Tom Scott's and Danny Mulheron's excellent television movie Rage, screened on Sunday night, brought it all flooding back.
Well, not exactly. Some of us, ancient enough to have done so, experienced the 1981 tour vicariously - through television reports, newspapers and, later, the odd documentary.
And I, for one, was glad of that. The confrontation and conflict, the violence, the friend-on-friend encounters, the families split down the middle, the lovers on either side of the divide ... it's easy enough to romanticise it now, render it safe in fiction, but it actually happened and by all accounts at times it got pretty ugly.
The clashes, the baton hits, the emotional trauma resulting from the protests against the ill-fated Springboks tour of that year, which brought the country to the brink if not of civil war then sectarian strife, were real. Rugby was our religion back then. There were those for it and those agin. Believers and pagans.
I had certainly worshipped at its altar. Spent university years on the rugby field, had team-mates who pulled on the black jersey. So I would not have found it easy to eyeball them across the barricades.
Mind you, I did have the example of my old coach Bob Burgess, who came out against South African tours at a cost to his own career, to hang on to.
And when it came to it, I eventually found the gall of Robert Muldoon, manipulating events to favour his party's electoral prospects that year, too much to stomach.
We went out on to the streets in London to protest his arrival at a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Relatively painless and ostensibly without consequence it was, so I for one don't take a great deal of stock, or righteous indignation, in who was for and who was against it all back then.
I'm minded of this because I think it was Scott I heard discussing just this with broadcaster Kim Hill the other day. Was Prime Minister John Key for or against the tour?
Apparently he does not recall, which, Scott was suggesting, was a little hard to believe.
And he's probably right. Not that Mr Key would be alone in such a curious memory lapse. It's hard to find anyone who was pro-tour these days, Scott added.
It's all past history now. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd been here and out on the streets. I might have felt I'd earned the privilege of pointing fingers. And anyway, isn't it a good thing if people's memory's have elided their support for a tour - and thus a morally bankrupt regime - that was plain and simply wrong?
It's a tacit admission of just this. They have evidently, if subconsciously, come to accept it. In showing its overwhelming distaste, not to say outright opposition, the country proved to be on the right side of history. Muldoon and his more fanatic supporters weren't: end of story.
Thirty years on, it is an immeasurably more mature culture that hosts the biggest sporting event it is ever likely to see. It's promising to be a "tour" to remember, one like no other. And one that will hopefully find all New Zealanders united - if not in their support or passion for rugby, then in the opportunity to play the gracious host.
For rugby's only going to be one - albeit important - part of it. Already the streets of Dunedin are chirping and trilling to the sounds of foreign accents.
It may come to seem as if the whole world has arrived on our shores.
Most New Zealanders are travellers, have at some stage or other visited other countries, sometimes at length and others at leisure. But they also love to show off the virtues and beauties of their own country.
By tournament's end, Otago will have hosted teams and supporters from Argentina, England, Ireland, Scotland, Georgia, Romania and Italy and probably streams of other associated visitors who, having travelled to this side of the world, will not want to leave without seeing the South.
For gregarious and generous-minded Kiwis the next few weeks offer unprecedented opportunity to turn on a warm welcome. I'm looking forward to it. The sport, if we can just manage not to get too hung up about it, should be a terrific bonus.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
