When Bill Bush felt

’’Being dark-skinned, it was becoming obvious . . . that every game I was selected to play in would likely involve a bit of biff, with the white South Africans blatantly out to get me.’’ Bill Bush

Samoan wing Bryan Williams and Bush accepted home visit invitations from coloured South Africans who ‘‘wanted their story heard about what the apartheid regime had been doing to them.’’

The South African authorities frowned on Bush’s fraternisation with black and coloured people.

They told All Blacks coach J J Stewart, ‘‘that I was only there to play rugby, and that my walkabout visits needed to be reined in’’.

‘‘They must have had their goons tailing me,’’ Bush said.

Later in the tour, Bush had to curtail his ‘‘efforts to spend time in forbidden areas with Coloured and Black South Africans’’ after Stewart feared the All Blacks would have to go home if the South African Rugby Union complained further. ‘‘I swallowed my pride and I tried to comply, but it was bloody awful,’’ Bush wrote.

Bush felt, because of his race, he was targeted by the white establishment press and by rivals and referees on the field.

Rapport, an Afrikaner Sunday paper, labelled him ‘‘the meanie no Springbok could hope to tame’’, a ‘‘dirty player’’ and ‘‘a hatchet man, kicker, gouger, scratcher and biter’’.

‘‘Being dark-skinned, it was becoming obvious, even at this early stage, that every game I was selected to play in would likely involve a bit of biff, with the white South Africans blatantly out to get me. I was not wrong. Mind you, I gave as good as I got, and a bit more when I was targeted.’’

The Canterbury frontrower’s book details a number of violent incidents in matches where offences against the All Blacks went unpunished.

Some of the ‘‘worst thuggery’’ came in a match against the North-west Cape Invitation XV where Bush inadvertently ‘‘walloped the referee’’.

He said the opposition ‘‘turned to more and more violent tactics’’ in the second half.

‘‘I was prepared to meet fire with fire. But one punch-up – basically an all-in-brawl in the forwards – resulted in me accidentally walloping the referee. We were having a dingdong go when he made the mistake of grabbing me by the shoulder. In the heat of battle I spun around and let him have it