In 1984, just over 40 and a bit years ago, the Wallabies toured Great Britain for an 18-match tour. It was to turn out to be one of the greatest trips north ever undertaken by a Wallaby side.
Under captain, Andrew Slack, and coach, Alan Jones, the Wallabies lost matches against Cardiff, Llanelli, Ulster and South of Scotland but, more importantly, they beat all four Home Unions convincingly to become the first Australian team, before or since, to win the Grand Slam.
In the four internationals they conceded only a single try – by Welsh scrum-half, David Bishop – and their margins of victory were so impressive that they’re worth repeating. They beat England by 16 points, Ireland by seven points and Wales by 19 points, scoring four tries (only worth four in those days) in the process.
Against Scotland, in the last international on tour, they scored 37 points, including four tries, to four penalties against, for a 37-12 victory. Two of the tries at Murrayfield that day were scored by a 19-year-old Wallaby winger of Italian descent from the New South Wales backlands. He was to become – as we’re about to find out – rather famous.
His name was David Campese, a player who was beginning to develop a reputation for himself as elegant, hard-running and opportunistic wing and full-back. Campese was shy off the park, even socially awkward, but on it he was loud. You couldn’t miss him. In many ways, he was louder than words.
Campese wasn’t only strong, pacy and unpredictable, he had a calling card, something that set him apart from his talented teammates. Most of us know it as the “Campese Goosestep” but as James Curran’s recent book on Campese tells us, it’s better known in Aussie as the “Struggletown Shuffle.”
The name for Campo’s goose-step came about because the small town in New South Wales in which Campsese was brought up, Queanbeyan, was full of immigrants from Europe who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. The local council realised that these immigrant families, from Germany, Greece, Macedonia and Italy, couldn’t afford to build permanent houses, so stringent housing regulations were temporarily relaxed.
Lean-tos, shanties and cobbled-together do-it-yourself structures sprung up, much to long-time residents’ ire. “Struggletown” came to be born. Soon it produced a rugby dance of its own – the “Struggletown Shuffle”.
Born in 1962, Campese was the son of Italian immigrant parents who’d arrived in Australia in the early 1950s. His father, Giantonio Campese, came from a village close to Venice. Although a French polisher by trade, he was quickly working on the Snowy River Hydro-Electric scheme. It comes as no surprise to learn that his Aussie mates quickly dubbed him “Tony”.
All Tony’s son, David, wanted to do was play sport, it didn’t matter whether it was golf or cricket. Rugby league, he soon discovered, wasn’t for him, but perhaps union, for which he showed early promise, was?
Campese left school at 16. By 17 he’d made his debut playing fourth grade rugby for the local Queanbeyan side, the Whites. His rise was meteoric.
Two years later he was called up for Australia on their July 1982 tour of New Zealand alongside the three famous Ella brothers, Mark, Glen and Gary.
The tour to New Zealand took place at a fractious time in Australian rugby. Queensland rugby fans weren’t happy with the selection policies of then-Wallaby coach, Bob Dwyer, and nine players, many of them Queenslanders, made themselves unavailable.
Seventeen members of the touring squad had never played international rugby before. When the Wallabies crossed the Tasman, their luggage contained unusually heavy baggage – the baggage of trepidation.
Despite the inexperience of the touring Wallabies, they acquitted themselves well. Having lost the first Test to the All Blacks they narrowly won the second, losing the decider.
Campese made his debut in the first Test loss at Christchurch, memorably stepping around much-vaunted New Zealand winger, Stu Wilson. Playing alongside, Ella marveled at Campese’s insouciance. “What have we got here,” he mused.
Not all Wallabies were as keen on the “Struggletown Shuffle.” Some moaned, not without merit, that Campese’s unpredictability meant you never knew what he was about to do. Where should you be, when you didn’t know where he would be. Hell, he didn’t seem to know where he’d be himself.
The loose-forwards, in particular, found his off-the-cuff brilliance trying as they tried to predict his next move.
Not everyone struggled to the same degree. In his book on Campo, Curran quotes Mark Ella saying the following: “My brothers and I were able to read Campese and more often than not were able to anticipate him.
When Campese took off we might see that he had, say, two immediate options, but that in either case he would have to come right eventually. As a result, we would head to the right – taking the short cut, in other words, and meeting him in the middle of the field.”
Curran rightly notes in his chapter on the beginning of Campese’s international career that not enough has been made of the relationship between him and the Ellas. Not enough has been written, he adds, about the who they were and where they came from.
Campese, was the son a of a French polisher from Italy who perfected the “Struggletown Shuffle”, while the Ellas were Australians of aboriginal descent. In their unique way, they widened the conception of who could play for the Wallabies and what, therefore, the Wallabies became.
None of them went to private schools in Queensland or New South Wales, as most Wallabies usually did. The traditional pathways weren’t theirs.
To the sport they brought their daring, their difference and flair. They also brought their view of the world, their quiet insistence that the world they came from in wasn’t necessarily the world played in by the Slacks, Michael Lynaghs and Simon Poidevins of this world.
South African listeners will find it easy to see where I’m going with this. Campese has come out recently and said some ego-swelling things about Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, and Campo no doubt sees some of his youthful self in the audacious young fly-half and utility back.
Sacha not only has talent to burn, he has a story to tell, a story that chimes exceedingly well with the times. His grandfather was the late Barry Feinberg, a poet, graphic artist, cultural desk activist and ANC member who fled from South Africa because of apartheid to go into exile in England, where his son Nick was born.
Nick, Sacha’s dad, has felt the tug of both his birthplace and South Africa but for Sacha, identity is more straightforward – he’s South African through and through. He always wanted to pull on the green and gold.
When he returned from his exile years, Barry used to watch Sacha, his grandson, play for Bishops in Cape Town’s southern suburbs when Sacha was growing up. Unfortunately, Barry, the ANC activist, never saw his grandson become a Springbok because he died last year.
It would have been impossible for the mixed-race grandson of a white anti-apartheid exile activist to become a Springbok even as recently as 20 years ago. But as South African changes, so, too, does rugby, although rugby also contributes to a changing society by illustrating what can be achieved through talent and hard work.
What exactly do I mean by my use of the world “impossible”? Well, it would have been generationally impossible for a grandson of an ANC activist to play for the Boks 20 years ago because such grandsons wouldn’t have been old enough. They might not even have been born.
But it would also have been literally unthinkable, too, because the system wouldn’t have tolerated it. Can you imagine, say, an André Markgraaff, with his backward-looking conservatism, picking Sacha? The very notion is ridiculous. It’s like asking a human being to fall upwards.
But Rassie Erasmus (and, to a lesser extent, Jacques Nienaber) is more open-minded, shrewder, more historically sensitive, more attuned to the optics than any Springbok coach ever has been. Not only does he have a system with a wider base from which to choose players, he is currently experiencing one of the legacies of success – the luxury of being able to plan for the future.
He knows Siya Kolisi is 33 and Eben Etzebeth turns 33 in October. He knows the “Malmesbury Missile” Pieter-Steph du Toit has just turned 31 and is increasingly being held together by willpower alone. Age-wise, Handré Pollard isn’t far behind. Erasmus knows that rugby is a physically-taxing, brutal and attritional game, particularly but not exclusively for the forwards, and some of his stalwarts are running out of time.
In this regard Rassie is only too happy for the idle talk about Sacha being a Springbok captain-elect to swirl about the media. It keeps Siya honest and it will inspire Salmaan Moerat, ‘Bok skipper for the second Test against the Wallabies, to not get ahead of himself and take too much for granted.
So, the game is changing. And it is changing quickly, as Rassie begins his relentless quest to defend the World Cup crown in 2027. Organically, without hue and cry, Springboks are coming from all races and coming from everywhere, like Campese and the Ella brothers did for Australia before them. Rugby, once associated with Afrikanerdom and apartheid, has re-fashioned itself as the people’s game.
Older listeners will rightfully point out that South African rugby players have always come from everywhere, with that everywhere conveniently called “the platteland,” roughly translated as the “country districts.”
But now that everywhere is producing players of all colours, shapes and sizes, whether this be Lukhanyo Am, who went to school in King William’s Town, or Ben-Jason Dixon, who went to school in Stellenbosch. This is different to how it used to be, where talented players like Breyton Paulse and Bryan Habana and JP Pietersen were literally marginalised and hived off to the wing.
Counting two replacements for those who injured themselves in the initial 2007 World Cup squad, Jake White called up 32 players to the tournament in France. Of those 32, six were so-called “coloured” players, including some names you might have forgotten like Ricky Januarie and Wayne Julies, who was drafted into the squad as a late replacement for the injured Jean de Villiers.
In the entire squad of 32, there was just one black African player – Akona Ndungane, and his role in the tournament was negligible. And we’re not talking the really dark days here, like the 1980s or 1990s, either. We’re talking 2007, 17 years ago.
Born in 1991, Siya Kolisi was 16 when the 2007 Rugby World Cup, came round. At 16 he was just beginning to create a bit of a reputation for himself at Grey High in Gqeberha, and might have seen in rugby an avenue of potential possibility if not potentially rich reward.
The win for Jake White’s team would surely have made a profound impression on him, although one wonders what his private thoughts were when it came to not seeing a single black player wearing the treasured green and gold.
Kolisi reminds me a little of Arjuna Ranatunga, the portly left-hander who led Sri Lanka to her Cricket World Cup victory over Australia in 1996. As Kumar Sangakkara points out in his 2011 Sir Colin Cowdrey lecture on the “Spirit of Cricket” which we will hear an excerpt from shortly, Ranatunga recognized that for Sri Lankan cricket to be fully Sri Lankan, it needed to move away from the shadow of colonialism and post-colonialism, and forge its own cricket identity.
It also needed to move away from stale coaching orthodoxies, and find players who represented the carefree flair, sense of humour and improvisatory brilliance of the islanders. In Sanath Jayasuriya and Muttiah Muralitharran, Ranatunga found two such players. He built the island’s new-found cricket identity around them.
Murali started out as a fast-bowler, but soon realised that he could use a natural deformity in his arm to good effect as a wrist-spinning off-spinner. As Sangakkara reminds us, it was the Aussie skipper, Allan Border, who said on first facing Murali that, “he’s a leg-spinner but, hell, he bowls a fair whack of googlies.”
The point here is that Sri Lankan cricket needed to discover what was unique about her cricket before she could compete with the best in the world. And she needed to do so based on the sensible and entirely pragmatic assumption that utilizing what was to hand, and fashioning it to her ends, was the only way to gain competitive advantage.
The rest of the cricket-playing world was, after all, more prosperous. It was more settled, not having to live through the debilitating and traumatic effects of a long-term civil war. It was surer of itself, unlike the Sri Lankans who were, more often than not, insecure and wide-eyed.
Ceylon only became Sri Lanka in 1948; a tiny island, dwarfed by India up above and Pakistan above that, she was only granted Test status by the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 1981. Finally, the Sri Lankans were insecure, because they had bigtime identity issues. Deep down, they weren’t sure of who they were.
South African rugby has always had a solid foundation on which to build, that foundation resting on the herculean endeavors of the forwards, but lurking just beneath the surface was insecurity. There was apartheid. There was isolation. There was the disadvantage of being almost buried at the bottom of a continent people were wildly ignorant about that was itself at the bottom of the world.
How else does one explain the well-documented reflex to crisis in South African rugby? How else does one explain the – often desperate – need to show the world who was boss? How else does one explain the endless, often tortuous moments of anguish?
Think of Corne Krigé’s implosion at Twickenham in 2002 in which the Boks, on the back of two defeats, lost the plot as the match careered into mayhem and the Boks plunged to a record 53-3 defeat? Think of the other implosions, cave-in, earthquakes. Think of Kamp Staaldraad?
Think the Pieter de Villiers experiment? Think of Louis Luyt’s Trump-like craziness, tolerated at the time but, with the benefit of hindsight, best characterized as a reign of boorishness and bluster. Consider, finally, the wisdom of making Harry Viljoen and Carel du Plessis national coaches. I rest my case.
Such insecurities have evaporated as a result of back-to-back World Cup wins in 2019 and 2023 and the arrival of Siya and Jacques Nienaber and Rassie Erasmus. They have evaporated because the Springboks are going through a remarkably successful patch but they’ve also evaporated because you feel that all the talent at our disposal is being used in a way that gives best expression to that talent. Our players, finally, have embraced their unique versions of Campo’s “Struggletown Shuffle.”
And, like Sacha, they have pedigrees and backgrounds which Springboks of older generations didn’t have. Such backgrounds are more similar to those of Campese and the three Ella brothers and have the added advantage of bringing a slightly different style.
We left Campese at the beginning of this podcast in 1984, just after the Wallabies successful Grand Slam tour of the British Isles. After conquering the north, the Australians only needed one more notch on their bedpost, and duly went to New Zealand for the Bledisloe Cup in 1986 determined to beat the All Blacks in their paddock. If they did so – remember, these were pre-World Cup days – they could legitimately claim the title of the best team in the world.
New Zealand rugby was not in a happy place at the time. The Kiwi players who had gone to South Africa with the Cavaliers would only be available for the second Test because of their two-match ban, and there was talk of a rift down the middle of New Zealand rugby.
Campese had an eventful first Test, scoring a try, making the deciding pass that led to another and then throwing out a wildly speculative pass across field which led to the All Blacks creeping back in. Finally, the Wallabies snuck home by a point 13-12 – before losing by exactly the same margin in the second Test.
Winning the series (and so the Bledisloe Cup) in the third, didn’t, however mean that when the inaugural World Cup came round a year later, they could rest on their laurels. In the 1987 World Cup semi-final they lost a high-scoring match to France. 1984 and the Grand Slam seemed like an eternity away. The dream was over.
It would take four years and the ruthlessness of Jones’s successor, Bob Dwyer, for Campese to find himself at another World Cup. In 1988 Dwyer had brought in new blood, turfing some of the players who’d lost to France in the previous year’s World Cup semi-final loss.
Fullback, Roger Gould, simply walked out of camp and flew home. Dwyer drafted in a young hooker called Phil Kearns who had been playing in the second team at Randwick in the Sydney suburbs. When Tim Horan and Jason Little, soon-to-be the famous centre pairing, played for the Wallabies for the first time, they hadn’t yet represented their state, Queensland.
The key fixture of the 1991 World Cup from an Australian point-of-view was against the old enemy, New Zealand, in the semi-final. Poidevin has referred to it subsequently as “Frazier versus Ali”, and many Australians believe the Wallabies’ first half is the finest half of rugby they’ve ever played.
Ever the maverick, Campese dealt with the haka by not fronting up to it but wandering in the outfield lost in thoughts of his own. Suspicions of uninterest were unfounded. Campese scored his first try by coming off his wing and gliding diagonally across the field without a hand being laid upon him as he dotted down in the corner.
His next moment of off-the-cuff brilliance was his no-look pass to Horan, who was running off his right-shoulder while Campo was looking left. It’s fodder for a thousand YouTube highlights reels but you should still try and see it again for old time’s sake because it’s masterful.
Take a listen to the commentary for both the Campese and the Horan try Campese made on these two linked snippets and take the pulse of the excitement in the commentator’s voice yourself.
The Wallabies won the semi-final against the Blackness 16-6 and then beat England at Twickenham in a grubby final. The architect of the “Struggletown Shuffle” finally had his World Cup winner’s medal.
We forget that it was many years of Struggletown for the Springboks prior to their back-to-back World Cup wins. Yes, there were successes, but there were also World Cup defeats to Japan and European Tour defeats away to Italy. Every step forward appeared to be accompanied by two back.
In the space of five or six years with the two back-to-back World Cup wins, all that has changed. Organically, rugby in South Africa has moved away from its conservative, Afrikaans roots and become the people’s game.
A more equitable society has changed rugby, in that young rugby players are now coming from everywhere, but rugby has also changed a more equitable society. How so? It has changed a society because the ‘Boks have demonstrated that nothing succeeds like success. As South Africans we are proud of the Springboks as we are proud of little else.
