a two-month tour which would divide the country.

Some of those events, such as the chants sung while marching, remain indelibly printed on my memory. Being of the same generation as John Key, I am amused he famously can’t recall whether he supported or opposed the tour. That’s like meeting a present Millennial in 2060 who can’t remember Covid-19.

I could forgive Key forgetting that Suzanne Prentice won top female vocalist that year or that Mortimer’s Patch won best, and probably only, TV drama, but the tour? You couldn’t escape it. Go somewhere and the first question asked was ‘’pro or anti?’’.

* Photos chronicling the storming of Hamilton's Rugby Park on show at Waikato Museum for anniversary of Springbok Tour protests

Some commentators are comparing the “targeted antipathy” against Ardern to when Robert Muldoon was prime minister, in 1975-1984. Pictured is Muldoon on the night he announced a snap election.

* Inside the 1981 Springbok tour

I was anti-tour – surprise, surprise – and I did important things to show my abhorrence of apartheid. These included voting in unanimous motions at university condemning apartheid, and wearing a red and black H.A.R.T (Halt All Racist Tours) badge with my embroidered flared jeans and crimplene purple polo-necked skivvy.

Dave Armstrong: “I feel for those poor kids, carrying schoolbags as heavy as they are, trudging home to do even more repetitive written work.”

I also marched, once I worked out what was the most law-abiding, pacifist squad to join. While many radical students donned motorbike crash helmets, in case they were batoned by the violent Red Squad, I joined civil liberties lawyers, education lecturers, and retired art curators in the 1981 equivalent of the Thorndon Fair.

I wasn’t able to be at the Molesworth St march, where the police violently batoned the front of the crowd, because I had to complete an incredibly important assignment about a Haydn piano sonata.

But the blood-spattered kids on the front page of the paper the next day showed that the previously reasonable approach by the police had disappeared, almost certainly at Prime Minister Rob Muldoon’s behest, and the gloves were off.

I also remember performing with a street theatre group in Civic Square one Friday night. Our anti-tour performance was so didactic that we were lucky not to get batoned by critics, let alone the Red Squad.

As the day of the Wellington test approached, I decided I would bravely don a crash helmet and march with my retired friends – as long as it was outside a five-kilometre radius of Athletic Park.

Alas, I was selected for a Youth Orchestra in Nelson, so I chanted from 200 kilometres away.

During the latter part of the tour, I gave a visiting African member of the liberation struggle a lift home on the back of my Suzuki 90 motorbike one night after a party. Amandla!

So, I was little miffed that the ANC didn’t send me a telegram thanking me for my support when it eventually became the government.

As the cadre said to me when I admitted I hadn’t helped the anti-tour movement much, ‘’David, it is a broad movement, and we all contribute in our own way. I have taken up arms against the South African security forces and seen members of my own family shot in cold blood, while you bravely wear a H.A.R.T badge, except in town after 10pm because you might be bullied.’’

Although Wellington was largely an anti-tour town, as the results of the 1981 election, held later that year, show, opposition to the tour wasn’t unanimous. In a sports team I played in at the time I would guess only three of us – me, a minister of religion and a guy with Indian heritage – opposed the tour.

In provincial New Zealand, it was the other way around. My parents, who had no interest in rugby, took a trip up to Wairarapa, coincidentally, at the same time as the Wellington test. ‘’You’re from Wellington,’’ said the interested hotelier, ‘’are you up here to escape all those dangerous protesters?’’

So, did the Springbok tour make a difference? I would never have guessed how quickly after the tour that apartheid started to be dismantled, though it stuck in the craw to see Nelson Mandela treated like a hero by people who had been staunchly and publicly in favour of the Springbok tour.

The cancellation of the Hamilton game certainly inspired many in Africa. Yet the tour also won Muldoon re-election by two seats. He narrowly won quite a few marginal seats in provincial towns where support for rugby and the tour was strong. I can’t think of any politician since who cynically exploited a situation for their own political gain. Brash’s Orewa speech and Labour’s list of Chinese names don’t come close.

After the tour, some Māori, while grateful that so many Pākehā marched against racism in South Africa, loudly wondered why their issues of land, sovereignty, language and racism in their own country were not supported with the same enthusiasm, and they made a very good point.

In fact, some of those leading the anti-apartheid movement would soon be cadres of a different movement – the 1984 Rogernomics deregulation of the economy that marginalised those at the bottom, including many Māori in provincial towns, even further. But that’s another story.