Riddled with Phantoms and Skeletons

Rowan Light

The Unsettled: Small stories of colonisation by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press, 2024), 224pp, $39.99

Aotearoa New Zealand, like the Arthurian setting of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, is a landscape with its own buried giants of memory, myth and a contested past. Ishiguro’s titular monster is a metaphor for a past that is so violent and full of anguish that it has been collectively buried by a fiction (that Arthur’s reign was one of universally accepted peace rather than genocide) and guarded by a dragon whose magic causes communities to forget their memories.

In our own public life, greater attention has been drawn to the events of colonial conflict—‘the New Zealand wars’—which, despite their impact on the balance of political, economic and cultural power today, have only recently been recognised in national curriculum and commemoration. For many New Zealanders, it is a buried truth that the wars were of apocalyptic proportions for iwi Māori, of which Pākehā today are the primary benefactors. We can point to how this violent past has been shrouded in myth and forgetting. Few New Zealanders can hold, untroubled, once-cherished myths of peaceful settlement and perfect race relations through the Treaty of Waitangi. Yet Michael Belgrave observes that ‘we seem to be remembering [the wars] at every opportunity, and then forgetting about them everyplace in between’. Such is the enchantment of our public amnesia.

Like the protagonists of Ishiguro’s novel, we too are faced with choices that need immense care and consideration amidst calls for the reappraisal of the past in public life. Ignoring past hurt is no longer viable. Others would seek to control it. David Seymour’s desire to legislate the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi is one such flawed project: a strange recognition of a waking giant, a past that demands to be grappled with. At the same time, in summoning collective experiences from the traumatic past, carried out in performances of memorialisation and commemorative acts, remembering can lead to conflict and the maintenance of grievance and victimisation. Anyone seeking to unbury the violent past, however well-intentioned, needs to recognise this.

The fraught demands of remembering—to wake the buried giant or let it lie—are what Richard Shaw explores in The Unsettled. In the intervening years since his 2021 memoir The Forgotten Coast, Shaw has been part of a series of conversations (as well as the target of criticism and outright abuse), in person and through correspondence, with a range of Pākehā New Zealanders. (It is an explicitly Pākehā perspective: ‘us’ and ‘my/our people’ throughout the book are Pākehā.). Some are like-minded; others are ‘fretful sleepers’ and ‘broken-souled people’—but all share, in some way, long settler histories riddled with phantoms and skeletons (p. 133). Through a kind of dialogical writing, Shaw reflects on how Pākehā might ‘live well with their own pasts, presents, and futures’.

I’m interested in this, in how we react when our sleep is disturbed. For some—including those whose stories are in this book—there is a pull, a need to apprehend both the nature of our historical foundations and how to live well on them. But those who’ve sent me abusive messages, and many of those opposing the Ōtorohanga students’ petitions, have resorted to anger, unsettled, perhaps, by what lies just beneath the surface. (p. 131)

This is the ethics of a Pākehā memory. What Pākehā remember (and forget) of their past constitutes their sense of belonging and identity. Moreover, this knowing or ‘unknowing’ has been a key part of their assertion of and response to colonial power since the nineteenth century. The question posed by Shaw is whether a Pākehā memory can only ever reinforce their position within a colonial order or be exercised in an ethical way that supports Māori in a shared, flourishing future. Hence, Shaw and his interlocutors are the ‘unsettled’, but ‘they are doing something about it’.

It is a timely piece of writing, sitting across some of the big debates of the last decade firing up in new ways in 2024. Shaw offers a series of chapters to be read less as a clearly developed argument and more akin to Pascal’s pensées: ‘small stories’, of tragic ‘unsaid, difficult things’ that ‘we glimpse out of the corners of our eyes but do not fully apprehend: things that are hinted at and which make us uneasy’ (p. 29). In between historical truth and fiction are the conversations among families, through which the past is distilled, ordered, forgotten and survived. A major source of unease is the origin of land, ‘the family farm’, that fundamental unit of pioneering myths, along with ‘the survey pegs, the fence line, the boundary markers’, which furnish our storied past and obscure its malignancy. The task here is to connect these ‘small stories’ to the big histories—of the legal, political and military processes of state forming, neither of which is possible without the other—‘they represent a continuum, not a binary’ (p. 29).

Broadly, The Forgotten Coast and now The Unsettled are ‘critical family histories’ that explore the ‘why’ of family origins rather than simply the ‘what’ (p. 29). New Māori history, notably Rachel Buchanan’s history of Taranaki Māori experiences of conquest and raupatu, has also shaped Shaw’s project—highlighting not simply the economic benefits of the colonial system, but also its cultural axis, of memory and belonging. Shaw is also responding to Pākehā backlash to public changes in our memory culture—such as the introduction of the New Zealand Wars day of commemoration (an example of ‘how to forget’ in Chapter 4). Submissions to the select committee offered a rare window into how at least a subset of the Pākehā population thinks and talks about the past.

In contrast to this angry and volatile minority, Shaw is offering a useful study of the quiet, meaningful work of families and communities reckoning with colonial history. Shaw’s meanderings are redolent of what historian Judith Binney called ‘remembered history’, a remembrance of the violent past that is historical—gesturing towards the truth of what happened in time—while recognising the deep wounds that echo in patterns of collective life. In doing so, this remembering unveils the moral demands that such an account makes in our public conscience—and allows us to imagine ourselves together.

There are some obvious pitfalls in this kind of historical reflection. Shaw is well-read, erudite and thoughtful, but this is not an academic study. He is a political scientist, not a historian. There is no methodology to his interviews with the various Pākehā he encounters, quotes, critiques and queries in nine pithy chapters. He, nonetheless, offers some sensible qualifications, such as the danger of moral hindsight and an awareness of the problems of siloing the workings of a Pākehā memory from its wider context, not least its entanglements with Māori lives.

Ellen Foxon, for example, is the subject of her granddaughter Marguerite’s ‘unsettled’ story. Foxon helped build the Māori Methodist Church in 1932 and was president of the Māori Ladies Guild from 1929 to 1934. Ngāi Tahu Māori, locked out of their land and prosperity, had struggled to build their whare karakia at Arowhenua pā. Foxon, with others, worked hard to fundraise for the new church, which they achieved in three years, meeting monthly at the Foxon’s farmhouse in Epsom, through ‘the sales of handiwork, sweets and fancy good at stockyard sales, where special stalls would be set up (and following which dances might be held’. When Foxon retired as President, a Mrs Rehu of the Māori Women’s Institute gifted her two flax kete, along with a ‘hand worked Māori tea cosy’. Given the history of Ngāi Tahu land loss, any congratulatory family back-slapping is cautioned. Yet Marguerite is ‘unsettled’: one of the last tracts of land Ngāi Tahu held in the South Island, she ‘felt something between being embarrassed that once again it’s the whites who, in their arrogance, always step in to lead things, and a sense of being upset that she had somehow intruded into this Māori organisation.’ (p. 73)

As Shaw notes, Marguerite’s story articulates ‘the ambiguity of the descendant who can find much to admire in the actions of a forebear while also holding on to her discomfort with the circumstances and context in which those things took place’. Shaw calls this doing an ‘Elizabeth Stout’; ‘not indulging in a “sorry shake of the head at the inadequacies of our settler forebears”, but trying to sift, weigh, and sort things that pull in different directions.’ (p. 75) This is historical retrieval at its best; far from imposing a present-day judgment, it actually allows us to consider the fraught and contingent decisions of a colonial past—and present.

By focusing on the context of people’s lives in families over generations, Shaw is able to step back from nebulous debates about the ‘national past’, which quickly become detached from how human beings actually remember and develop their ethical reasoning. Moreover, family memories form part of a broader landscape of commemoration—war memorials, historical writing and memoir, associative networks—as a set of cultural tools by which to comprehend and manage the demands of memory, sometimes alongside Māori. An intergenerational approach also allows investigations into wider patterns of cultural memory riddled with historical trauma, like Irish migrants who arrived in New Zealand off the back of British imperialism in their homelands, which had deprived them of life, culture, and land, only to be—paradoxically—instruments of that same colonial policy.

Perhaps most usefully, Shaw shows the importance of interrogating our own collective languages of memory, apart and together: how we describe the past, the terms that explain and constrain its lessons, and the weight we give to notions of truth/false, right/wrong, justice/vengeance. Shaw, for example, approaches, at a distance, his family’s Catholicism, which also colours a number of his ‘unsettled’ interactions (he finds himself in conversation with retired nuns among other Irish Catholic descendants). Scholars of modern memory have long noted its religious tenor: a desire to encounter, as sacred, a moral past and absolve its transgressions. In this way, an ethics of remembering means returning to ‘communities of memory’ (to invoke Avishai Margalit’s framework) as institutions of change that forged those original stories and furnished their ‘affective textures’: ‘the tables at which meals are eaten, the clubs where sports are played, the places of worship—help us stick’, as Shaw puts it. ‘Then and now’. (p. 49)

In this way, more nuanced studies of Pākehā memory might equip communities with models of engagement with their past—part of the demand for what postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty calls ‘transitional histories’. In the epilogue, Shaw ponders whether, perhaps, Pākehā are coming to ‘completion’. If, as the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum frames it, Māori history is the foundational history of Aotearoa, then Pākehā become, at best, a chapter in a larger story, with the falling away, like weeds, of colonial names and attachments. Any fruitful transition, however, requires a commitment to knowing the truth (Shaw dedicates the book to those for ‘whom the forgetting can end’.) It is a journey that begins with a recognition that we can no longer afford to ignore, downplay, or underestimate this waking giant and grapple, instead, with the demands to remember.

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ROWAN LIGHT is a Pākehā historian at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau, where he teaches Aotearoa New Zealand histories. He is also project curator at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, assisting with research on the history, remembrance and commemoration of the New Zealand Wars.