TV: Terrible winter when adolescence was lost

By GILBERT WONG

Police officer Patrick Wilson was a member of Blue Squad. His brother opposed the 1981 Springbok tour. On Saturdays Wilson would pack his groin protector, helmet, baton and padding, while his brother packed his lifejacket, trench coat and motorcycle helmet.

One brother saw his responsibility as being to enforce the law - allowing the tour to proceed; the other to stop it through serious civil disobedience.

Their mother saw them off. Wilson recalls in this documentary that she would urge her boys not to hit each other if they should meet up on the winter streets. Then she would go to mass.

Wilson does not need to say what she was praying for. Thus it was so for many households throughout that terrible winter of discontent.

On July 19 this year, it will have been 20 years since the arrival of the touring Springbok team that woke a sleepy nation from its comfy assumptions about race relations and made all too real its potential for near-murderous mob violence.

It's hard to convey the impact upon the country to those who were too young to recall it, or who were overseas. It's even harder with Super 12 on our screens every weekend and the near-canonisation of Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

The 1981 tour has been the subject of documentaries and news retrospectives before, but these have tended to focus on the well-known protagonists, the Blazeys, Mintos and Meurants. This documentary turns to the impact on ordinary people who weren't the subject of headlines in an attempt to show how deep the fissures ran.

Hone Ngata, a Gisborne social worker who was anti-tour, recalls crying, because as a protester he was denied entry to his marae when it hosted the official welcome for the Springboks.

Nurse Joan-Mary Heffernan feared for her life as angry rugby fans tried to drag an injured woman from her makeshift ambulance after the Waikato match was halted by protesters. Tour supporter David Sparks raised a flagstaff in his garden and flew the flag each day.

Even after 20 years the footage of the protest action and police reaction, the clashes between rugby supporters and protesters, retain the power to shock.

What New Zealanders saw on television news and on the front pages of the newspapers each weekend had the same impact as footage of the carnage of the Vietnam War had had on Americans.

The political issues that lay at the tour's heart could not be ignored, though paradoxically they often had to be for the sake of family and workplace peace.

The police, some in the documentary contend, would never regain their position of trust in the community. That other institution, rugby union, found its place at the forefront of the national consciousness crumbling fast. The Muldoon Government would topple, and in its place grew a widespread sense of cynicism towards politicians. The media, not for the first time, but more strongly than before, found itself blamed for the message.

Ordinary New Zealanders were forced to shed their customary polite reticence and address a political issue that would have repercussions for our own state of race relations. But perhaps, most troubling of all, the tour tapped a seam of latent violence that lay only lightly buried in far too many of us.

Most graphically the documentary replays the scenes of outright battle that overtook the leafy suburban streets of Mt Eden following the third and final test. The sickening thunk of baton against flesh; the clatter of police and protester shields, the howls of rage, the screams of terror and pain. It is too horrible to forget. It was the winter New Zealand left adolescence behind.

1981: A Country at War

TV One, 8.30 pm, Monday