In the early stages of the summer of 1985/86, the Australian selectors were fathoming the Sheffield Shield competition for not just an opening batsman as they are now 40 years later, but pretty much a whole Test team.
Over the winter, The Australian newspaper had broken the story South Africa, then banned from international cricket because of apartheid, had filched the crème de la creams, and coloured clothing, too of Australian cricket, including eventually Kimberley John Hughes, for two rebel tours as they were known.
The audaciousness of the South African raid, which had largely been kept a secret even apparently from the manager of the Australian team, Bob Merriman, who shared the change-rooms with the players, was as breathtaking as it was controversial.
From the Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, up the players were slammed as traitors and racists.
Hawke threatened a heavy tax imposition.
The South Africans were already ahead of Hawke on that. Whatever taxes were imposed, they would cover, leaving the players with $200,000 in their kick for two tours.
And there were the diamonds left in players’ shoes when they visited the appropriately named Kimberley mine.
Hawke also banned South African officials like Dr Ali Bacher, their former Test captain turned administrator, from talking to the Australian media; though it can be recorded one meeting did take place behind the aspidistra in a hotel near Sydney’s Circular Quay.
As Bacher told the aspidistra, it was easy for Australians to be anti-apartheid from their side of the Indian Ocean. On his side, he had been threatened with imprisonment after organising a protest against the South African Government.
While there was some sympathy for all that at what was then the Australian Cricket Board, even from Sir Donald Bradman, the Board imposed three-year bans on the players from Test cricket, but only two from the Sheffield Shield, the two years they would be in South Africa.
After the English High Court decision in 1977, and with an Industrial Relations Commissioner, Bob Merriman, on the Board, the ACB knew restraint of trade in cricket was a real thing.
Needless to say, ACB members, along with their newly installed captain, Allan Border, were peeved, particularly the skipper who had eye-balled the putative rebels and been given a commitment of solidarity.
That peevishness only got worse when Hughes, to whom it had been made clear he had no future in the game in Australia even as a player after his lachrymose resignation as captain, not only sided with the South Africans, but gave an exclusive interview to The Australian newspaper which revealed the one-sidedness of the hitherto top-secret peace deal the ACB has signed with Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket.
According to Tony Greig, quoted in the book written by his son Mark and mother Joycie, Love, War and Cricket, Sir Donald Bradman was ready to agree to anything so long as the ACB kept control of cricket. Kerry Packer went guffawing all the way to the bank.
Despite the hawkish threats and those of bans, the tours went ahead, some players benefitting from the experience beyond their hip-pockets while others like Mike Haysman found a new permanent home in South Africa where he became a commentator and beer importer.
One player to benefit sufficiently to forge a Test career after the year-long ban was Trevor Hohns.
Hitherto, for Queensland, he hadn’t had a wicketkeeper with the skill set of Steve ‘Stumper’ Rixon to tell him exactly where to bowl his leg-spin.
And against Graeme Pollock, even in his 40s still a mighty force, if you didn’t put the ball in the right place, the left-hander had another spot for it t’other side the boundary rope.
Ask Carl Rackemann, who upon taking the new ball halfway through an over, saw the next three balls despatched to three different parts of Newlands, then snatched his terry towelling hat from the umpire and exited stage left to deep fine leg muttering such as “how do you bowl to that”?
Rackemann also returned from the veldt to play for Australia again, as did Terry Alderman, who ran amok for Allan Border’s Australians on the 1989 Ashes tour of England, taking 41 wickets, many times Graham Gooch’s.
As a result, Gooch’s message on his phone went: “I’m not here. I’m probably out . . . lbw, to Terry Alderman.”
Unlike Hohns, Rackemann and Alderman, Hughes did not resume his Test career, retiring after a disappointing season with Western Australia, his valedictory game at a venue far from the MCG or Lord’s, two places where he had taken centre stage.
Such were the lack of facilities at Newcastle Cricket Ground, local lad Gary Gilmour arranged for a caravan to be parked behind the spartan press box. It proved handy for the former Test all-rounder, who was found asleep there after a big night.
Well rested, Gilmour joined the handful of spectators who respectfully applauded Hughes from the ground, all of them poignantly aware whatever had made him one of the most exciting cricketers of his time, “the embodiment of Trumper” as The Guardian’s Paul Fitzpatrick called him for his innings in the Centenary Test at Lord’s in 1980, was gone.
History, and his story, which was the topic of one of the best cricket books of the modern era, Golden Boy by Christian Ryan, reveal a talent not completely fulfilled … in great part because of politics, and not just that of South Africa.
Desperate for an Australian captain from their state, West Australian officials, having realised the selectors would never go for a wicketkeeper as Test captain despite Rod Marsh’s unmistakable claims, pushed Hughes into a candidature for which he wasn’t best suited.
Modern wisdom, reflecting much of that on the eastern side of Australia 40 year ago, is Hughes would have been better left to be ‘the embodiment of Trumper’ batting at five or six for Australia.
Bob Merriman and Greg Chappell were among those who counselled Hughes to let go of the captaincy and concentrate on his cricket but, once back in Western Australia, any thought of such a thing would evaporate in the City Beach heat.
Even unencumbered by the leadership, the West Indians would still have gone after him as they did in 1984/85, but he had already shown as a batsman alone, he could withstand their four fast men of the Apocalypse.
Eventually, too, South Africa returned to the international game, the modern players of the rainbow nation now the Test cricket champions under Temba Bavuma, the first black man to captain the Proteas and who learned the game on the streets of the bleak township of Langa.
Thankfully as is now the modern way in South Africa with people of all hues, his talent was recognised and rewarded with a place in a private school – the great nursery of the old Republic’s team which, at the time it was banned in the early 1970s, was the best in the world.
Led by the strategic Bacher, it had the genius of Pollock G. and Barry Richards in the top six, and Pollock P. and Mike Proctor to open the bowling.
Bacher’s astuteness was evident in many ways, not the least his way of picking the spin of Australia’s so-called mystery spinner, John Gleeson.
Like Jack Iverson, Gleeson used his middle finger to spin the ball both ways, something which had the South Africans mostly guessing.
Bacher’s idea, confirmed by the man himself: put lots of the old Kiwi white on to your batting pads chaps, pad up to the first few balls, and then see which way the dots are turning as the ball came towards you.
Gleeson bowled plenty of overs, and the South Africans to this day still regard him as a high-class bowler, but it was Alan Connolly, who took the most wickets, 20 to Gleeson’s 19, on that 1969/70 tour which South Africa won 4-nil.
Upon his enforced premature retirement Bacher, though qualified as a doctor, took to cricket administration, briefed to keep the game alive in South Africa by no less than Nelson Mandela.
Even while imprisoned on Rodden Island Mandela insisted Bacher must have cricket ready to go when apartheid was over.
Rightly or wrongly, the latter because of the damage they did to the game in the West Indies, England and Australia, the rebel tours were part of that.
In an interview on ABC Radio National’s ‘The Sports Factor’ at the time of the launch of his memoir, for which Nelson Mandela wrote the foreword, Bacher acknowledged the negative impact of the tours, both externally and internally.
But the past could not be changed, the same past which, going all the way back to Krom Hendricks in the 1890,s had denied players of great ability international cricket.
Hendricks was classed as coloured and while he was good enough to run through the best of England in provincial matches, at the insistence of Cecil Rhodes, he was passed over for the Test team.
Four decades on from Kim Hughes et al’s trek to the veldt, much has been forgiven but, hopefully, the injustices from Hendricks through to Basil D’Oliveira and beyond on the cricket field, and the evils of ‘separate development’ off it highlighted by that time, have not been forgotten.
There was and still is a terrible cost to not just sport, but all humanity, through the denial of talent, or opportunity, because of the colour of a person’s skin.
Click on the YouTube link below for the full interview with Dr Ali Bacher on The Sports Factor:
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Good piece Warwick. The Hughes story is indeed a complex one. The younger generation is largely oblivious to the intensity of feeling regarding the divisions during this period in the game. Hughes appears on local radio every weekend in summer here in Perth. I recently did an interview with him – he was the co host – and his charisma is still very apparent.
Thanks Barry, charismatic he is … I always enjoyed his company perhaps, as he often said himself, born at the wrong time. Whatever else is said about him, one thing is undeniable. He could play.