As an 'outsider', it is fascinating to read the history of the bewildering number of Trot sects and groupuscles, and their alliances, splits and metamorphoses. When I started at Otago University (in my home town of Dunedin) in 1980, there were no Trotskyists of any description on campus, or as far as I know, anywhere else in the city. The were only two options for students interested in progressive politics - the New Zealand Labour Party or the Maoists. Uninterested in the reformism of the Labour Party, and unwilling to put myself through the ethical contortions required to be a Maoist, I promptly declared myself a follower of Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin and repudiated the lot of them as authoritarian scum.
The most important political campaigns of that era were based around the anti-Apartheid movement, and the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand - the campaign against which saw rioting and running street battles with police wielding steel batons. Things got particularly nasty after protesters prevented the game at Hamilton by scattering broken glass on the pitch. I ended up getting quite close to the Springboks, without realising it. I was at an afternoon film, when a group of burly blokes entered late and left just before the end. I walked out of the cinema into a full-on demo, with organisers demanding to know where the Springboks had gone. Out the back door of course. I thought they were just Engineering students.
These days I call myself a Marxist, although my comrade Will likes to castigate me for my anarchist tendencies. I still wear black.
NB: Not quite opposite - Dunedin is opposite a point in the Atlantic off the North-West tip of Spain - but close enough.