Feature
The remains of the day
by Greg McGee
The occupation of the Waikato stadium guaranteed that the tour would be completed, come hell or high water.
Twenty-five years ago, Mary and I were part of a long column of anti-apartheid protesters marching from the centre of Hamilton out towards Rugby Park. As we neared the ground, one of the protest marshals came back and told us that they were going to try to break into the ground, and if we wanted to be a part of it to come closer to the front I’d already decided I wanted no part of that; I believed in our right to protest, but equally in the spectators’ right to watch the game. Principles aside, after living in Italy around the ’76 election and watching the neo-fascists rallying in one piazza being kept apart from the socialists in the next by carabinieri armed with sub-machine-guns, I couldn’t believe that an occupation of the ground would be achieved without some split heads at the very least.
But the protest leaders walked the column straight past a phalanx of police at the main entrance and, a hundred metres or so later, veered left, ripped out a flimsy wire fence and climbed a small rise that took them onto the embankment at the Tristram St end of the ground. The thinnest of blue lines scarcely impeded their progress. When the ease of the breach was seen, excitement beat reason hands down and we all sprinted for the hole in the fence.
About 300 people scrambled up that rise and charged down the embankment on the other side onto the playing-field. The few policemen at the perimeter fence seemed to redirect their energies to developments on the field, leaving the hole in the fence pretty much unattended. At least another thousand protesters would have got on to the field had a couple of large rugby fans not taken it upon themselves to stem the breach. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of the rise, hurling protesters back from whence they came. The charge lost momentum, the breach was sealed and those on the field were isolated from the rest of us and left to an uncertain fate. The two colossi at the top of the rise were Maori: one of many ironies and paradoxes that defy easy analysis of the political dynamics of the time.
There was a kind of innocence along most of the protester/rugby fan divide. And for all the talk of families divided, the two sides often demonstrated a profound ignorance of each other.
One strength of the protest movement was that it galvanised urban liberals and the “intelligentsia”. One weakness was that many of these people hated rugby: they saw it as the embodiment of a system of values they loathed – rural, misogynist, red-necked and … National. Muldoon had won the last election with a minority vote on the back of the rural marginal electorates. Many of those urban liberals out on the streets protesting felt held to ransom by those rural marginals, by Muldoon and, by extension, rugby.
It’s easy to forget now, when rugby is hip and the corporates buy boxes and the game at the top end is part of the entertainment and celebrity matrix, how truly unfashionable rugby was back then. It was difficult to have aspirations in the arts or indeed to have any pretension to an intellect and also be a rugby player or fan.
At Hamilton that day, while the few hundred protesters occupied the playing-field, we several thousand diverted ourselves and the police by trying to ram sheep and cattle trailers into the back of the main grandstand. When the game was finally called off, the cheer was huge. Tim Shadbolt led the triumphalism on a loud hailer. I cheered with the rest, then had a very disturbing thought – that those 30,000 furious rugby fans would shortly be let out. The meaning of that didn’t seem to occur to anyone else. The protesters seemed blissfully ignorant of what might shortly be descending on us. I grabbed Tim and said something along the lines of “For f---’s sake, let’s get out of here!”
We did, jog-trotting back to our assembly point, men on the outside, women and children on the inner, escorted by a thin blue line of policemen who only just prevented the exiting fans from getting among us. I remember thinking at the time, as I looked at the hate in their eyes, what a desperately ugly bunch of people those angry bastards were. No doubt we looked the same to them, only wimpier.
Mary and I hopped into our A40 Farina and puttered gratefully back to the safety of Auckland. I was sure someone would be killed in Hamilton that night.
No one was. And that, of course, was another irony – that in this peculiarly New Zealand “civil war”, as some commentators have called it, no one died. I wonder if that is partly why ’81 has not gestated any great literature or drama, to date; that two clowns in Auckland came closest to martyrdom.
Page 1 2 
