How ignorant are Pākehā of their history? In his new collection of essays The Good Settler, Richard Shaw is angry that people still do not realise that most of the land now in farms or cities across the country was acquired by settlers, not by inheritance or for a fair price but by conquest, confiscation or ripoff deals that promised Māori a goodly share—or at least a fair price—but which were never honoured.
The Good Settler is the third, and possibly last, of Shaw’s books on this theme, originating in his discovery that his family’s South Taranaki farm lay on confiscated land near Parihaka. Its sub-title ‘Essays from other people’s lands’ heavily underlines the point. The raw part of the story was that Shaw’s great-grandfather, Andrew Gilhooly, was an immigrant Irishman who had escaped penury, prison and the miseries inflicted by English gentry landowners but then joined the Armed Constabulary in New Zealand. He worked on construction of the road that led to Parihaka, was involved in the pā’s destruction, and after retiring from military service, became a tenant and then owner of a farm at Pungarehu not far off. On confiscated land. His wedding reception was held in the schoolhouse which had been the “blockhouse in which Te Whiti O Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi had been held for a month following the invasion of their pā”.
Irony seems piled on irony here but Shaw admits that he can find no information about his great-grandfather that reveals his character and attitude towards Māori, their persecution and loss of land. Was it a case of the persecuted turning persecutor? But Andrew Gilhooly left Shaw with a hard cross to bear and it has taken three books to mitigate the burden.
Shaw grew up with the family story of poor Irish immigrant ancestors who left home forever to make a rewarding life in a new and empty land through hard work, observing Catholic values and making contributions to community. But there was an active forgetting. “Much was missing from my origin story … there was nothing of the destruction wrought by colonisation. No consciousness of the injustices done to Māori … No awareness that the farms were an instrument of colonisation, or that those who worked them were foot soldiers on the agricultural frontline, animating the colonial project, bringing it to life, giving its shape and substance. Mine was an intensely political story which contained no politics.”
As he proselytises his findings, Shaw often encounters people who respond with shock or anger. “Why have we never heard about this before? Why did we not learn that at school?”
These questions can be answered, in part, by understanding that societies grow and exist on the myths, narratives and beliefs that validate their existence, emphasising the best bits, pushing aside the bad bits, even justifying those in the name of progress or necessity. All societies do, including Māori. But in our post-modern world, in our democratic and ‘civilised’ 21st century country, grown out of the colonial politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, we must test these stories and beliefs to see who suffered most in the process; and then, after seeing the light, make amends.
Shaw’s one driving thesis is that everyone should know about what happened and then, well, we might be better placed to come to terms with the past and go forward better. And of course our history in every nasty detail should be taught in schools. Is there really any significant residual argument about that? And Shaw has helped settle it. But history curriculums should also start earlier than 1840 (see Ron Crosby’s Musket Wars), even before James Cook’s arrival: historian Monty Soutar has shown the way in that. So that we have a rounded picture of what the country was like before the settlers arrived.
Shaw spends a good part of his essays taking down the opposition to his revelations of settler atrocities that disfigure Pākehā ancestry. The ones who say, ‘Move on’, ‘Yeah but British settlement has brought a lot of benefit to Māori’ and those who falsely claim that William Hobson declared, ‘We are now one people’. These are the ways of maintaining colonial control, hence the book’s cover image and essay of mowing the lawn: the foreign cultural concept, the introduced grasses, the machine to keep order. Keep everything in order for Rob Muldoon’s ‘real New Zealanders’ and ‘New Zealand The Way You Want it’.
Shaw writes that people who push back against revisionist history are indulging in the “politics of nostalgia”, are “inhabiting a particular understanding of the past”. These “defenders of the faith” resent “their creation story turning into a tale of the end of innocence. They are losing Eden and edging towards the Fall.” Shaw adds, “That so many who harbour such resentments are the beneficiaries of the injustice heaped upon Māori is astounding. If my land had been taken, my language erased, my people vilified, disparaged and demeaned in our own country, might I not be pissed off? Yes, I would be. Mightily. Yet it is from Pākehā that the most trenchantly virulent words come.”
As chance would have it, as I write these words, the ‘Today’s Birthdays’ column of the Otago Daily Times lists Maurice Shadbolt and quotes from him, “I suppose because I come from pioneer stock on both sides of my family, I feel deeply for the men and women who made New Zealand what it is.” That New Zealand was celebrated in his and photographer Brian Brake’s seminal 1963 volume Gift of the Sea which sold tens of thousands. It was dedicated to “all New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha.”
This is the ‘faith’, the ‘creation story’ that Shaw’s non-believers hold close. In seeking to dispose of these by exposing the dark underbelly of Pākehā treachery and violence, he is surprised at the pushback, and works hard with his essays to disillusion them. To correct them. But is it enough to believe that once all Pākehā learn and accept the truths of our colonial past, this will lead us all into sunlit uplands, along a path less travelled to understanding … what exactly?
It is inevitable that, in listing all the discriminations and injustices visited upon Māori, Shaw should occasionally trip up over history. Two examples. He states that “The sale of alcohol to Māori in the King Country was banned between 1884 and 1954” as an example of Pākehā suppression. In fact, the King Country was a no-go area for Pākehā until the early 1880s when negotiations took place to take the main trunk railway through the region. This was agreed to by local rangatira but on condition alcohol sales would not be allowed, after witnessing its destructive effects on their people.
Shaw laments that the heroic efforts of Lance-Sergeant Haane Manahi at Takrouna were not recognised with a Victoria Cross as recommended, ‘For reasons unknown,’ and he was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal instead. It should have been a VC. But Shaw does not consider that some bearing on the decision may have been that Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu (whom he does not mention) had been awarded a VC posthumously less than a month earlier, in the same Tunisian campaign.
Guilt is mentioned but Shaw rightly emphasises that shame rather than guilt is what Pākehā should feel now about what happened to Māori in the past. The distinction was made clear to me about 20 years ago in Berlin when the Holocaust memorial was being constructed. I asked a young art administrator about it and she pointed out that neither she nor anyone of her generation were guilty of what happened; but she was ashamed of what her country had done. The German experience of dealing with the Holocaust is a useful one for New Zealand. Acknowledge it, apologise for it, compensate for it and make laws that work against the chance of it happening again. Then go forward, remembering.
Shaw writes that avoiding the past “enables the collective maintenance of the fiction that colonisation, and the price from those upon whom it was visited, is over”. He suggests that keeping people ignorant of the past is “not accidental. It is intentional, organised, and its purpose is to ensure that one specific telling of our colonial story squeezes out alternative versions.” This comes close to conspiracy theory. Especially when, as he points out, finding out the alternative story is only an article, essay or book away. When I was on the Listener, getting on for 60 years ago, we published Dick Scott’s story of Parihaka, the precursor to his 1975 book Ask That Mountain. There have been the regular findings of the Waitangi Tribunal over the past 50 years, Treaty settlements like those for Tainui and Ngāi Tahu and on and on. Where have people been all this time? Looking at their phones?
Shaw’s admirable efforts to point out the past, to try to make more people aware, are certainly helpful and might help more in coming to view more sympathetically the realities of life for Māori, their needs and a fairer place in our small society. But if the past is always with us, so is colonialism on a planetary scale that affects everyone every day: Australian banks, US defence demands, corporates far wealthier than us as a nation who gain their wealth through our willing or unwilling participation.
Shaw tells us of one correspondent who called him a ‘race traitor’ and he goes on to lay out the horrors of delineating people by false definitions of race. At the end of this section, he writes, “But disgust is not enough. The word at the root of this evil, which hides its violence in plain sight, needs to be systematically dismantled. Then the pieces need to be scattered to the wind.” I scribbled against this passage, “Of course, but how?”
Shaw tells us what we might become. He hopes that his “kind of real New Zealander is in and of this place/ has learned both the trick of standing upright here and that of sitting down and listening to others/ does not need to keep all of history to themselves/ uses Māori names of towns and cities alongside the English ones/ shares both the stage and the story/ sees real New Zealanders wherever they turn/ gazes out beyond the circle of light and see an invitation not a threat. For this kind of New Zealander bonfires are for sitting around with people of different persuasions and beliefs and backgrounds and histories and ways of seeing and being in the world/ and for weaving one’s own stories with those of others into a narrative that is not of me and mine but us and ours. This kind of real New Zealander is all good/ sweet as/ not going anywhere.”
It is an ideal conclusion devoutly to be wished. It is a kind of political heaven. A member of the current coalition Government might add ‘and singing kumbaya’.
The trouble is that there are many different bonfires, not only among Pākehā but among Māori, too. Those warming their hands at one may welcome others to join them; at another they may be told to just bugger off. The deep sense of hurt and injustice among many Māori gives them just cause to wave away any Pākehā interlopers, no matter how well-intentioned they are.
Shaw writes about Pākehā fear of Māori gaining too many ‘privileges’, of needing to keep control of the narrative, and sees this as people failing to come to terms with the past, of not opening themselves up, listening to stories long suppressed. When they do, he feels, it will be easier to understand who we are and find better ways of dealing with our problems around the communal bonfire. There are a couple of lingering flaws in this argument.
Shaw does not really address the deep-seated issue of many Pākehā feeling that their actual place in the country is challenged by Māori insisting that they are the only true inhabitants, that the rest are ‘guests’, or are allowed to be here by the Treaty or belong to foreign tribes. He writes that Pākehā should not expect reciprocity for doing the right thing, let alone become mana whenua.
The other difficulty is eliminating racism. Is there anywhere this has happened or is likely to happen? Tā Mark Solomon threw a rock into the pool a few years ago when asked on the radio if there was racism in New Zealand. “Yes,” he said, “from both sides”. Māori have every justification for being anti-Pākehā, as Shaw demonstrates at length. But racism against Māori is more complex, rooted in European concepts of race going back 200 years or more, of belief in the superiority of ‘white civilisation’ and, perhaps, the innate need of all ‘tribes’ to see the threats to life and survival in the evils of The Other. Eruptions of this human trait are manifest all over the world today.
A long time ago, Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, who focused on realities rather than ideal states, wrote that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. Richard Shaw has contributed much to understanding backward, but life goes on. If Pākehā focus too much on the evils of their ancestors, while Māori accord only reverence to their tūpuna as they walk backward into the future, we may not see the cliff edge looming behind us.
The Good Settler: Essays from other people’s lands by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
