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1981 Springbok Tour

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The 1981 Springbok Tour (still known by many in New Zealand as The Tour) was a controversial tour of New Zealand by the South African Springbok rugby team.

Background

The Springboks and New Zealand’s national rugby team, the All Blacks, have a long tradition of intense and friendly sporting rivalry. In the 1950s and 1960s, the South African apartheid policies had an impact on team selection for the All Blacks: the selectors passed over Māori players for some All Black tours to South Africa. By the 1970s public protests and political pressure forced on the New Zealand Rugby Union the choice of either fielding a team not selected by race, or not touring in the Republic. However, the South African rugby authorities continued to select Springbok players by race. As a result, the Norman Kirk Labour Government of 1972 - 1974 prevented the Springboks from touring during the mid 1970s. In response, the Rugby Union protested about the involvement of “politics in sport”.

It is well established in New Zealand that the Government can prevent non-nationals from entering the country (so allowing the government to stop tours by opposing teams), but does not limit the freedom of its citizens to leave the country (so for example, after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan the government was unable to force all NZ Olympians to boycott the Moscow Olympics).

In 1976, the then newly-elected New Zealand prime minister, Robert Muldoon, “allowed” the All Blacks to tour South Africa. Twenty-one African nations protested against this breach of the Gleneagles Agreement by boycotting the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, due to their view that the All Black tour gave tacit support to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Once again the All Blacks failed to win a series in South Africa (they would not do so until 1996, after the fall of apartheid).

At a time when New Zealand was re-examining the history of its own race relations, the issue of All Black tours and apartheid was picked up by many on the New Zealand political left - for example becoming a central theme of Greg McGee’s hit play Foreskin’s Lament.

The Tour

By the early 1980s the pressure from other African countries as well as from protest groups internal to New Zealand, such as HART (Halt All Racist Tours), reached a head when the New Zealand Rugby Union proposed a Springbok tour for 1981. This became a topic of political contention due to the issue of the sports boycott by the other African nations. Activists asked New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon to cancel the tour, but he permitted the South African team to come to New Zealand in mid-1981, arguing that New Zealand was a free and democratic country, and that “politics should stay out of sport”. Muldoon’s critics, however, felt that Muldoon really allowed the tour to go ahead in order for his National Party to secure the votes of rural and provincial conservatives in the general election later in the year. Some rugby supporters echoed the separation of politics and sport. Others argued that if the tour were cancelled, there would be no reporting of the widespread criticism against apartheid in New Zealand in the controlled South African media. If the tour proceeded, the racially integrated All Blacks and New Zealand crowds would undermine the apartheid system.

The ensuing public protests polarised the New Zealand population as no other issue has in the nation’s history. While rugby fans filled the football grounds, sizeable protest crowds (including other rugby fans) filled the surrounding streets, and in some cases succeeded in invading rugby pitches in order to halt games.

The New Zealand authorities strengthened security at public facilities after protestors disrupted telecommunications services by taking out a TV microwave station. At first protests were predominantly peaceful. A small minority of the protestors saw the opportunity to force a confrontation with authority, and came wearing motorcycle helmets, home-made shields and a variety of weapons. Others adopted defensive armour against police batons. “Patches” of criminal gangs such as traditional rivals Black Power and Mongrel Mob were also evident, (interestingly enough, the Mongrel Mob were Muldoon supporters). After early disruptions, the police created two special riot squads (the Red and Blue Squads), to control protestors. They also required that all spectators assemble in sports grounds at least an hour before kickoff, after protestors surrounded grounds and attempted to invade pitches early in the tour.

At Rugby Park, Hamilton, about 350 protestors invaded the pitch after pulling down a fence. The police arrested about 50 of them over a period of an hour, but were concerned that they could not control the rugby crowd. Reports that a light plane piloted by a protestor was approaching the stadium was the last straw, and police cancelled the match. The protestors were ushered from the ground, with enraged rugby spectators lashing out at them. A bloody encounter took place between protest marchers and police in Molesworth Street in Wellington. And at Eden Park, Auckland, a low-flying light plane disrupted the final game of the tour by dropping flour-bombs on the pitch. The scenes that appeared on television made the country look on the brink of civil war as the evening news broadcasts replayed running battles between helmet-clad protestors, the police and enraged rugby fans.

There were, in fact, many peaceful protests around the country, but sporadic violence attracted the press and led to the impression of a nation at war with itself. The police on the other hand, prevented the release of ‘provocative’ images, (such as a officer on fire after being hit by a molotov cocktail). These images were however shown to ‘motivate’ policemen before the Mt Eden test, during which street-fighting broke out with the police. Perhaps because of this, the tour remained a bizarrely civilised break down of order. Neither side used firearms or tear gas. There were no deaths, and no serious injuries. Some of the more violent policemen were quietly disciplined. Protestors who might, in another country, have faced unreasonable charges of attempted murder or treason, were charged and convicted of relatively minor and unimportant disorder offences - or acquitted after defence by pro bono lawyers. Leaders of both sides went on to fill important roles in public life.

Aftermath

Supporters argued the African National Congress was encouraged by signs of opposition in the outside world; opponents that the scenes of fighting held back reform by strengthening the hand of the security forces. It may be that events in New Zealand had little effect in South Africa, and the protests and response were more an argument about the future of New Zealand society than apartheid. The Muldoon government was re-elected in 1981 partially as a backlash to the tour protests.

The NZRFU constitution contained much high minded wording about promoting the image of rugby and New Zealand, and generally being a benefit to society. In 1985 the NZRFU proposed an All Black tour of South Africa. Two lawyers sued the NZRFU, claiming such a tour would breach the NZRFU’s constitution, which it clearly did. The High Court duly stopped the All Black tour. The 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand could have been stopped by the courts. It is interesting that protest groups did not attempt such a remedy within the “system” in 1981. The All Blacks did not tour South Africa until after the fall of the apartheid régime (1990 - 1994), although after the official 1985 tour was cancelled an unofficial tour did take place in 1986 by a team including some but not the majority of All Blacks players. These were known outside South Africa as the Cavaliers, but advertised inside the Republic as the All Blacks.

For the first time in history, rugby in New Zealand had become a source of embarrassment rather than pride. The sport fell into a six-year decline, arrested only by the country’s victory in the first Rugby World Cup in 1987.

Public respect for the police also took a battering as a result of The Tour, with protestors filing a number of high-profile brutality complaints against officers. Many felt that the authorities had set up the Red and Blue Squads for the purpose of suppressing dissent, as opposed to by-the-book law enforcement.

For the New Zealand protest movement the 1970s only truly arrived in the early 80s, (protests against the New Zealand Army’s involvement in the Vietnam war had been somewhat muted). Together with the Bastion Point occupation and ANZUS, the tour marked the high water mark of protest success. The decline of the trade union movement, unemployment and increases in student work load would combine to see the movement wither by the early 1990s. Yet without an obvious rite of passage such as compulsory military training, participation in the tour protest is fondly remembered in a bizarrely similar way for many who came of age in the 1980s.

Merata Mita’s documentary film Patu! tells the tale of the tour from a left wing perspective. Commander of the police “Red Squad”, Ross Meurant published Red Squad Story in 1982, giving a defensive conservative view. In 1984 Geoff Chapple published The Tour, a book chronicling the above events from the protesters’ perspective. In 1999 Glenn Wood’s biography “Cop Out”, covered the tour from the perspective of a frontline policeman.

New Zealand leftist Tom Newnham’s book By Batons And Barbed Wire is one of the largest collections of photos (and general information) of the protest movement during the tour itself.

References

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