What’s in a game?

Apartheid would smell as sweet

If Rugby be thy name.

In his almost-haiku New Zealand Rugby Union, poet Hone Tuwhare reimagines the most famous lines from the balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, lines 45–46) for contemporary Aotearoa of the early 1970s. It’s a clever swap, given Shakespeare’s play is about the sectarian Capulet and Montague families, whose mutual hatred for one another ultimately leads to the young lovers’ untimely deaths. Penned in 1973, Tuwhare’s political poem reflects the growing social consciousness of New Zealanders, responding to newly instated Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk’s controversial postponement of the South African Springboks’ rugby tour, in spite of his election-year promises that he would do no such thing. In Kirk’s 1973 letter to the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, he included a report stating: “it is the considered police view that the tour would engender the greatest eruption of violence this country has ever known.”[01] Almost a decade later these words proved prophetic, when the 1981 Springbok tour divided the nation for 56 days in one of the largest civil disturbances in our modern history, with more than 150,000 people taking part in over 200 demonstrations in 28 centres and a subsequent 1,500 charged with offences stemming from these protests.[02]

Ralph Hotere’s (Te Aupōuri) painting What’s in a Game? looks back from the vantage point of 1988, utilising his friend’s poem to evoke the anger and tragedy that characterised the times, even echoing the catchy, satirical language common in protest chants and on placards to this day. Written in a combination of bold stencilled lettering and looping freehand scrawl, Hotere’s transcription of the poem onto canvas similarly recalls the improvisational aesthetics of protest materials. Describing Hotere’s practice of taking lines from the poems of friends such as Tuwhare and Bill Manhire, writer Vincent O’Sullivan highlights that these works were not collaborations, explaining that “the words became the painting, the painting as entirely Hotere’s as if he had taken an object in a room and let its associations ring for him.”[03]

In What’s in a Game? the associations between Tuwhare’s wry poem and Hotere’s patterning don’t so much ring as clamour: one direct message chimes clear, but there are echoes, overtones and undertones adding richness while also disorienting the listener. Above the lines of poetry, taking up the majority of the vast unstretched canvas is the abbreviation “NZ” emblazoned twice, letters stacked on top of each other, thick black strokes over a garish orange-red ground, recalling the logos or numbers often branded on sports jerseys. However, on the second line, “NZ” has been corrupted, flipped upside down and around, two simple transformations with the haunting result of creating a pattern that evokes the formational lines of both the Union Jack and the Nazi swastika. Once noticed, it is hard to disentangle the three symbols from one another, to see one without simultaneously seeing the other, so Hotere visually implies the inextricability of these three ideologies: colonialism begets fascism begets nationalism begets colonialism, around and around they go.

Hotere returned to the Black Union Jack many times over the years, often accompanied by scrawled text asking, “Union Jack? A Black Union Jack?” or else boldly stating, “This is a Black Union Jack”. O’Sullivan hones in on the blackness of Hotere’s Union Jack motif, describing it as “the flag of imperialism leached of its colour and so its emblematic harmony.”[04] Without colour, the ‘unity’ symbolised by the flag is distorted, the historic significance of each hue and shape lost or diminished to the point of futility. In What’s in a Game?, there is no lexical reference made to the Union Jack and the icon itself is barely black, smudged and spattered as it is with red paint, edging it closer to the conventional colouring of the Nazi swastika, reminding us of what is at stake when we turn a blind eye to regimes of segregation and oppression. The visceral, blood-like spray of red is also suggestive of the violence that could—and did—result from the government’s myopic view of race relations in our colonised country. In What’s in a Game?, we see a prophecy fulfilled, an eruption of violence spewed across the canvas like lava, the greatest this country has ever known. But we are also forced to grapple with our understandings of what “this country” really is, whether we simply echo the sentiments of Empire upon which we were founded or whether we hold our own values. In the 1970s, it was a question of whether we would lean into our conservative post-war identity as a country besotted by “rugby, racing and beer” and attempt to “keep politics out of sports”, or follow the UN directive of boycotting sport as a way of putting pressure on the South African Government, showing that we would not condone racism and refusing to demean our Māori rugby players.

Tracing the trajectory of Hotere’s life and practice, O’Sullivan observes that the artist was often moved to action by his experiences of injustice and imperialism, but that he quickly learned to respond as an artist. He writes, “It is remarkable how implacably his work insists that it plays that double role—art as politics, politics as art.”[05] Visually arresting, red hot with righteous rage, What’s in a Game? exemplifies this sentiment with a message that, while historically located, remains as relevant as ever as the pendulum swings back towards greater sectarianism and we must contend with our values on the world stage once again.