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This post is part of a series remembering the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Masked protestors lead an anti-tour protest in 1981

‘July 22nd, Day of Shame, Rugby Union is to blame!’ The old chant still pops into my head every now and then when this date comes around on the calendar. Through the 30 years since the Springbok Tour I have read and heard a variety of accounts, with the emphasis generally on the national trauma our country went through during that season of chaos. I feel compelled to write as someone who was energised rather than traumatised by their involvement in the anti-tour protests.

A true provincial, I grew up in the blandness of suburban Stoke, Nelson, among a family of mechanics. I remember the joy of watching the 1974 Commonwealth Games, with its brilliant array of athletes from newly independent Africa and the Caribbean. Following on from the ‘friendly games’, we had the rise of Muldoon. Soon we had the All Black Tour to South Africa in 1976, playing rugby while kids were shot in the streets of Soweto. That tour lead to New Zealand’s international shame as the cause of the African boycott of the Montreal Olympics. The generation who watched these events as teenagers were the ones who stood on either side of the lines in 1981.

In 1981 I was a 19-year-old lad in his first year studying zoology at Canterbury University. I traded sunny Nelson for the excitement of the big city of Christchurch and the big world of tertiary education. Before leaving Nelson I had become involved with a group of environmental and peace activists, who also began to organise anti-tour activities. On arrival at Canterbury University everything went up a notch. There was a strong and quite militant anti-tour movement on campus. There was also a strong and vocal, but smaller, pro-tour group, centred around the Engineering School. Student meetings were lively and well-attended; abuse flowed freely. Despite the volatile situation, I still had plenty of mates in the opposing camp.

In town itself the feud crossed over into other realms. The boot boys and rastas, who had regular punch ups at this time, also took sides on the tour. We knew to always remove our HART badges before going into a pub if we wanted to walk out unscathed. It was a time of many narrow escapes from violence, including my own dash out of a dairy to a waiting car, pursued by several rather angry rugby-heads with pro-Tour badges.

Once the tour actually started, there was a march on the day of every game; that was every Wednesday and every Saturday. The Saturday marches were always followed by a do at varsity, put on by the anti-tour club, where invariably the songs played included ‘Police on my back’, ‘I fought the law’, and ‘No depression in New Zealand.’

The first march, 22nd of July – the day of the Gisborne game – was designated the Day of Shame. The sequence was wrapped up with the final game, the Auckland test, held on the anniversary of Steve Biko’s death: 12th September, the Day of Rage. While we took the whole business very seriously, marches were also, in the early days at least, great social occasions.

Even with the events at Hamilton and the batoning at Molesworth Street, many of us in Christchurch had yet to comprehend the scale of the violence going on. That all changed two nights before the Christchurch test, when the Red Squad appeared, blocking a night march. There were no batons drawn that evening, but the sight of the faceless storm troopers blocking the street brought home the reality of events to the crowd. The response was anger rather than intimidation, though that night ended peacefully.

It was a different story that Saturday, with merry mayhem all around Lancaster Park, followed by night raids to try and wake the Springboks. Days of running on adrenalin and working with large groups of people in a common cause were a heady experience for a young provincial hick. Where else could you quickly learn the optimum number of people needed to tear down a security fence, or how to manufacture paint bombs from hollowed-out eggs?

In Christchurch the umbrella group, Coalition Against the Tour, had a lot of students and varied lefties involved in it, but the most significant organisers were from the churches. Catholics were particularly strongly represented, with the organiser being Mary Baker, a staunch Catholic activist and mother of the later-to-be-famous athletes Erin and Phillipa Baker. Speaking of Catholics, I also remember sitting with a couple of nuns watching the news coverage of the riots in Auckland at the third test. As the crowd drove the police away with flying missiles, both nuns broke let loose cheers of triumph.

At the end of it all the ‘boks went home and we were left with a feeling of anti-climax. Yet I do not remember anyone in the anti-apartheid movement at that time seeing the tour as a defeat.

On reflection, there was a lot of naivety to our approach. Most of us had only a vague idea of the racism within New Zealand itself. And young tearaways such as myself had little idea of the trauma faced by people whose jobs or lives were threatened due to their role in the movement. For those who made a stand outside the main centres, the odds were even more stacked against them. These people were some of the real heroes of the movement.

I continue to believe that disrupting the rugby, the national religion of New Zealand and apartheid South Africa, was the most direct way we show support for the South African struggle. I think this even though, while living in Otago I rejoined the faith and now watch rugby on a semi-regular basis.

It is clear now that the tour was as much about a culture clash within New Zealand as it was about racism overseas. Yet, while it may have been a long dark night of the soul for the nation, for some of us young activists it was an exhilarating experience. For me, that time was one of purpose, where I saw things that changed forever the way I view power in this country.

This post is part of a series remembering the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Poetry Day 2011

Today is National Poetry Day in New Zealand. Today is also the 30th anniversary of the first game of the 1981 Springbok Tour. That first game in Gisborne was the beginning of 56 days of protest, violent clashes between protesters, supporters and police, and division in communities and even families.

Not that I remember that much about it – I was seven. But it seems to me that afterwards this enormous country-wide experience wasn’t much talked about in society at large – or at least not around me. But I think that’s changing, and more people are able to look at what happened in context, see what it meant for the country, and examine the many different threads that led to this sort-of civil war.

Protestors and police at the Hamilton game, 25 July 1981

In commemoration of the tour we’re planning a series of blog posts from a variety of people looking at what happened or sharing their personal memories. For a good overview of the tour, check out NZHistory.net.nz’s coverage, which includes an interactive map of the games and what happened at them.

And, because it’s National Poetry Day afterall, I’m going to kick it all off (pun intended) with a poem that I wrote not long after the 20th anniversary of the tour. At the time I worked at the National Library, which is on Molesworth Street in Wellington, site of the infamous Battle of Molesworth Street.

Memories of the civil war

When the Springboks came
we were six or seven or eight.
I didn’t know much
about that
but I knew all about
the Royal Wedding.

Karen says
that she was probably
making veils for her
friend’s Barbie. They’d play weddings
‘But don’t worry,
we’d always drown her afterwards.’

I was in standard one
and my friend Catherine
was English and had the
same haircut as Lady Di. In class we
wrote stories about royal visits
but not about riots in
the streets of Wellington.

Brian was fifteen
and lived in the Waikato.
‘We were very pro-tour and pro-rugby.’
He begins to explain how
it was the last straw
for the Kiwi blokes
who’d recently been
told they were racist and
sexist and now
they couldn’t even watch the footy.

I think we must have watched
one game on television, because
I remember my South African mother
saying she wanted the Springboks to win.
I remember some other kid
telling me that his mum said
South Africans were bad. Most kids
just said ‘Your mum can’t be South African –
she’s not black!’

Joeli says she remembers being
scared, but she hadn’t been
back long from Iran, escaping
during the revolution. Loud noises
still terrified her.

We’re watching footage on the television
twenty years later. There’s a riot and
I can see the building
where I work.
I had no idea
what was going on
outside my window.

(Source: Helen Rickerby, Abstract internal furniture. Wellington: HeadworX, 2001)

Homosexual law reform was what it was called, and it was also the name of the act of Parliament, but it was also an amendment to the Crimes Act 1961, sections 141 (indecency between males) and 142 (sodomy). To the lesbian and gay communities of the time – and the lesbian community played as much of a role in overturning the law as did the gay male community – those clauses criminalising male same-sex activity (female same-sex activity was not similarly criminalised) were themselves an offence.

They were also out of step with the spirit of the age. Politically minded adults in 1986 had been active over the preceding 20 years in the peace movement, the environmental movement, the anti-racism movement, the women’s movement and the gay-rights movement itself. Such people didn’t need to be convinced that the law needed to be changed.

People march in support of homosexual law reform

The election of a Labour government in July 1984, with a leadership a generation younger than that of the outgoing government – 43-year-old David Lange replaced 63-year-old Robert Muldoon as prime minister – made the time auspicious.

The United Kingdom had decriminalised in 1967, Canada in 1969 and many US and Australian states and territories in the 1970s and early 1980s. And it was possible to point to many countries which had a long history of tolerance – Japan, France, Italy and the Netherlands, for example.

On the other side of the ledger there was the ‘let sleeping dogs lie argument’. Gay men in the late 1970s and early 1980s did not conduct their lives expecting at any minute to be arrested. I know this because I was one of them. The real stress, everyone understood, came not from fear of the police, but in dealings with family, friends and workmates, and for lesbians as much as for gay men. ‘Coming out’ stories were the stock in trade of getting to know another gay person and the questions were always the same: ‘Does your family know?’, ‘How many of your friends know?’, ‘Does anyone at your work know?’

So what would happen if law reform became a real possibility? It didn’t take long to find out. As soon as MP Fran Wilde announced her intention of introducing the bill into Parliament – in March 1985 – a tsunami of invective, outrage and anger filled the airwaves, the letters to the editor pages, and the mail bags of members of Parliament.

In an irony, which has since become familiar but at the time was not, it was the opponents of law reform, disgusted though they claimed to be about the whole notion of male-to-male sex, who seemed unable to talk of anything else. Homosexual men were not people; they were sex machines, and predatory, proselytising ones at that. To the observer it was puzzling that an activity that was so appalling could nonetheless be so seductive that the slenderest of exposures to it could lead a youth astray. Now we have a name for this mindset – homophobia – then we did not, or only just.

The onset of AIDS, a barely understood and terrifying disease at that time, added fuel to the fire. Not only were gay men indecent, they were bearers of contagion – never mind that they were also its victims.

In retrospect, the outpouring was cathartic. After that first wave of anger and hatred debate started to take place and slowly the middle ground shifted.

What middle ground? Lesbians and gay men did not need to be convinced that change was justified or overdue; the most vocal of their adversaries would never be convinced. It was those in the middle, who had never reflected on the matter, but who were probably prejudiced in an unthinking way, who shifted.

This is not to underplay the heroic efforts of the law reform campaigners, who demonstrated, lobbied and argued month after month. Without them there would have been no change at all. But someone had to be convinced and it was this middle ground that was.

In a fashion very much similar to the debate over the South African rugby tour four years earlier – but at even greater speed – dinner tables, kitchens, staff rooms, even classrooms were witness to heated arguments.

From my own recollection the vanguard in these arguments, which happened in my family as in so many others, was taken by women. It was women who ‘called out’ their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons, all of whom generally felt more awkward and even more vulnerable with the issue. I don’t recollect there being lots of discussions amongst fellows at pubs, but when those men returned home and made the mistake of voicing a prejudice – ‘We don’t want a bunch of fags thinking they can drink with us’ – then the sparks flew.

This is of course not to say that all women were liberal and all men were conservative, but there was a gender dynamic in the debate. And maybe no surprise in that. After all law reform was in part about the right to love – men – and most women turned out to grasp that better than most men.

I was in Parliament the night the bill passed (the decriminalisation part; the human rights part had to wait another seven years) in July 1986, some 16 months, several million spoken words, hundreds of thousands of written words and hundreds of kilometres walked on demonstrations and protests, since that announcement by Fran Wilde in March 1985. The atmosphere was electric and the voting, as is well known, close. MPs were aware that the public mood had shifted – but how far, they wondered.

Many of those who voted against decriminalisation were not opposed to it (most indeed would have probably accepted an 18 years old limit - Wilde and her supporters rightly held out for 16). But they were spooked by the venom of the opposition and the likely effect at the next election of being seen to favour ‘immorality’.

That said, the night of 9 July 1986 was also a demonstration of the best side of democratic politics - accomplishing change through a blend of reason, passion and commitment.

New Zealand is a much different – and better – place for lesbians and gay men in 2011 than it was in 1986, and that means it has to be better for everyone else – if I don’t have rights, you lose out too. There are still struggles to be fought for lesbian and gay, not to mention bisexual and transgender rights, particularly in high schools and some churches. And many other struggles doubtless, where principles must dive into politics and take on prejudice.

The struggle for homosexual law reform, March 1985 to July 1986, which triggered social transformation as well as political change, is a reminder that it can be worth the effort.

At morning tea Te Ara staff were discussing the tragic case of Venessa Green, who was tragically hit and killed by a bus while crossing Wellington’s Willis Street the week before last. The morning paper showed a photo of a sign that may have blocked her view of the street. In bitter irony, it featured an image of a bus with the warning ‘Buses Coming this Way’.

Some of us wondered why she could not have crossed at the pedestrian crossing barely 10 metres away. We then agreed that jaywalking was a New Zealand cultural trait that even the most fervent traffic engineer had little hope of shifting. That’s not to say they haven’t tried. One my favourite Te Ara clips is from a 1952 government road-safety film attempting to stop jaywalking. ‘Jay’ is early 20th century slang for a stupid person, which the film plays up to the full.

Wellington is, according to a recent newspaper article, the jaywalking capital of New Zealand. And I have to confess I’m a totally unreformed jaywalker and will blithely cross streets within sight of pedestrian crossings. This is partly because I’m lazy and can’t be bothered treading the few extra metres, but it is also, I like to think, a small public protest against the pre-eminence of the car. For a few brief seconds I can ‘reclaim’ the street for those it was originally intended for: pedestrians.

Corner of Cuba and Manners streets in Wellington, around 1920, when cars had taken streets from pedestrians

As I discovered while researching the Te Ara Street life entry, the motor vehicle’s dominance of city streets is barely a century old. Before then the street was a shared space, where vehicular traffic had to travel at walking pace and negotiate around pedestrians, not the other way round. But with the growth of motor traffic in the 1920s, pedestrians were officially sidelined to footpaths and encouraged to cross streets at particular places, at particular times.

That many pedestrians continue to jaywalk perhaps suggests there is a hidden impulse in our ‘urban DNA’ that resists such constraints being placed on our passage through cities. (Having had free reign of city streets for millennia this impulse decreed it was not going to surrender that right for the sake of a mere machine.)

Urban DNA or not, some city planners have finally recognised that privileging motor traffic over pedestrians is a sure-fire way to kill city life. Since the early 2000s cities such as Auckland and Wellington have been trying to introduce ‘shared spaces’ – where, as before, vehicular traffic and pedestrians share the street. Proposals in Elliot Street in Auckland, and lower Cuba Street in Wellington, are currently coming to fruition. It is my hope that these will prove successful and lead to further shared spaces, eventually taking in the likes of Willis Street, making it safer for all.

Ripeka Evans and Basil Keane check out the new e-book

This blog post is also available in Māori (Kei roto hoki i te reo Māori te Rātaki nei)

The theme of Māori Language Week this year is ‘Manaakitanga’. At Te Ara we decided that one way we could ‘Manaaki’ others was by making our great Māori language resources from Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB) available as an e-book, and so we have published all the biographies of renowned Māori in te reo Māori. This new e-book can be downloaded from: http://www.mch.govt.nz/news-events/news/ng%C4%81-t%C4%81ngata-taumata-rau-1869-1960.

The publication, Ngā Tāngata Taumata Rau, 1879-1960, comprises close to 500 biographies, all in Māori. For a reader of Māori the content is a joy to read due to the excellence of the translators involved, including Tairongo Amoamo, Te Pōroa Malcolm, Pou Temara, Merimeri Penfold, Wiremu Kaa, and Rangi McGarvey. We have been fortunate at Te Ara to have Rangi McGarvey continue on as a Māori language expert with oversight of our Māori-language content.

As the proverb goes, Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi - With your basket and my basket, the people will prosper. Members of design team, Julia Vodanovich and Heath Sadlier, designed the cover, which evokes the original covers. The most important role was played by our resident tech wizard, David Turton, who was able to download all the files from our database to be transferred to the e-book.

For me this project was a great way to kick off my new position as director, Māori digital projects. I’ve already got Ngā Tāngata Taumata Rau, 1769-1960 on my Kindle and plan to read one biography a day until I’ve gone through the lot (which should take about a year and a half).

The other thing worth observing is that this format provides a great opportunity for our rangatahi (youth) to access te reo content. Increasingly the current generation, which has been described as ‘net natives’ due to the fact that they have grown up surrounded by technology, access content through portable devices the majority of which have some form of e-reader. So it’s an ideal platform to look to develop our te reo content on. Hopefully this will be the first of many.