Jenny Nicholls reviews Richard Shaw's The Good Settler for the Waiheke Weekender:
‘This is one of the books which make me glad to be a book reviewer. A New Zealand book with a quiet cover I might not have stumbled over if it hadn’t been posted to me.
Richard Shaw is a professor of politics at Massey University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the author of The Forgotten Coast (which I reviewed a few years back) and The Unsettled. He is a wonderful essayist, and his new book is a New Zealand history at its most readable, humane – and enraging. It explains things about our colonial history that every New Zealander should know.
One of the reasons Shaw is so easy to digest is that he uses simple language, and makes it personal. Like most Pākehā, the family history he heard growing up was about plucky Irish farming pioneers. Much later, as a researcher, he learned the land which enriched his family was a small slice of the 1,199,622 acres ‘confiscated’ in Taranaki through regulations which amounted to brazen theft. Not only that, he discovered that his great-grandfather had been party to atrocity at Parihaka on 5 November 1881, as a member of the Armed Constabulary.
The Good Settler’s 15 essays explore the events of that day, the life of his Irish jailbird ancestor, and the curious erasure of the past in so many settler families. Shaw’s family told no stories about the country they left behind, the Ireland of famine graves and English absentee landlords.
“I don’t know what happened to Ireland. Time, perhaps”, writes Shaw. The old country is hard to see, he says, over ‘the great embankments of history’ – “the erasure effected by English colonisation, the Great Famine and awful ocean voyage required to get them from there to here.”
Other pieces in the book list the 27 different ways Māori land was taken, the outrageous national inequalities you may never have heard of (cleverly framed as quiz questions); the enduring impact of racism and playing fields which are anything but equal, and the comforting lies our nation tells itself – described, by Shaw as the national “dementia
ward”. He also mentions the online abuse he received for talking about colonisation
and its myths.
Someone has to do it. This is a quietly explosive and memorable book, and (I say this often) but really, every home should have one.
Here is Shaw on Hobson’s so-called pledge’, one of the book’s many nuggets.
“Hobson spoke in te reo Māori at Waitangi, not English,” says Shaw. “He did not say: ‘We are now one people’ – he said: ‘He iwi tahi tātou’, which, when translated by a native te reo speaker, means: ‘We are peoples together’. Plural, not singular. Moreover, the only account of what Hobson said at Waitangi (where he spent most of his time reassuring Māori that the Crown did not intend to take their land) is from William Colenso’s memoirs – written 50 years [later]. It was Colenso who came up with the translation ‘We are now one people’, not Hobson. And neither Hobson nor Colenso ever uttered or wrote the word ‘pledge’. There was, and is, no Hobson’s pledge.”’
