Richard Shaw’s 2021 memoir The Forgotten Coast uncovered the story of his Irish great grandfather, Andrew Gilhooly, who arrived in Aotearoa in 1875. In 1881, Gilhooly, a member of the Armed Constabulary, was among the troops at the invasion of Parihaka, the Māori village in south Taranaki.
Later, Andrew and his wife Kate bought three farms on land confiscated from Māori. As Shaw writes, “What was a beginning for them was an ending for others.”
Following the publication of The Forgotten Coast and an essay on the Conversation website, Shaw, a politics professor at Massey, received sustained feedback – from detractors, but also many people who had been similarly disturbed by aspects of their families’ histories in Aotearoa. These “small stories of colonisation” from across the country make up The Unsettled.
Some contributors have agreed to their first names being used; others are quoted but unnamed. It is a credit to Shaw that he manages to pull these testimonies together in a coherent form. His own story does dominate, but the “shared threads” of these other origin stories reinforce his argument about how history resonates in the present. The “unsettled” of the title refers not only to the unease felt by Shaw and his collaborators, but also to an awareness of “the unsettling effects the arrival of their settler families in this land have had on those who were here before”.
The people whose voices Shaw presents “reject the lazy tropes about the civilising effects of colonisation” and want to change the conversation about the past and its effect on the future. This is not about judging or blaming antecedents, who need to be seen in their own context, but is an acknowledgement of the effect of their actions.
Historian Vincent O’Malley has noted that many of the lands confiscated became central to this country’s booming pastoral economy. As a result, Shaw and his correspondents enjoy privileges that are not necessarily material or immediately obvious. Sometimes it is a sense of place and identity that comes from long generations of a family’s presence in and on land.
Shaw’s attempt to quantify the inter-generational economic benefit of the three farms formerly in his family’s ownership was one of the most interesting and novel things about The Forgotten Coast. He returns to this theme in his new book, joined by other voices: one succinctly notes that “land, money, education: all these things were made possible by the confiscation”.
Having identified these personal histories in The Unsettled, which have been shaped by the “big C” colonisation story, what next? Just bearing witness, Shaw argues, can be “a decidedly active thing to do”. Talking about the hitherto hidden histories has the potential to change conversations.
In one chapter, Shaw cites myriad actions taken by his informants that make a difference in their communities. The response can also be about not doing things, backing off and leaving space for others. As an example, Shaw questions the use of tūrangawaewae and pepeha to describe where he is from.
Shaw’s willingness to confront the anger sparked by the discussions he and his group are fostering is a strength of this book. The strong emotions stirred “when we begin rummaging around in our history” are evident when Shaw reviews the submissions after students from Ōtorohanga College presented a petition calling for New Zealand history to be taught in schools.
Perhaps, he argues, this reluctance to see history as anything but blameless, bygone and settled is related to fear of some sort of reckoning or retribution. At the same time, Shaw is not suggesting courses of action “beyond gently encouraging others to think about their own small stories”.
This courageous book is an addition to a growing literature by Pākehā “journeying back into the map of memory”. Just as the new Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum resulted from a group of New Zealanders who thought knowing about our own history was important for our collective future, this small but potent book will foster different conversations about the past and its connection with the present.
As Shaw argues in his closing chapter, “Historical retrospection is powerful because it can shape what we become.”
A longer version of this review will appear on the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books website, www.nzreviewofbooks.com.
The Unsettled by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, $39.99) is out now.
