Kerre Woodham: Memories of a dreadful day

Twenty-five years ago, I was standing on the embankment at Rugby Park, watching the curtain-raiser before the Waikato rugby team met the touring Springboks. I was in the fifth form at Sacred Heart College, and a number of us from school had decided to go to the game.

We knew that by buying tickets we were putting ourselves firmly into the pro-tour camp. We'd had long discussions about it in the classroom and the playground - a couple of girls were anti-tour and were planning to march against it; most of us thought the tour shouldn't have happened in the first place, but now that it was under way, well, hell, it should be good rugby, and a couple were pro-tour and anti-protester. How much our views were influenced by the households we were living in is hard to say.

Very few people liked Muldoon, but the protest movement leaders were alarming. Passion and fervour were alien to the Waikato psyche at the time unless it involved a rolling maul and Shield game. Besides, these people weren't just marching to help the blacks in South Africa. Many were fed up with Muldoon's New Zealand - a patriarchal, rugby-obsessed society intolerant of minorities and diversity. To march was to say you rejected your country.

We were teenagers. We thought we knew everything, and we thought we were well able to make our own decisions. So there we were, waiting for the game to start.

The atmosphere was wired - and that's not just with the benefit of hindsight. We knew something was going to happen - but we had no idea what, and as it transpired, the anti-tour marchers heading towards the ground had no clear plan as to what to do on arrival, either.

A few of the boys were scoffing that the protesters had been scared off. Then we heard the chanting as the marchers came up Tristram St, and in a way it was a relief that the waiting was over. They came right up to the fence where we were standing, and for a few minutes, members of the opposing groups shouted at each other. And then, incredibly and in what seemed like seconds, a group of protesters tore down the fence and made it on to the field.

The capacity crowd booed them and settled back to open another bottle of Waikato Draught while the police got rid of the interlopers. That's when things turned farcical, then nasty. The police trotted round in formation, looking more like a marching team than coppers. I'm not sure if there was a ground announcement, but the news spread quickly that the protesters had strewn tacks over Rugby Park, and even when they were removed from the field, the game wouldn't proceed. The crowd turned ugly. The booing got more virulent, and then, as the police finally managed to round up the small group of people in the middle of the ground and herd them, like fearful sheep, towards a narrow exit at the far corner of the ground, men gathered to pelt the do-gooding spoilsports with bottles and abuse. No polystyrene cups in those days. Then everyone went home.

The wide streets of Hamilton were deserted, but everywhere there were signs of a society in conflict. There were broken shop windows, burning piles of rubbish in the streets, discarded placards and forgotten scarves in Waikato colours - it looked like the sort of image you only used to see on the television.

It was a dreadful day, and it was the day a debate about how change could be brought about in South Africa turned into a crisis about the future of the very society in which we were living.