When Australian workers struck against apartheid
Few things can match the feeling of hope generated by the sight of millions on the streets of Italy demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine. With a general strike at its heart, with industry after industry shut down, it gave a glimpse of the usually latent power of the working class.
While there have not been similar scenes in Australia recently, there is nevertheless a history of mass political strikes against apartheid regimes here. The target was South Africa, an anti-apartheid action reaching a high point in mid-1971, when the all-white South African Springbok rugby team toured Australia.
The tour was fully supported and aided by the Australian government. Initially, 85 percent of the population were in favour of it and only 7 percent opposed.
Yet by the tour’s end, more than one-third had come around to opposing the government maintaining sporting ties with South Africa. The cricket tour of South Africa scheduled for the following year was cancelled, the chair of the cricket board explicitly saying, “We will not play them [South Africa] until they choose a team on a non-racist basis”. That position held right up until apartheid formally ended in 1994. Bold working-class action, with the left taking the lead, was integral to bringing about this shift.
The campaign against the apartheid team received unprecedented union support. The long campaign against the Vietnam War had legitimated political strikes amongst a wider layer of workers. As a result, more union activists had some experience of working with student radicals and were less likely to dismiss them as “long-haired ratbags”. The level of strike action in general had surged, raising working-class confidence and combativity.
This shift in mood began to affect even the conservative upper echelons of the trade union bureaucracy. While the ACTU had refused to support strike action against the Vietnam War, its moderate leader, Bob Hawke, now initiated action against the Springbok tour, urging unions to “take whatever action is necessary as an act of conscience to obstruct the tour”. It took off.
Transport union members, especially Qantas staff, refused to carry the Springboks. Liquor and hospitality workers and Miscellaneous Workers Union members made sure drink supplies were cut off from hotels that allowed them to stay. Laundry workers refused to wash their clothes, and their mail deliveries were stopped. Maritime workers delayed ships carrying South African goods, and the entire Melbourne port was shut down by strike action for a week.
Union opposition even included a one-day general strike in Queensland on 21 July. Forty unions took part in the action. The issue that galvanised them was the month-long state of emergency declared by the state’s far right Bjelke-Petersen government on 14 July. This was ostensibly to bring in hundreds of extra police and take over the well-fortified Brisbane Exhibition oval for the games. Ballymore Oval, the traditional Brisbane home of rugby union, needed extra facilities built to accommodate the expected crowds, and the unions would not cooperate.
Bob Anderson, an Aboriginal man and a communist, was an organiser in Brisbane with the Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU) at the time. He gives a wonderful account of persuading building workers not to build facilities for the tour:
“There was a big team of plumbers working, installing temporary urinals, wash troughs and things like that. So I had a discussion with them, and said ‘the union policy is that we’re against apartheid, we’re not supporting the playing of this game here’, and I explained what it is to be black in your own country, and the workers said: ‘Well, if that’s the case, let them piss on the ground’ and walked off.”
The Amalgamated Meat Industry Employees Union banned the transport of police horses to the Brisbane demonstrations. Workers at the Alice Street workshop of the Department of Public Works let the union know they had received an order to make 500 extra-large riot batons for the police. Bob Anderson and BWIU president Hughie Hamilton went to argue with the workers not to make them. Union policy prevailed and the damage the cops could inflict, while still brutal, was somewhat minimised.
Then maintenance workers at the exhibition grounds struck, refusing to work while the police cadets were there putting up barbed wire around the oval. The fence itself then remained in place for a month as unionists refused to take it down. As their letter in response to a request to do so put it: “The coppers put the fucking fence up, the coppers can pull the fucking fence down”.
There was a reinforcing effect between the defiant mood amongst important groups of workers and the militant student protests. Outrage at police violence deployed against a largely student protest outside the Springboks’ motel led to a packed meeting at the University of Queensland the following day. Dan O’Neill, a lecturer in the English department argued: “We can no longer beat the ... tour and fight racism in the streets ... The only way is ... to bring the industrial system to a halt”. To cries of “Strike now!” 3,000 staff and students voted to stop work and turn the campus over to anti-racist agitation.
When Nelson Mandela visited Australia in 1990, a few months after his release from 27 years of imprisonment, he made special mention of the power of union solidarity:
“It was the labour movement of this country, in the early ’50s, the dockworkers in this country, who refused to unload South African ships ... which gave the people of South Africa in their struggle a lot of strength, and a lot of hope. It was difficult to understand how workers, thousands of miles from our shores, could take the initiative, the lead, among the workers of the world to pledge their solidarity with the people of South Africa. The feeling that we are not alone, that we have millions of workers behind us.” That legacy of working-class internationalism is one we have to continue to build on today.
