John Minto, founder of HART, 50 years ago this week.
John Minto, founder of HART, 50 years ago this week.
Last week marked 50 years since the formation of HART and this anniversary will have had special resonance for Hawke's Bay folk with longish memories.
It should also offer lessons for the climate change activists of today.
HART, an acronym for Halt All Racist Tours, was set up to opposesporting contacts with South Africa which was then ruled by a white minority under a policy they called "apartheid", which roughly translates "separation".
My Hawke's Bay family were committed All Black supporters, following every game on scratchy radio broadcasts and featuring a double page picture of the team from the Sports Post on our living room wall in Outram Rd.
At one time, I knew the team's names by heart and can still dimly recall a list that started "D B Clark, I J Clark".
This all changed with the 1960 All Black Tour of South Africa when the New Zealand Rugby Union bowed to South African demands and sent a team excluding Māori.
My mother was utterly incensed. She was proud of the fact that New Zealand didn't have what she called a "colour-bar" and our best friends were a Māori family, also called Williams who lived in the same street.
Climate change activists of today remind Mike Williams of the HART people of half a century ago.
We'd met up when our letters kept getting mixed up by the short-sighted postman.
The disgust of people like my parents must have got through to the New Zealand Rugby Union because the no Māori rule was finally deemed unacceptable for the 1970 All Black tour of South Africa, and the tour proceeded with Māori members of the team deemed "honorary whites".
By this time HART had been formed and had spawned an opposing organisation seeking to "keep politics out of sport" named the War Against Recreational Disruption or WARD.
This was based in Hawke's Bay and led by real estate agent Bob Fenton.
By this time, I'd left Hawke's Bay to start a degree at Victoria University in Wellington and was pleased and not surprised to learn that my mother had started a Hastings branch of HART and had invited HART co-founder Trevor Richards to an inaugural meeting.
She convened meetings, organised vigils, mounted demonstrations and formed a circle of writers who bombarded the Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune and the Napier Daily Telegraph with letters to the editor.
At this time there was a battle of ideas in the Bay. Pro and anti sporting contacts with South Africa groups squared off against each other and passionately held opinions often divided families.
Disaster struck the Hawke's Bay HART movement in 1975 when WARD founder Bob Fenton defeated the one term Labour MP Richard Mayson and became the National MP for Hastings.
My mother was incandescent at this outcome and redoubled her activism over the next three years. She saw the result as a triumph for racism in her own country.
It's probable that Richard Mayson was felled by a country-wide swing against the Bill Rowling Labour Government, and compared with other results from provincial cities, Mayson had done rather well as Bob Fenton's majority was under 500 votes and the seat remained marginal.
This was the Muldoon landslide election and it later became clear that Muldoon himself credited the sporting contacts issue at least partly for his success when he doggedly defended a highly divisive Springbok tour of New Zealand in 1981.
In 1978, the new Labour Party candidate for Hastings, David Butcher, a schoolfriend of mine, asked me to manage his election campaign and, having had quite enough of what the English call a summer, I was happy to accept his invitation.
On election day, Social Credit candidate and later mayor of Hastings, Jeremy Dwyer, stripped a large chunk of Bob Fenton's vote away in Havelock North and David Butcher won the seat he was to hold for 12 years by just over 300 votes.
I met Bob Fenton only on election night when he came to concede defeat. He was a gentleman and gracious in defeat - but his cause was also defeated on that night.
My mother carried on with her war on apartheid and next year organised a demonstration at (the now demolished) Nelson Park against Canadian softballers who'd played against a South African team.
I had to calm proceedings when a softball fan saw Mum's placard: "Don't Play with Apartheid".
Looking at it he said, "I play with whoever I like, missus" to which she replied, "Mostly yourself by the look of you".
The anti-apartheid movement finally triumphed when South Africa became a full democracy in 1994. Mum lived to see this.
The climate change activists of today look a lot like the HART people of half a century ago. They face an even bigger international challenge and will again have to work to defeat the politicians that undermine or oppose their cause.
