The Network: Apartheid

Showing posts with label Apartheid. Show all posts

Saturday, 14 December 2013

POLITICAL FOOTBALL - Australia and its fight against apartheid in 1971 - and what happened in Toowoomba

In 1971, I was chair of an organisation called Citizens Against Apartheid in Toowoomba, Queensland. Toowoomba - an ultra conservative regional city - was to play host to one of the two regional Rugby Union games played by the South African Springboks against Australia's Wallabies.

Our small group had come into being because of Richard Buchhorn, then the National Chaplain of the Catholic youth organisation, the Young Christian Workers. [Below you will find more about Richard in a piece I wrote on The Network four and half years ago.] Richard was and is an ardent campaigner against racism. He had got in touch with a Toowoomba contact he had who passed Richard's interest on to my husband and I and some friends his willingness to come and speak in Toowoomba. This galvanised us into action. We held a debate between Richard and the President of Toowoomba Rugby Union (an old school friend of my husband). It was well attended. It unearthed some surprising supporters and we were off and running. We published some leaflets. But on the day, I was the only one of us available (with my nine month old baby son) to attend.

The story and the drama has best been told in the late Stewart Harris's book Political Football. Because history and time have changed the attitudes to apartheid and racism in sport, and because history of the fight against apartheid is now being resurrected in Australia in the shadow of Nelson Mandela's death - now seems the time to collate my tiny role into one keeping-place.

I have collated the material relevant to my small part in the fight against the Springbok tour in 1971 into the PowerPoint file below. I also had the good fortune (as did Richard) to be at the dinner organised by Meredith Burgmann in her role as President of the NSW Legislative Council. It was rather incredible. All of a sudden - at least so it seemed - we radical leftie types (and we were called worse) were now respectable.

That night at Parliament House we honoured those Wallabies who had taken very great and grave stands against apartheid and apartheid in sport. The money raised that night would send to South Africa the first young Aboriginal Rugby Union team to tour there.

What amazed me that night was the attendance by many who, in another generation, would have vilified me and those doing the sort of thing I did. Now, however, Nelson Mandela himself had become respectable, honoured and revered. I wasn't strong-armed off a football field as Meredith Burgmann was. Neither was my nose bloodied and spread across my face as Brian Tovey's was. All I can say is that I did what I was able to do at the time. It has been yet another lesson in my life that probably the greatest change agent of all is time. Time shows what is true and what is false. Time shows what is worthy and what is venal.

Friday, 6 December 2013

President Obama farewells Nelson Mandela

From Junitta - we are all mourning

From my friend Junitta in Gippsland this morning:

We have lost one of the most remarkable human beings of our time. Nelson Mandela made a huge difference wherever he went and he brought untity and peace to his troubled land, and the peace that still exists is due to him. It was with great sadness that I learnt the news of his Passing this morning.

Att are the words he spoke during his Inaugural Speech in 1994 when he became the first black President of South Africa. These are words of wisdom, words of hope, words that can inspire and uplift us and help us to also shine.

Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Involuntary simplicity - with maximum economic force

I look at this picture and it reminds me of when I supported boycotts against apartheid in South Africa back in the 1970s. I have never been to South Africa but to me it looks like photographs from segregated communities in apartheid South Africa.

The sad, horrible thing is that the photograph above is from 21st century Australia.

The Northern Territory.

Where we stigmatise Aboriginal people.

Where we boss them around.

Where we give them a specific card, a sort of economic passport

which defines status rather like the the pass laws of apartheid South Africa.

And where we sing

Advance Australia Fair.

Aboriginal people have served as a social laboratory for the major political parties of Australia - the Liberal/National Party under John Howard which governed from 1996-2007 and the Australian Labor Party under Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard which has governed Australia since the end of 2007 and now governs by the skin of its teeth in a hung Parliament.

Both sides of the political coin have supported this evil, sinful public policy.

Now this system is to be extended further to urban black people and others dependent on the social security system through Centrelink.

We have become a nation which stigmatises people: Aboriginals, refugees and asylum seekers, the poor. We are forcing people to simply live .... living, to put it simply, in dire and insecure circumstances depriving children of their future and the elderly of meaningful care and support while confusing and placing impositions on everyone else. Then there are those who simply live a sort of death-in-life process because their wounds have meant addiction to grog and drugs or criminal offences which walk them through prison gates.

In all this, successive Australian Governments have played fast and loose with the Racial Discrimination Act which purports to give effect to Australia's responsibilities under The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

We in Australia are hypocrites.

We in Australia are people not to be trusted.

For we Australians, our word is not our bond.