‘At 2.40pm Patu charged. A human tank. The first time during the tour that a protest squad charged police lines with the intention of breaking through . . .’ The Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981 provoked the biggest mass protests in New Zealand history. For two months tens of thousands of New Zealanders took to the streets every week to register their opposition to the tour. In When the Tour Came to Auckland, Geoff Chapple, author of 1981: The Tour, describes the dramatic events in Auckland as a light aircraft flour-bombed Eden Park and protesters battled police in the streets of Mt Eden in the tour’s violent conclusion. Includes a new introduction prepared especially for this BWB Text by Geoff Chapple.

Leading New Zealand anti-apartheid campaigner Trevor Richards has written this history of New Zealand's contribution to the fight against racism and apartheid in South Africa. The story of the protests is vividly told - but it is not an account of one man's battle against the system - "it is a serious history of a crucial part of our recent past."

It's 1981 and the New Zealand is about to host the Springboks from South Africa for a national rugby tour. A well-supported protest movement pitches against a national of die-hard rugby supporters. Despite growing public protest, the Government and Rugby Union are adamant the tour will proceed. Beth returns from London. Her World War 2 veteran father is a rugby fanatic, her brother becomes a protestor embroiled in street violence. She studied law and meets Viktor who, unknown to her, is a member of the notorious Police Red Squad. What will happen to their polarised relationship in a country where the very survival of civil order is at risk? In this fast-paced novel, the nuances and tensions of the infamous 1981 Springbok Tour are probed and laid bare.

Forty years ago, a South African rugby tour in the United States became a crucial turning point for the nation’s burgeoning protests against apartheid and a test of American foreign policy. In Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement, Derek Charles Catsam tells the fascinating story of the Springbok’s 1981 US tour and its impact on the country’s anti-apartheid struggle. The US lagged well behind the rest of the Western world when it came to addressing the vexing question of South Africa’s racial policies, but the rugby tour changed all that. Those who had been a part of the country’s tiny anti-apartheid struggle for decades used the visit from one of white South Africa’s most cherished institutions to mobilize against both apartheid sport and the South African regime more broadly. Protestors met the South African team at airports, chanted outside their hotels, and courted arrests at matches, which ranged from the bizarre to the laughable, with organizers going to incredible lengths to keep their locations secret. In telling the story of how a sport little appreciated in the United States nonetheless became ground zero for the nation’s growing anti-apartheid movement, Flashpoint serves as a poignant reminder that sports and politics have always been closely intertwined.