Exhibition opens wounds of 1981 Springbok tour

Twenty years ago Springbok tour protesters managed to stop a match in Hamilton. The curator of a Waikato Museum exhibition finds feelings still run high, writes MICHELE HEWITSON.

On wednesday night at the Waikato Museum an unlikely group of people will find themselves in the same room chatting over canapes. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable: the idea that rugby union representatives, rugby union fans and Springbok Tour protesters could have gathered without the Riot Squad holding a line between them.

Add to the cast list two Hamilton City councillors, one who on that day 20 years ago was linking arms with fellow protesters and one who was head of security at Rugby Park, and John Minto, the then organiser of anti-tour group Hart, and you have the makings of a get-together that might make its organiser ever-so-slightly nervous.

Because on July 25, 1981, these assorted players in a drama titled, depending which side you were on, Black Day of Rugby History or Batons and Barbed Wire, were taking up their respective positions, making the final adjustments to their costumes, going through a last run of their lines. Possibly the only thing the two disparate groups had in common was that nobody knew how the play was going to end.

The rugby supporters hoped, of course, that when the final whistle blew, the Waikato side would have achieved a win over the Springbok side - one that had all the lustre of its historic 1956 victory. The protesters hoped they would manage to stop the game - with as little damage to its people as possible.

At 1.50 pm 2000 protesters swarmed down Mill St and into Tristram St. Armed with wire cutters they charged and cut their way through the 2.5m wire-netting fence. Demonstrators made their way through the fence, on to a field and into a scene that had become, wrote the New Zealand Herald's D. J. Cameron, like "some obscene colosseum."

It was a spectacle that held, at least until the game was officially called off at 3.10 pm, some semblance of entertainment for a thwarted rugby crowd.

" ... Two squadrons of police, batons swinging free, riot helmets glinting dully and so sinisterly Orwellian," wrote Cameron.

In the news reports of the day there is a sense of disbelief at the scenes unfolding. How to describe the unimaginable: police and protesters alike attacked; a van with a seriously injured protester inside being rocked violently by angry game-goers who, denied a game, found another to play; a crowd baying for blood and calling for the police to "stop the bloody ballet. Use your batons."

It would no longer ever be just a game.

And so 20 years on to the day, Let the Game(s) Begin opens at the Waikato Museum. Lynette Williams, curator of history, is its ever-so-slightly nervous curator. Nervous, she says, because it became apparent while researching an exhibition that focuses on that "black day" that those involved still feel strongly about what happened in Hamilton on July 25, 1981.

"What I've really been struck by," she says, "is the intensity of people's feelings still. I've found very few people who have said, 'Hey, we've moved on."'

When she put out a public appeal for memorabilia she was interested in not only the bits and pieces that families have kept in cardboard boxes in the spare room or hanging in the garage, but in their memories of the time - and their responses 20 years on.

One woman, a rugby supporter, turned up to talk and began by telling Williams, "Oh, no. I'm not still angry about that." By the time she left an hour later, Williams says, "she was quite stirred up again."

She met two middle-class, middle-aged women from opposite sides of the fence who had the same thing to say about that day: "I was terrified of the protesters/rugby supporters."

Williams thought: "I wish you two could hear each other."

The memorabilia people have kept reveals the depth of feeling. There is no intrinsic value, for example, in a now rag-like Hart T-shirt that was spat on; a much-dented bike helmet that could never be worn again; a ticket to the game that never was kept by a woman whose husband ripped his up in disgust.

There was a real sense, says Williams, that "straight away people saw the significance; that they were in an act of history [even] as it was happening." And it is a part of our history, says Williams, who was protesting in Invercargill at the time, "that was cataclysmic, really."

She will be watching with as much interest as anyone at the opening to see how her exhibition is viewed. "I don't think those feelings have died. I think it will arouse passion."

People, particularly those from the anti-tour side, saw their memorabilia as badges of honour - much in the same way that Williams says they regarded their arrests as badges of honour. They had been through a war and people who have been through wars are often compelled to keep reminders of how hard the battle was.

Museums have long collected the tools of war: in Let the Game(s) Begin those tools include tacks thrown on to Rugby Park and the halved tennis balls used to deliver them. There is also, courtesy of the Waikato Rugby Union, a stuffed Springbok head in the form of the trophy awarded to the team in 1956. And a boot from Roger Litt of the 1981 team: "The boot he was going to kick the winning goal with," says Williams.

It's a trick of history, of course, that the boot that never took the field is now as worthy of a place in an exhibition as it would have been had it been the one that had indeed kicked the winning goal.

* Let the Game(s) Begin is at the Waikato Museum from July 25 until October 14