Hawke, Packer and ‘Supercat’: Cricket’s secret Kirribilli meeting and the end of apartheid

In early 1985, Bob Hawke hosted two guests at Kirribilli House in Sydney. One was Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer. The other was the soon-to-retire West Indies captain, Clive Lloyd.

Packer and Hawke wanted the bespectacled Lloyd, nicknamed “Supercat”, to become the supremo of Australian cricket. Lloyd would coach and select the national team that had in recent times been repeatedly beaten by his powerful Caribbean side, and had just come to be led by Allan Border.

“When I was retiring, the two of them came together and wanted me to be involved with Australian cricket. We discussed all the finer points of what we wanted to do and what they wanted to do,” Lloyd, now 80, says. “Because Australians are very passionate about their cricket and their sport for that matter.

Part of the rebel team to tour South Africa: (from left) Rodney Hogg, Mick Taylor, Ali Bacher, Graham Yallop, and Rod McCurdy.Credit: Michael Rayner

“Our cricket was rising and flourishing, and they wanted the same thing to happen to their cricket. So it would’ve been quite something to be involved.

“But the West Indies wanted me to be involved too. If I had taken up that job it would’ve been quite interesting, because they were flying my family out and looking after me properly. Life sometimes doesn’t end up the way you want it to.”

Hawke and Lloyd had been friends ever since they had been introduced by the Chappell brothers a decade before. They shared a passion for cricket, an understanding of leadership and diplomacy, and a fierce opposition to apartheid in South Africa.

And it is impossible to understand Hawke’s commitment to ending apartheid without knowing of his friendship with Lloyd, his love of cricket, and how the breaking news of an Australian “rebel tour” to South Africa in April 1985 would trigger Hawke’s government to push for more substantial global action against the regime.

The fact that Hawke and Packer wanted to put Australian cricket in the hands of a West Indian made the tour of apartheid South Africa by rebel Australian cricketers all the more shocking – and politically charged. This month marks 40 years since news of that tour came to light, with huge ramifications not just for cricket in this country, but for the fight against the apartheid system.

What the tour achieved in Australia was to put the South African issue squarely on the front page for months, pushing Hawke, his foreign minister Bill Hayden and the federal government as a whole to broaden their opposition to apartheid, while encouraging other countries to do the same.

Watching Australians join rebel tours to South Africa gave Allan Border a harder edge.Credit: Glenn Hunt

South Africa was a hot global topic. The band Queen were disparaged for touring there in 1984; the riposte of other musicians was the all-star international hit Sun City, in which the singers, including Bono, Bob Dylan, the group Run-DMC and many others, vowed they weren’t going to play at that South African entertainment destination.

South Africa had been formally excluded from representative sport by the Gleneagles Agreement between Commonwealth countries in 1977, and a global ban followed in 1985. It had been uninvited from the Olympics as early as 1964.

Many of the players who took part in the rebel tour argued at the time, and for years since, that by going to South Africa – and wearing a three-year playing ban for doing so – they helped to bring apartheid to an end.

“If you talk to Kim Hughes, Rodney Hogg or John Dyson, they would say their tour helped the end of apartheid,” says Geoff Lawson, who was part of the 1985 Ashes tour. “They would say that and be quite adamant. ‘We were a part of the end of apartheid because we played against diverse teams, and they missed top-level sport. We were bringing it back, and to do it properly they had to end apartheid’. That would be their argument.”

For the Australian Cricket Board (now Cricket Australia), the saga was emblematic of a loss of control that had begun when Packer hijacked the world’s best players in 1977 for two years of World Series Cricket, then struck a highly favourable peace deal with the board.

Kim Hughes with South African rebel tours organiser Ali Bacher at the Wanderers Ground, Johannesburg, in 1985.Credit: AP

When the rebel tour became public knowledge in April 1985, Packer pre-emptively signed some younger players, including Steve Waugh and Dean Jones, to keep them in the fold. He then persuaded Wayne Phillips, Graeme Wood and Dirk Wellham to break their rebel contracts by matching their $US200,000 fee – to the chagrin of the Australian Cricket Board, which protested he had done so “without any reference to the board’s Test selectors”.

Packer’s actions also caused ructions within the team.

Border and Lawson felt compelled to interrogate Phillips, Wood and Wellham in a hostile meeting at their hotel in Melbourne, the day before the 1985 Ashes touring squad left for the UK. Harsh words were exchanged and tears shed over questions like “does Kerry Packer own” the Test team?

“You had this distinction between the players who didn’t take rebel money, went on the tour and got paid sod-all, and the other guys who had taken the rebel money, got told to go on the tour and still got paid bigger money,” Lawson recalls, shaking his head.

“We took a couple of them into another room and asked them some questions about, ‘Are you loyal to the Australian cricket team?’ They’re stupid questions, really, in hindsight. The playing group was particularly poorly prepared for such meetings and conversations, and I don’t think the outcome pleased many people at all.”

The fallout carried on for years. Border was never approached, but has admitted that, if asked, he would have thought long and hard about touring.

Geoff Lawson in 1986.Credit: Bruce Milton Miller

“We were told many, many times in previous years that if you go to South Africa you’ll be banned for life,” Border says. “And that didn’t happen, did it?”

Border had poured his heart out to his new team during a one-day tournament in Sharjah in the UAE in early 1985 without knowing that many of them were going to South Africa. The episode caused Border to lose a great deal of trust, some naivety – and a lot of his team. “Up to that point we were a pretty competitive team. Then all of a sudden you lose [Rodney] Hogg, [Carl] Rackemann, [Terry] Alderman – there’s 40 wickets he would’ve taken in England probably – and a host of other younger batsmen, Steve Smith, Mike Haysman, who we lost from our system because they went to South Africa.

“I can’t say I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it gives you a harder edge to the way you play, and it makes you enjoy the good moments more.”

Among the rebel players, there was the terrible sense of sand shifting beneath their feet, as exemplified by how rebel fast bowler Rod McCurdy confronted his state teammate “Flipper” Phillips about backing away from touring South Africa due to Packer’s inducement.

“G’day Flipper, what are you doing to us?” McCurdy recounted asking in a statutory declaration for a 1985 Victorian Supreme Court action by the ACB against the South African Cricket Union that was ultimately settled.

“I had an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

“Who from, Packer?”

“Yes, the big boss.”

“What about the blokes who put their careers and families on the line?”

“Well you have to look after yourself. I hope the tour of South Africa goes ahead, I am trying to help try and find replacements.”

“How are you going to look these blokes in the eye when you play against them next year?”

“Ah well, that’s the way it goes, every man for himself.”

Kim Hughes, who had resigned as Test captain after five successive losses to the West Indies, initially rebuffed South African approaches. But when his omission from the Ashes squad was followed by word that Wood, Wellham and Phillips had been paid by Packer to stay at home, Hughes lost what little commitment to establishment cricket he had left.

“He could have played Test cricket for another couple of years for sure,” Border says. “The captaincy was just a part of the equation really. But that was a sad scenario where he got overlooked for the Ashes tour.

“I suppose in his own mind he wasn’t all that enamoured with the ACB, and then they all got paid $US200,000 to go to South Africa. He’s just been dropped from the Australian side, so what do you do? You take it.”

Hawke, Hayden and federal sports minister John Brown all fired off plenty of verbal rounds at the rebel tourists, the trip’s organiser Bruce Francis (who played three Tests for Australia in 1972) and the South African authorities.

“It would be shameful if reports that a team of rebel Australian cricketers was preparing to visit South Africa turned out to be true,” Hawke said in parliamentary question time on April 16.

“Notwithstanding the very considerable financial rewards which it is alleged are associated with this offer, I earnestly request any Australian cricketers who are contemplating accepting such an offer to think about the principles involved.

“I ask them to think about the comfort that they would give to a racist regime by accepting that offer. I ask them to think about the plight of blacks in South Africa. I ask them to think about the reputations of themselves and of their country and to reject any offers they may have received.”

Clive Lloyd remembers Hawke as a staunch opponent of apartheid, in much the same way as political leaders in the Caribbean were.

“[Hawke] was very serious about apartheid,” Lloyd says. “And even when we were playing for Kerry Packer, I think we had a [contract] clause put in there by Mr [Michael] Manley, the then prime minister of Jamaica, that Kerry would not take the guys who were signed up to South Africa.

“It was quite obvious how serious a lot of Commonwealth countries were about it, and guys were ostracised for going.”

There were, of course, accusations of hypocrisy about questioning the rights of cricketers to play in South Africa while economic and trade relations continued to flow with Australia. No less an authority on cricket than Sir Donald Bradman took this view.

Clive Lloyd, Bob Hawke and Kim Hughes. Credit: National Archives

“Of course the whole thing hinges on dirty rotten politics,” Bradman wrote to his friend Peter Brough in May 1985. “Our government freely trades with South Africa and it is total hypocrisy for them to prevent sporting contacts. The ‘black’ countries will never agree to re-admit South Africa and the final answer is a total split between the blacks and the whites.”

Well-briefed by South African rebel tours organiser Ali Bacher and Francis, Hughes felt he was on a mission for cricket, and somehow even for humanity.

“I am going to South Africa with an open, and I hope, intelligent mind,” Hughes told a press conference after he joined the tour. “I believe I have the ability to judge right and wrong. I also believe I will be able to comment and suggest ways the situation can be improved.”

In July 1985, Packer met with South African Cricket Union principals Geoff Dakin and Joe Pamensky to complain that they were “poaching players that he wanted for the Australian team”, and warned Dakin: “Listen fella, you’re maybe a rooster today, but tomorrow you’re a feather duster!”

Though Hawke publicly deflected accusations of double-standards, the sting of those kinds of words was evident in cabinet discussions – in particular the work of Hayden in foreign affairs.

On August 19, with the Ashes series in full swing, a cabinet submission on Australian relations with South Africa was intended “to spread the burden of anti-apartheid measures more widely within the community.”

Here was a major shift from the policy outlined in the 1983 cabinet papers, in which sporting boycotts were emphasised, but punitive economic measures were only to be considered if agreed to “by the United Nations Security Council and implemented by South Africa’s major trading partners”.

Because of the August review, Hawke went to that year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the Bahamas with a clear vision for the gradual escalation of economic measures against South Africa. Those measures would kick in after the visit of an “eminent persons group” to the republic, led by Hawke’s predecessor Malcolm Fraser.

Significantly, Fraser’s group was permitted to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, where he famously asked whether Bradman was still alive. However, the group did not achieve any progress in the removal of apartheid, thereby opening the way for harsher tactics.

Neither Margaret Thatcher’s Britain nor Ronald Reagan’s United States wished to impose sanctions on South Africa, but the momentum started in Nassau would grow over the next couple of years. Reagan was, in fact, overruled by the US Congress, which voted to pass a range of economic strictures on South Africa in 1986. Hawke then met in 1987 in Vancouver with Commonwealth leaders and Australian-American banker Jim Wolfensohn (later head of the World Bank) to work through a plan to turn off the tap of international capital flowing into South Africa.

That restriction on capital flows left the South African government with little choice but to choose drastic reform.

The rebels made two tours of South Africa, after which Alderman, Trevor Hohns and Rackemann returned to Australian ranks when their bans expired. Greg Shipperd went on to a long and distinguished career as a coach. Others like McCurdy and Haysman stayed on in South Africa, while Mick Taylor, the youngest member of the squad, eventually served on the Cricket Victoria board.

South Africa was changing. Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, and visited Australia in October. The nation rejoined world cricket, touring India in November 1991, and playing at the 1992 World Cup. Led by Kepler Wessels, the South Africans qualified for the semi-finals a few days before a whites-only referendum at home overwhelmingly backed abolishing apartheid.

Lloyd, meanwhile, retains great admiration for Hawke, Packer and also Mandela. He visited South Africa in 1992 as a match referee.

“I went to see Mandela after apartheid ended with Ali Bacher, and when we were approaching him, I’ll never forget he said, ‘Ah, here is a sportsman that I know,’” Lloyd recalls. “And that was quite something, because here was a man who had been incarcerated for many years, and he’s saying he knows who I am.”

Even so, Lloyd has ruminated more than once on what life would have been like had he become the man in charge of Australian cricket, as championed by Hawke and Packer that summer day at Kirribilli House. The ACB gently rebuffed Hawke’s suggestion, but those conversations led ultimately to Bob Simpson becoming Australia’s first full-time coach, the start of the national cricket academy, and the beginnings of sustained success.

“I really thought it was a missed opportunity because there were so many things I could have learned,” Lloyd says. “I’m sure, being backed by those two great men, it couldn’t go wrong.”

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