In 1971 the South African Rugby league team was scheduled to tour Australia and were on their way to Brisbane as part of the tour.  But well before that, a movement against the pro-apartheid National Government of South Africa, that had been in power since the end of the second world war.

Protesters gathered outside the Tower Mill Hotel where the South African team was staying, demanding an end to apartheid and an end to the tour, but then Premier Joh Belkie-Peterson moved the game from Ballymore to the Exhibition Grounds, declared a state of emergency that would last a month and brutally cracked down on protesters, including reassigning 600 rural police to quell the protests.

The tour did end up going ahead, but it marked an early point in a campaign of international pressure on the Nationalists and turned a spotlight on the abuses of the Belkie-Peterson Government.

This is the topic of one of the panels at the Brisbane Writers Festival this year, Political Football, the radical history of the Anti-apartheid protests in Brisbane, on the 50th anniversary of the event.

Alexis Pink interviews Anthony Abrahams, former Australian Rugby player and the lead voice in the sport at the time for severing sporting ties with apartheid South Africa.

[Photo courtesy of the Brisbane Writers Festival]