Between 1969 and 1985, New Zealanders fought a long and bitter series of battles to end this country’s rugby contacts with apartheid South Africa.
Many people remember the 1981 Springbok tour. Over 56 days, the tour brought the country the closest it had come in the 20th century to civil war.
Fewer people recall the 1976 All Black tour of South Africa. That tour had gone ahead with the blessing and goodwill of the New Zealand government. No other government in the world had offered apartheid South Africa such enthusiastic support.
Countries felt compelled to act. The International Olympic Committee was asked to ban New Zealand from the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The IOC refused.
With the All Blacks still in South Africa, about 30 countries walked out of the Olympics in protest at New Zealand’s presence. The first major boycott of the modern Olympics was caused, not by US-Soviet Cold War rivalries — those boycotts were to come later — but by New Zealand’s support for apartheid.
In 1985, two lawyers brought a case in the High Court which led to an injunction being issued which prevented that year’s All Black tour of South Africa taking place. I am not sure how well remembered that campaign is.
And the cancelled 1973 tour? Today, few know anything much about it. It is the forgotten campaign.
The tours of 1981 and to a lesser extent, 1976, are better recalled, largely because their dreadful outcomes were hard to ignore. The events of 1973 go mostly unnoticed, buried by the dramas of 1976 and 1981. Yet to this activist/student of history — and there’s a potential conflict if ever there was one — the campaign against the 1973 tour was the most significant campaign of them all.
In early 1971 Hart had announced its intention to disrupt the 1973 tour, should it proceed. The reaction of many, especially in provincial and rural New Zealand, was hostile. In February 1973, during a South Island speaking tour, there were foretastes of what was to come in 1981. In Ashburton, about 600 pro-tour supporters had turned out in an effort to prevent me from addressing a meeting. The meeting went ahead, but only after a number of their placards had come crashing down on my head.
In demanding the cancellation of the tour, Hart was openly challenging the values of post World War 2 New Zealand. Then, we were a predominantly rural, male-dominated, conservative society whose Pakeha citizens — well, most of them — believed the country had "the best race relations in the world". Many saw New Zealand as part of a white man’s club which had more or less ruled the world for as long as most people could remember.
These old values were slowly dying, but in 1973 they still possessed a lot of clout. Perhaps no single person better encapsulated them than Tom Pearce, former president of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union and the manager of the 1960 All Blacks in South Africa. In April 1972 he had said "where the white man has been, he has brought law and the establishment of his regime for the benefit of mankind. If these go, we are lost ... They say if we have a Springboks tour, we won’t have a Commonwealth Games — I couldn’t give a damn".
Prime minister Norman Kirk’s decision to stop the 1973 Springboks rugby tour caused an uproar. Organisations supporting the tour threatened "massive retaliation". Rugby Weekly’s front page headline read: "In memory of the grievous harm suffered by a great game at the hands of politicians, international blackmailers and rabble-rousers".
During the 1972 general election, Labour had promised it would not stop the tour. Announcing the abandonment of the tour less than six months later, Kirk said: "I have no doubt that I will be criticised because of the difference in what I said last year, and what I said this year. When it comes to a decision between what I must do in the light of the facts that are put before me in the interest of the country, and a desire to avoid criticism, then I would be failing in my duty if I did not accept the criticism and do what I believe to be right."
Kirk was concerned that if the tour proceeded, African nations would stay away from the 1974 Christchurch Commonwealth Games. He had also received advice from the police that were the tour to proceed, it would engender the greatest eruption of violence this country has ever known. But these were not his major concerns.
Frank Corner, secretary of foreign affairs during Kirk’s prime ministership, has said that "Kirk could see that if he stopped the tour, Labour could lose the next election. But the tour did not fit in with his view of what New Zealand should do in the world, and what its standing would be should it proceed".
It was probably the first time a New Zealand government had sought to change both the way New Zealand viewed itself and the way it wished to present itself to the world.
There would seem to be little doubt that the driving force behind the tour’s abandonment was the prime minister himself. At a Commonwealth finance ministers meeting in Dar es Salaam in September 1973, Bill Rudman was one of a small group of expatriate New Zealanders meeting New Zealand finance minister Bill Rowling. Rudman congratulated Rowling on the government’s decision to stop the Springbok tour. Rowling’s response took Rudman by surprise. That, Rowling said somewhat sniffily, was Mr Kirk’s decision.
Of the four major post-1960 New Zealand battles against apartheid sport — 1973, 1976, 1981 and 1985 — it was the outcome of the 1973 battle which was arguably the most historically significant. It was the cancellation of this tour which heralded the beginning of New Zealand’s gradual shift into a more progressive space.
