Joh also told Police Union president Ron Edington he’d fix the cops’ pay rise – which was currently before the industrial court – and they’d get a superannuation fund.
Outside the South Africans’ hotel in Brisbane, 600 police met 400 protesters.
‘The police took Joh at his word,’ recalls one protester. ‘They went apeshit on the slope below the Tower Mill, removing their badges and clobbering anyone within reach. Any respect I had for the QPS went out the window that day. They were a bunch of out-of-control thugs.’
Can you describe the mood in the state at the time? Bjelke-Petersen bussing in hundreds of cops from all over the state. Batons. Horses.
‘It was very, very nasty, because Joh represented the very worst of the principles that underlay apartheid,’ says Hawke.
Do you feel like you, with the ACTU, changed a lot of people’s minds about apartheid?
‘I’m sure we changed a lot of minds,’ says Hawke.
South Africa’s cricket team were scheduled to tour later in the year, the summer of ’71/’72. The chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, Don Bradman – a man whose legend would make any Australian weak at the joints – got in contact with Hawke and told him they should have a private meeting. The implication was this wouldn’t be a discussion about the rights and wrongs of apartheid so much as a personal request for Hawke to keep the union dogs on a leash.
Hawke flew to Adelaide and cabbed it to the Don’s house in Kensington Park. Bradman told Hawke he didn’t believe politics should intrude on sport and that the tour should proceed.
And I said, “That’s my point entirely,”’ says Hawke. ‘It wasn’t us; it was this government in South Africa that intruded politics into sport by saying that no non-white person had the right to represent the country.’
How did Bradman react?
‘Don thought for a moment and he looked at me and he said, “Bob, I haven’t got an answer to that.” There is no answer. They introduced politics into sport, not the other way around.’
Cricket talk between the interviewer and Hawke ensues. Did you ask Bradman for tips on your stance? How to emulate his famous drive?
Soon, we fall down a hole of bawdy cricket jokes involving the English fast bowler Fred Trueman and the racism inherent in British society in the fifties, as well as a couple celebrating the physical superiority of West Indian cricketers.
First, Hawke on Trueman.
‘Freddie hated batsmen and he was a racist bastard and he particularly hated black batsmen. And there was this black batsman who went on to get a hundred and fifty. And Freddie was getting madder and madder, and Colin Cowdrey told me Freddie bowled a perfect ball, an out-swinger, and it went straight through Cowdrey’s legs and to the boundary for four…’
Hawke switches to the voice of Colin Cowdrey, mimicking the well-rounded Oxford accent.
‘At the end of the over I went up to Freddie and I said, “Oh, Freddie, at the very least I should’ve kept my legs together.” Freddie gave the immortal answer: “Not thee, lad, thy fookin’ mother!”’
In the final of the just-created, one-day-format Gillette Cup, Freddie’s Yorkshire team faced Northampton.
‘Northampton had more coloured players than any other side,’ says Hawke. ‘And Yorkshire were batting and it was getting pretty tight and Freddie came in to bat. The field crowded around and Freddie took block and just as the bowler was about to start his run-up, Freddie said, “Hold it, ump! If these black bastards don’t piss off I’ll appeal against the fookin’ light! ”’
I ask him if he ever met Trueman.
Hawke hoots. ‘I played against him!’
What was it like to face the demon himself?
‘I was twelfth man that day against Yorkshire,’ he says, with what might be sheepishness. ‘We took him out that night and got him pissed. He didn’t bowl very well the next day.’
‘Do you remember Joel Garner?’ asks Hawke.
Also known as Big Bird?
‘Yeah. This girl, this cricket groupie, used to follow Joel Garner. They were playing a test match at the Sydney Cricket Ground and at the end of the day, the cricketers were coming out and this groupie lady looked up at Mr Garner and said, Mr Garner, are you built in proportion?
‘And he said …’ Hawke suddenly animates as the Barbadosborn Garner. ‘Ma’am, if I was built in proportion I’d be eight foot ten!’
‘The other story,’ says Hawke, ‘was Garner and his captain. They were walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge at night and they stopped to have a piss. The captain looks at Joel and says, Geez, it’s cold, isn’t it?And Joel says, And deep too!’
You don’t hear gags like that anymore, at least not in polite company. And the way Hawke tells a gag, the convincing impersonations, his timing building to an uproarious finale, guarantees unexpected snorts of laughter.
But back to apartheid.
What was the most surprising thing that came out of that Springbok tour?
‘Just how divided the Australian people were. A large number of the Australian people were good and decent, rejected the concept, but we had to face the fact that there was a strong element of racism in the country.’
Do you believe Australia is particularly racist or do you think there’s an element of racism in every country?
‘Every country’s got an element of it. We’re seeing that now all around the world.’
What do you make of Pauline Hanson’s re-emergence?
‘I’m disappointed, and particularly in a situation where the Senate is so mixed up. It gives these minor parties considerable political influence. I’m very sad to see her back on the scene.’
How would you react if you were prime minister and you saw her walking through the House?
‘I’d be civil to her, but I would not be extending any hand of friendship.’
It’s an ironic twist of fate that Hawke was only alive to help squash apartheid because a white South African cricketer, Roy McLean, saved his life twenty years earlier.
It was the summer of’ 52/’53 and Rhodes Scholar Hawke had six months to kill before he sailed for England. In the uni term he tutored students in economics. During the Christmas break he worked as an assistant to the University of Western Australia’s gardener.
‘I had this very dignified job of taking round a horse and cart loaded with horse shit and spreading it on the roses,’ he says. ‘I went back and loaded it up again and then said, “Come on,” but the horse wouldn’t move, so I got out and went round the front to pull it out and it bolted, and the shaft of the cart ripped open the inside of my right thigh. There was blood pouring out and I collapsed onto the side of the cricket oval. It just happened that the South Africans had arrived and were playing an opening game against the Governor’s XI on James Oval. I collapsed on the side of the oval and Roy McLean, marvellous batsman, he raced over to me; he had these strong hands, and he just held my thigh together. Otherwise I would have bled to death.’
Four decades later, when Australia and South Africa resumed official test matches, Hawke was invited to South Africa to speak to a gathering of officials and former cricketers.
‘Perhaps some of you would like to do something about Roy McLean for saving my life,’ cheeky Hawke said.
To which one Boer responded, ‘My bloody oath I would.’
Once you were in government, did it become a great resolve to hit apartheid?
‘Yes, it did become a great resolve. From the beginning. And the instrument in my hand, obviously, was the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.’
(A side note. In meetings, Hawke says, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe would make the ‘right noises’ about apartheid,
‘but they were meaningless. He had his own form of apartheid in the way he treated white people. It had been an extraordinarily productive country and it just went downhill under him.’)
‘My first CHOGM was in 1983. That was in India and I was the new boy, but it soon emerged that I was a leader of the push against apartheid,’ says Hawke. ‘The next meeting was 1985 in the Bahamas, and we set up the Eminent Persons Group. There were [trade] sanctions, we tried sanctions on… I said to them in 1987, in Vancouver, “Look, sanctions aren’t working. They’re too easily avoided.’”
Hawke says he told the other leaders that the only way to effect any sort of real change was to hurt the South African government financially. Hawke called the internationally renowned investment banker and economist Jim Wolfensohn, who would later become president of the World Bank.
‘I rang Jim and he immediately got on a plane and flew to Vancouver. I introduced my idea and he said, “I think it can work.” And I said, “If I provide the top people from my treasury, will you work with them and formally get it going?” He said, “Yes, I’d love to.’”
There were concerns for Wolfensohn’s safety when you were setting up the financial sanctions, weren’t there?
‘Yes, but that was a risk he was prepared to take,’ says Hawke.
Were those threats real?
‘It wasn’t unknown for the South African regime to assassinate people.’
A robust opponent of the anti-apartheid measures among the Commonwealth heads was the Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
‘She didn’t like the concept of interfering in the political affairs of another country,’ says Hawke.
Hawke’s buddy in the White House, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t much help either. He vetoed a bill in Congress to impose sanctions on South Africa, writing in his diary, ‘It isn’t a solution to the problem of apartheid and it will hurt the very blacks we’re trying to help.’
Meanwhile, sixteen of Australia’s best cricketers signed lucrative deals to tour South Africa in ’85/’86 and ’86/’87, both ‘rebel’ tours led by the former Australian skipper Kim Hughes. Hawke called the players ‘traitors’.
In 1985, world champion surfer Tom Carroll refused to surf in South Africa’s three international surfing events ‘until black surfers are allowed on all beaches’. Carroll was sponsored by the South African company Instinct, which he claims threatened him with a lawsuit if he didn’t compete.
Hawke heard about the threat, called Carroll and invited him to Canberra, where he told the surfer that if his sponsor went legal he had the weight of the Australian government behind him.
‘I was really welcomed by Bob. It was a nice feeling to have that support from him,’ says Carroll, who didn’t lean either way politically and admits he was initially inclined to distrust any politician courting the youth vote. ‘I had some strange responses to my decision. All kinds of people went a bit crazy about it. But he was genuine, very interested, and he asked all these really good questions about the tour and competing and where I’d been and even brought up some results. He read his brief very well.’
When Nelson Mandela came to Australia, Hawke introduced him to Carroll.
‘I remember Bob telling him, in his frank way, “Nelson, this was the world champion surfer at the time and he made the decision to boycott the events in South Africa.” Gave him the whole story. Mandela turned around to me and said, “Thank you very much, Tom. I needed all the help I could get.” Bob facilitated that. It was a lovely moment between the three of us. It gives me goosebumps now.’
At Carroll’s retirement dinner in 1995, Hawke would say, ‘His beliefs, his principles, were so strong that he put those in front of everything else, and as I recall there has been no example in the history of Australian sport where a champion has been prepared to put principles so manifestly in front of his or her own interests as Tom Carroll did in 1985.’
By the 1989 CHOGM in Kuala Lumpur, it was clear the sanctions were helping to turn the screws. The South African economy was shrinking. The following year, apartheid’s last head of state, F.W. de Klerk, released Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison, also lifting his government’s ban on Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC).
In 1990, the Investor Responsibility Research Center in Washington estimated sanctions had cost South Africa between US$15 and $27 billion.
In the same year, the South African Minister for Finance, Barend du Plessis said financial sanctions were ‘the dagger that finally immobilised apartheid’.
‘The whole process was self-reinforcing in a way that trade sanctions never were and never could have been,’ said Gareth Evans in his Nelson Mandela Day address in 2012.
Every new financial institution in some part of the world refusing credit, or setting tougher terms, increased the risk for other suppliers still in the field. By 1990 the denial of access to new international capital was dramatically and comprehensively strangling the economy. South Africa could fund internally growth of no more than 2 per cent a year, but it needed to grow at least 4 per cent or more to create jobs for its expanding population and to maintain existing standards of living. If nothing had changed, the country would have exploded.
So Australia was, I believe, a prominent and effective international voice on the anti-apartheid issue over many years. The sports boycott conceived and led by Australia was psychologically important in creating a sense of isolation and vulnerability, and the financial sanctions – in their fullest application again a significantly Australian initiative – were profoundly practically important in their economic and ultimately endgame political impact.
I ask Hawke for his thoughts on South Africa post-apartheid. A country with one of the most unequal distributions of wealth and employment in the world, with 47 per cent of its citizens living on less than US$43 a month. The burning anti-immigrant sentiment. The hate crimes against foreigners. The farm invasions and torture of whites – seventy attacks in the first few months of 2017 alone, including twenty-five murders. A nation that may not have state-sanctioned racism, thanks to leaders like Hawke, but one that is as riven as ever by disunity, mistrust and fear.
‘It’s a terrible, terrible disappointment,’ says Hawke. ‘We had such a giant of a man as their first leader in Mandela … It’s a tragedy that Mandela wasn’t able to ensure better succession.’
Have you ever wept for South Africa, Mr Hawke?
‘Internally, I weep, yes. Very much so.’
— CHAPTER 12 —
GARETH EVANS
THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY IS SPREAD OVER 348 hectares of low-slung, bush-wrapped buildings in its own corner of the capital. Student or passer-by, you can wander into any number of lectures at a uni rated among the twenty best in the world.
Early for my meeting with the university’s chancellor, Gareth Evans, AC – Hawke’s first attorney-general and later his Nobel Peace Prize-nominated foreign minister – I just miss the wonderfully obscure ‘A Japanese Moment in the Globalisation of Contemporary Chinese Art’ but briefly catch a session on John Stuart Mill’s 1869 essay ‘The Subjection of Women’, joining an audience busy swiping smartphones and pecking at laptops.
The nearby chancellery building is illuminated by shafts of soft light, the sun filtered by a phalanx of gum trees. Five Fred Ward chairs and accompanying tables fill the waiting room. (Ward, if you didn’t know, is the Australian interior designer responsible for the ANU’s sober mid-century style, the use of wood and subtle curves suggesting a university not given to fads or gaudy grandeur.) And perhaps because of Gareth’s famous exactness (a secret CIA report from 1988 describes him as ‘a brilliant but arrogant and impatient foreign minister’), every moment in the building plays as if by script. I walk through the two sets of automatic doors and am immediately greeted by a uniformed security guard who politely recites my name and the time of my meeting. Without my having to ask, a parking pass is presented.
Before I can lower my body int
o one of the high-backed Wards, the security guard rushes over to sweep me up to the third floor. Here, I’m deposited into a smaller waiting room, near the office that serves the chancellor two days a week.
The chancellor’s secretary appears and plays a captivating little game of What is this? with a dagger-like artefact from French Polynesia, a present from Gareth, that sits on the corner of her desk.
‘Is it a miniature of a ceremonial knife used for human sacrifice?’ I hazard.
‘No.’
‘Is it the fang from an exotic animal?’
‘Well, it is ivory, unfortunately. But no.’
Reveal. It’s an ear-piercing device! Rest point on lobe. Bang!
On cue, in stomps the chancellor, slightly breathless after having flown in from Melbourne and taken breakfast with Jean-David Levitte, a former French presidential adviser and ambassador to the United Nations, and Evans’ negotiating partner in the 1991 Cambodian Peace Process. He grabs my hand, apologises for taking me through the ‘tradesman’s entrance’, and seats me at a large round table that fills half the office.
Now seventy-three, Evans was the Oxford graduate who came into the Hawke government as its thirty-nine-year-old attorney-general before quickly being demoted to Trade and Resources. Between 1988 and 1996, he was the country’s celebrated foreign minister. Even in the dying days of the Hawke government in 1991, Evans kept his caucus vote behind his doomed master.
Evans is tall – ‘six foot two and shrinking’ – wears a tailored blue pinstriped suit, a fifties vintage gold IWC watch, and a red-and-white-striped tie from Nuremberg, where he’s just returned from a human rights jury. He carries a dossier of notes on, coincidentally, Bob Hawke, for an upcoming memoir, his thirteenth book.
He slides into a chair, a vast belly threatening the tenacity of buttons four, five and six on his crisp white shirt, and asks a few questions about the motivation behind my book.
Evans then clasps his hands behind his head, and says: ‘Go.’