Pitched Battle: In the Frontline of the 1971 Springbok Tour of Australia by Larry Writer

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Ex library copy with no external stickers. Sticky tape on the author synopsis page is now covered with a blank ex libris bookplate sticker. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Sunning to foredges. Interior and binding are still very good.

In 1971, when the racially selected all-white Springbok rugby team toured Australia, we became a nation at war with ourselves.

There was bloodshed as tens of thousands of anti-Apartheid campaigners clashed with governments, police, and rugby fans, who were given free reign to assault protestors. Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared a State of Emergency. Prime Minister William McMahon called the Wallabies who refused to play ‘national disgraces’. Barbed wire ringed the great rugby grounds to stop protestors from invading the field.

Pitched Battle recreates what became of the most rancorous periods in modern Australian history — a time of courage, pain, faith, fanaticism, and political opportunism — which made heroes of the Wallabies who refused to play, played a key role in the later political careers of Peter Beattie, Meredith Burgmann, and Peter Hain, and ultimately contributed to the abandonment of Apartheid. (back cover)