New Zealand Listener – August 10, 2019

52 LISTENER AUGUST 10 2019

October 1981. The famous

Listener cover at the end of

the Springbok Tour had no

need of a question mark.

The country had torn itself

in two – some friends and

family members irreconcil-

able – over a rugby tour.

The Springboks arrived for

a 56-day, 15-match tour,

despite heated protest that

in accepting a whites-only

rugby team, New Zealand

endorsed South Africa’s race-

based apartheid system.

Anti-tour people wanted

a statement of solidarity

and social justice. Pro-tour

people wanted politics kept

out of sport and revenge for

the past two Springbok-All

Blacks series, which we had

lost. At every game there

were violent protests, police

riot squads with swinging

batons and

barbed wire. Of

course, it was

about so much

more than rugby.

The Muldoon

Government was

hanging on to

power by the slim-

mest of majorities.

By allowing the

tour, it – accurately

• believed it could
  deliver enough electorates
  to scrape another three
  years. It was town against
  country, a new baby-boom
  generation against the
  old, a more liberal, urban
  middle-class against the
  conservative provinces. To
  historian James Belich, it was
  also a case of “contested
  nationalism”. Both sides
  claimed to be representing

the true New

Zealand character,

something picked

up on by Listener

journalists Tony

Reid and Phil

Gifford, writing

about the pivotal

day in Hamilton

on July 25, when

protesters forced

the game against

Waikato to be

abandoned. The crowd’s

fury at the activists invad-

ing “the equivalent of their

living rooms ... was like a

great lump of poisonous

phlegm being cleared from

the national throat. Once

you weren’t a Kiwi if you

did not love rugby ... The

crowd bashed and kicked

its rage that life was now so

incomprehensible that these

the contradiction between

our enthusiasm for material

progress and our worship of

the “scenic wonderland of the

Pacific”. But they were unu-

sual. Few worried about the

fragility of the environment.

Some of the negative effects

of technological progress –

atomic bombs, pollution – had

yet to become fully visible,

and electricity promised a

clean, efficient source of power

that would free people from

the smogs of coal and oil. It

is hardly surprising that for a

people struggling out of the

Depression, economic growth

and technological advances

were unquestioned goods.

Eventually, the contradic-

tion became obvious. The

first significant expression

came in the mid-60s when the

Government agreed to raise

the level of Lake Manapouri

to provide power for a new

aluminium smelter. The “Save

Manapouri” campaign was

launched and its petition in

1970 gained 260,000 signa-

tures, the largest up to that

point in New Zealand history.

A widely supported conser-

vation movement emerged,

which over the next few dec-

ades led to the end of logging

native trees, concerted efforts

to save endangered birds, the

establishment of the Ministry

Springbok tour

protesters should also claim
to be patriotic New Zealand-
ers.” John Minto, a leader of
Halt All Racist Tours (Hart),
now says the most profound
legacy was not the change in
attitude to South Africa, but
BRU to ourselves.

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