Pitched Battle: in the frontline of the 1971 Springbok tour of Australia

A vivid story of the men and women who took a stand when sport mixed with politics.

In 1971, when the racially selected all-white Springbok rugby team toured Australia, it became a nation at war with itself. 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 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 ultimately made heroes of the seven Wallabies who refused to play, played a key role in the later political careers of Peter Beattie, Meredith Burgmann, and Peter Hain, and ultimately led to the abandonment of apartheid.
See more