'Battle for the soul: Where were you in '81?', New Zealand Listener, 14 August, 1999

Nowadays, on a Saturday afternoon in Auckland, as the slate-grey rain sheets down, you can stand in the long grass that covers an aromatic tip in Glen Eden and watch the Hart soccer team doggedly fighting the years and the opposition in the lower reaches of Soccer Auckland’s Over-35 Grade.

It’s all that remains of an astonishing movement that once inspired hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders to confront the armed forces of the state: the second biggest anti-apartheid movement in the world.

What was it all about, 1981? It wasn’t just about apartheid, that’s for sure. For Trevor Richards, in this absorbing history of Hart, it was ‘a battle for the soul of New Zealand’, fought through more than a decade, where 1981 came as a climax, ‘like the guns going off at the end of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture’ (a peculiarly apt allusion, for, while Richards’s successor as chairman of Hart, John Minto, was described as having a face like a sackful of chisels, Richards was always said to look a bit too much like a Russian poofter).

In 1968, Syd Jackson, son of 1937 All Black Everard Jackson, had proposed to the Federation of New Zealand Maori students that All Black tours to South Africa be opposed, irrespective of racial composition, on the grounds that New Zealand should not play sport with apartheid.

The following year at the New Zealand University Students’ Association Easter Council, Richards proposed the same. Three months later, a meeting was called to form a national body to halt the 1970 All Black tour to South Africa. Tama Poata coined the name: Halt All Racist Tours.

Richards describes Hart as ‘a typical child of its time: rebellious, internationalist, confident, optimistic … the creation of a hard-headed pragmatic brand of idealism’. Over the next 12 months Richards and Hart set about their work, going ‘from setback to rejection to defeat’ as the All Blacks finally left for South Africa and its referees in June, 1970.

Hart girded its loins and won some respite in 1972, when Labour took office and, after dithering, announced that sporting teams not selected on merit would be unwelcome in New Zealand. ‘The Inter-War Years,’  Richards calls them.

Back came National in ’75. The invitations to South African sports teams flooded out from New Zealand. Hart responded with area officers and a multiplicity of branches. How-to leaflets were produced on organising public meetings, dealing with the media, raising funds. Hart News was doing a 7000-copy print run. A crucial international network was established and maintained. Hart netball and football teams took the argument over sport and politics on to the field of play and got the retaliation in first to the ‘spoilsport’ charge.

From Te Kuiti to Mataura, Richards fronted up to meetings, where he was shouted at and whistled at and jeered at, but he kept speaking. The All Blacks left for another tour to South Africa, this one a real disaster, and 30 African and Caribbean nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics rather than compete with New Zealand.

Although sportsmen had begun speaking out in numbers against sporting contact with South Africa, within Hart itself, tiredness, lack of funds and sectarian in-fighting were sapping energies. Political agendas continued to see-saw on the axis of public education versus direct action.

National kept New Zealand in the 1978 Commonwealth Games by signing the loopholed Gleneagles Agreement, but in fact National would agree to anything that might help it cling to office. This, coupled with Muldoon’s grim determination to stifle dissent, brought the winter of ’81 down upon us with its scenes of unimagined violence and fury, where Acting Prime Minister Duncan McIntyre announced that he would reassess the situation if someone was killed, ‘depending upon the factors surrounding any such death’.

Oh, but it was the worst of times, it was the best of times. There was just so much sex going on! The chant of ‘Stop the tour!’ was increasingly met with the aroused response of, ‘One more game!’

The speed with which law-breaking in ’81 became second nature was a revelation. When the Boks arrived at Auckland airport in July, I stood with hundreds of others peacefully and rather helplessly behind wire fencing until a Westie borstal old-girl I knew, standing near me, acting out of a combination of boredom and frustration, grabbed hold of the mesh and started to wrench it from its iron supports. She had already stripped most of the wire from one pole, before tentatively, we began to help. Eventually the entire stretch of fencing was shredded away and trampled down. Hundreds and hundreds of us now stood facing a single line of about 40 police standing a metre apart from each other and not looking too cocky. Nothing but the law stood between us and the airport terminal hosting the Boks. And none could bring themselves to take that step forward.

Six weeks later every access to the Wellington city centre was blocked by protestors. The electrified railway into the city was put out of action by explosives. Police walkie-talkies were jammed by Hart electronic boffins. Inside Athletic Park, a smoke bomb was hurled into the All Blacks’ dressing room. The police made few arrests: they simply did not have the resources.

Where Hart signally failed was in winning the working class. Where a union had an international perspective (the seafarers) or was mainly female (the Clerical Workers) or the Maori membership was high and the union leadership determined to argue the case (the West Coast North Island branch of the Meat workers), support for Hart was won. But the reality was that standing in the middle of Hamilton’s Rugby Park on July 25, 1981, were students, teachers, welfare workers, clergy. And pelting them with beer cans were working-class trade unionists. Almost three-quarters of those angrily attending a Northern Driver’s Union meeting in Hamilton the Monday after the abandoned Waikato-Springbok game had been at Rugby park – in the stands, on the bank.

Apartheid was never explained in class terms (although the Wellington Trades Council produced what turned out to be a highly effective leaflet comparing wage rights of whites with blacks in South Africa). It was always a moral crusade. And when it’s rugby versus morality, rugby tends to win. That rugby can provide a few savoured moments of release in an otherwise hard working life was lost on some of the protest movement, who ridiculed spectators at Springbok games as being ‘pro-tons’ – a coined term that combined with the phrase ‘pro-tour’ with ‘automaton’.

Dancing on Our Bones is inspirational stuff, written by a historian who made history and managed to file it away in boxes while doing so. It is illustrated with relish, the posters reproduced making you realise how well the anti-apartheid movement was served by talent; they’re up there with Paris ’68.

Of course the sporting boycotts were not the decisive element in the collapse of apartheid. The township risings of ’84-’86, the revival of mass organization and militancy under the independent Congress of South African Trade Unions, the large-scale flight of alarmed capital from the Republic – all meant a political settlement had to be found with the ANC, the dominant force of black resistance. But, as Richards says, it was no accident that among the first South Africans travelling with Lusaka in the late 1980s to talk let’s-cut-a-deal with the exiled ANC were rugby and cricket administrators.

What Hart achieved was a victorious coalition: of Maori finding common cause in a fight against racism, in particular of women reacting to the way in which the dominant social force of rugby had defined them, and of the bearers of 1960s idealism confronting a Prime Minister and a stone-headed mentality that brooked no dissent, asked no questions.

Trevor Richards is right. It was a battle for the soul of New Zealand. We won it – and then handed it back to the 1984 Labour government.

'At the heart of the matter', The Evening Post, 14 July, 1999

Pinko, commie, traitor, sports-hater. That’s only half of it, Trevor Richards says of abuse hurled during the 16 turbulent years in which he was the very public face of the Halt All Racist Tours movement.

He was the anti-apartheid organization’s prime leader from 1969 until 1980, and its international secretary until 1985.

‘Everything from my parentage to my sex life was fair game,’ he says. ‘A drunk Kiwi assaulted me in an airliner over the Indian Ocean in 1977 and screamed at me "traitor".'

Hart was formed at Auckland University in July, 1969, and was later based in Christchurch, then Wellington.

Richards became organiser, and was soon joined by four other office holders, Michael Law, Pauline McKay, David Wickham and Don Swan.

What none knew in 1969, Richards says, was that Hart would grow into a mass movement of people of all persuasions, among them notable sportsmen and women, whose opposition to apartheid sport would polarise New Zealand.

A former Kaikohe high schooler who became an Auckland University graduate, Richards, now 52, would have been a secondary school history teacher but for apartheid sport. His public classroom was an arena in which New Zealand’s 80-year relationship with South Africa changed for good with the election of South Africa’s first majority government in 1994.

‘We’d dealt to apartheid sport and its influence in New Zealand – don’t forget we played just a small part in the collapse of apartheid. Now New Zealand deals with South Africa through its majority government, not through the offices of the South African Rugby Board, and we were part of that change. But how New Zealanders see themselves in the context of racism at home is still a moot point.’

Untried and untested in 1969, Hart and Richards would eventually find themselves in deep political waters at home and, when the international campaign against apartheid grew, in even deeper waters with heavyweights at the UN and occasionally Heads of State. At home, there were the Prime Ministerships of Holyoake, Marshall, Kirk and Rowling, characterised largely by protests, meetings and floods of correspondence and Kirk’s refusal to allow the Springboks to tour in 1973.

The heat turned up in 1975, says Richards, with the election of the Government of Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. Muldoon’s view of Hart had been low at best; now he became hectoring and vicious.

When he held to his election pledge not to interfere with the rugby union’s South Africa connections, 30 African states boycotted the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The Prime Minister had failed to grasp that he was out of step with international opinion, says Richards.

‘That’s when we became ‘traitors’,’ he says with a grin.

‘Muldoon helped the polarisation process enormously. The [New Zealand Rugby Football] Union never admitted it was manipulated by the South African Rugby Board. The Boks wouldn’t play with the Maoris, so the union left brilliant players at home. We know how they felt – George Nepia said as much. What was worse, it showed Maoris just what white New Zealanders really felt about them.’

Today, Richards has returned to his history interests. He’s spent the last three years putting his history skills to use by writing Dancing On Our Bones. Published by Bridget Williams Books and to be launched next week, it’s not solely a history of Hart, nor of the allied Citizens Association For Racial Equality campaign.

‘They have to be seen in the context of 60 years of linkages to South African rugby, and then other sports, as South African governments insisted on visiting teams conforming with whites-only rules.’

Richards sees sporting contacts with South Africa falling into six periods. The first, from 1902 to 1948, in which the New Zealand Rugby Football Union followed the rules of the South African Rugby Board, and would not include Maori, whom the NZRFU left at home. The 1948 until 1966 period was characterised by the No Maoris, No Tour protests; 1970 to 1975 saw the rise of the anti-apartheid movement, led by Hart; the bitter 1975-1984 period in which the struggle peaked with the 1981 Springbok tour; and 1984 to 1990 in which a defiant NZRFU lost its tour to South Africa in the courts.

After the ‘largely forgettable Cavaliers tour of 1986, eight decades of rugby played according to South Africa’s political and social dictates had ended … with a whimper,’ Richards writes.

The ‘sports-hater’ who spends his summers glued to his radio listening to cricket commentaries and his winters watching rugby on TV was Hart’s poorly-paid fulltime organiser for 10 years until he joined the Public Service Association as a better-paid research officer. He continued as its chairman, and then its international secretary. He later worked for Volunteer Service Abroad as its Africa programme manager and is a research fellow at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University.