Going back in time...The 1969 Wallabies, Geoff Shaw
(second from left), Mick Barry, Rod Kellaher, Phil Smith and
Arthur McGill, prepare to tour South Africa.Source: The
Daily Telegraph
GEOFF Shaw sensed a tough tour of South Africa loomed when he and two other backs bound up at training to give the Wallabies front-row some opposition.

In Shaw, John Ballesty and Stephen Knight, there was a size issue.

"We were bigger than our front row," Shaw remembers.

The year was 1969, and the Wallabies were in South Africa on what would be the last Australian tour there until the Springboks' isolation ended in 1992.

Trips across the Indian Ocean had never been particularly fruitful for Australian rugby sides and this tour would prove no different.

Future Test captain Shaw recalls the man mountain Springbok forwards as one of the, well, biggest problems - much like the Wallabies still find today.

"We were fairly confident in the backs, but in those days we had a reasonably lightweight forward pack and the South Africans had these massive blokes who weighed 20 stone (126kg)," Shaw recalls.



"They could play 10-man rugby and wear us down."

Australia went down fighting 4-0 in the Test series, adding to what is a pretty undistinguished record in Africa. Since 1933, Australia have played 36 games in South Africa and won just eight: a pitiful 22 per cent.

Remarkably, that's a superior percentage to the Wallabies' success rate since the Springboks emerged from isolation last decade.

Since 1992, the Wallabies have only won three of 17 games at a strike rate of 17 per cent.
For all the clinical planning, science and strategy that goes into a hit-and-run Test tour in the professional era, tours like 1969 were more a war of attrition.

The tour was a four-month affair involving 24 other games against South Africa's many provincial sides. With only a squad of 30, injuries were often self-treated and playing multiple games in a week was routine.

Forget today's mass entourages. In 1969, the Wallabies had a coach, manager and doctor.
Travelling was far different, too. The squad travelled in an old DC3 around the country. One day flying to remote Welcome, the team saw something disconcerting.

"One of the engines was smoking, presumably on fire," Shaw says.

"They wouldn't let us land at the airport because they didn't have any fire engines.

"We were diverted 10 miles out of town to a disused airfield full of potholes and weeds. We survived."
As young men, some Wallabies were more politically aware than others of the apartheid regime, but Shaw says one of the most confronting incidents came when a temporary stand collapsed straight after a game in Pretoria.

"There was a roar like an aircraft engine as this stand collapsed," he says. "People suffered dreadful injuries. The players did what we could to help get people out of the wreckage. Amazingly, no one was killed."

The locals were very welcoming but the arrogant South Africa rugby bosses were another matter.
After the second Test, written accounts say Dr Danie Craven used a cocktail party speech to say meeting the Wallabies was like playing schoolboys. He was heckled by the Australian players.
It set the scene for a feisty third Test in Cape Town, which was played in pouring rain. It was a mudbath and a bloodbath, and despite being overpowered the Aussies gave another brave display of dogged tackling to go down fighting.

"The intensity of touring, travelling and playing was certainly a demanding task, but you were representing your country, you gave all you had," Shaw says.

Fittingly, the majority of the 1969 tourists will return to Cape Town again next week to mark their 40-year reunion.

Nineteen players will trek back in a party of 40, hold reunion functions with their old Boks rivals and, crucially, attend the Wallabies captain's run before their August 8 Test against the Springboks. There they will take part in the handing out of the Wallabies' Test jerseys.

To win in South Africa, you need courage and commitment. Stirling Mortlock's men won't need to look far for inspiration.

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