The Good Settler
by Richard Shaw

Richard Shaw has struck a rich vein. His books The Forgotten Coast (2021) and The Unsettled (2024) both grappled with his immigrant family history in the nineteenth century, extrapolating to New Zealand history generally, with a focus on the appalling wrongs done to Māori. The Unsettled was inspired in part by the responses he received for The Forgotten Coast, many angry, abusive, and motivated by racial prejudice. One correspondent called him a “race traitor”. In The Good Settler, Shaw responds:

The appropriate reaction to the phrase ‘race traitor’, with its thinly veiled allusions to racial hygiene and cleansing, is revulsion. 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 winds.

More literary and sophisticated than the earlier books, The Good Settler comprises fifteen essays that examine not only further fall-out from the first two books but aspects of our more recent history, much of which will alarm and sadden Shaw’s readers. Who exactly those readers will be is worth thinking about for a moment. Those who generated the negative responses will likely as not read it, even though Shaw’s argument throughout is addressed to those people. Those of us who agree with him will find some material that is familiar, either from general reading or from his earlier work. They may also find themselves a little irked by repetition and a sense that the author is preaching to the choir.

The first essay, ‘Slouching towards Parihaka’, returns to the initial inspiration for The Forgotten Coast. Here Shaw refers to the activities of ‘the Irishman’, who as a young man endured a short prison sentence in Limerick gaol in 1873. He and his family were farmers for an English absentee landlord, starving and impoverished. Soon after he was released, the Irishman made his way to New Zealand. As immigrants do everywhere, he worked hard and aligned himself with the perceived rulers of the land. The Irishman is Shaw’s great grandfather, Andrew Gilhooly. Readers of his earlier books will know this, but here Shaw doesn’t reveal this – with great aplomb – until the essay’s closing sentence.

He confides that it was less than a decade ago that he learned that Gilhooly rode with the armed constabulary into Parihaka, and may have participated in the general destruction of whare and gardens, rape, murder and imprisonment. It is this discovery that spurned Shaw on to examine his place in Aotearoa New Zealand – that and the knowledge that Gilhooly and his wife came into possession of rich Taranaki farmland, some of which had previously been under Māori cultivation. After Shaw discovers these facts, he ‘can’t stop thinking about it.’ The previously poor, disadvantaged Catholic family became, in their new country, equivalent to gentry. Much of this is covered in the earlier books, but here there are fresh details. Gilhooly’s 1898 wedding reception was held in the schoolhouse in Pungarehu: in 1881 Te Whiti O Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi were imprisoned in it for a month.

The second essay ‘In Search of Eden’ opens with an account of questions sent to him in 2024 by his publisher (unnamed here, but doubtless Nicola Legat of Massey University Press). No doubt considering the future readership, she asks him how big the cohort is, i.e. those descended from settler families. She assumes this is ‘an ever tinier subset of the population’, a logical assumption. It is, however, the opposite: settler families had lots of children and more of them survived than in many other countries. The most virulent of responses to Shaw’s work seem to come, unfortunately, from some of these descendants, who do not like the previously established heroic narrative of brave, self-sacrificing and innovative settlers.

Shaw is fair to his Irish antecedents who ‘…set out for a place from which there could be no return, looking for better lives than the ones they’d left behind, and who – through hard work, and commitment to Church, community and family, achieved that ambition.’ There is a sneaking nostalgia for the Sundays of his own childhood:

There was the requisite priest and the regulation nun, the long Latin masses during which some of the men would whip out the back for a smoke while their children sat petrified lest they allow the Holy Host to touch the roofs of their mouths thus condemning them to eternal damnation in an exceptionally hot place. There were the Sunday lunches when those same kids … would sit around the walls on the floor while the adults ate at the table. There was the rugby, most of it played, some of it administered, and one glorious spell involving the Ranfurly Shield.

In common with the earlier books, The Good Settler is rich with literary references to Ursula Le Guin, Richard Flanagan, Hilary Mantel and others. A quote from Tim Winton (‘The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they’ll deceive themselves’) is especially pertinent to those who rally behind the odious Hobson’s Pledge flag. Shaw dubs this the Pākehā creation myth. In the essay ‘Real New Zealanders’ he unpacks what actually happened at Waitangi. There was no pledge. When Lieutenant-Governor Hobson apparently uttered ‘We are now one people’ he said it in te reo Māori: ‘He iwi tahi tatou.’  The true translation is ‘We are peoples together’ which, as Shaw points out, means something else altogether. He comments that ‘the notion of ‘Hobson’s pledge’ is a modern fantasy.’ The full horror of Parihaka and elsewhere is not acknowledged. ‘In this way we reassure ourselves that we, and those from whom we descend, are and were decent, well-intentioned people. There is evasion here, taking place in full view, but we do not see it.’

There are two stand-out essays: ‘Mowing the lawn’ and ‘We’re all equal here.’ The first employs the metaphor of lawns, the taming and mowing of them, as a symbol for colonisation and the acquirement of land. It is also one of the more personal pieces, with talk of Shaw’s relationship with his partner and grief for his late father.  He is a keen mower but notes that ‘lately I’ve begun to wonder if there might not be more to my obsessive need to keep the grass down than I’ve been prepared to admit.’ A study of Ōtautahi Christchurch lawns calculated that ‘native grasses account for just 13 percent of all of the lawn species…and 19 per cent across the entire country’s lawns.’ Shaw is ‘struck by how similar those figures are to the proportion of Māori in the human population’. This is a tiny bit strained, perhaps, but overall the essay is playful, idiosyncratic, intimate.

‘We’re all equal here’ is a finely crafted piece of creative nonfiction that draws the reader into the period of each snapshot with the repetitive ‘It is 1863’, or ‘It is still 1863’, or ‘It is 1945’ etc, through the years of the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth and twenty-first using the present tense. Despite the immediacy of the style, it powerfully demonstrates how slowly the cogs of justice turn, if they turn at all. It delivers the information to the heart and breaks it, in a hard reading journey.

Oddly, he gives the politician Donald McLean a good rap, when in fact McLean is not remembered well by Māori nor those of us whose ancestors worked beside him in that period. My own great-great-great grandmother refers to him in one of her letters as ‘that scamp McLean’ because of his devious dealings, large personal land accumulations in Hawke Bay and part in instigating the Taranaki Wars.

Importantly, the essay demands a fresh look at the last century, which is often neglected in our desire to examine the nineteenth. For example:

It is still 1967, and the new Rating Act gives the Maori [sic] Land Court the power to place control of part or all of any Māori freehold land on which rates have not been paid within six months ‘in a trustee upon trust to lease, sell, or otherwise alienate it’. The authority to sell Māori land on which rates are in arrears will be removed in 1988.

This is shockingly recent but not as recent as the insult Hobson’s Pledge inflicted on Rotorua kuia Ellen Tamati when her image was used ‘as part of their 2025 campaign against the retention of Māori wards and constituencies. Smooth.’  Another offering from recent history is the account of how Nanaia Mahuta worked for the 2022 law change so that 34 Māori wards and 11 Māori constituencies were ‘up for contest… Māori were taking their place at council tables the length of the country. Then the Empire struck back.’ Readers will remember how swiftly the National Government got rid of the wards, Simeon Brown and Judith Collins instrumental.

‘A room of their own’ also works a central metaphor – in this case the land thefts represented by the furore over Māori students having their own rooms on campus, wherein they can seek company with one another and retreat from the mainstream. MP Parmjeet Parmar comes in for a bollocking: ‘It surprises me…that Parmar seems unacquainted with political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, whose distinction between negative freedom (the absence of barriers) and positive freedom (the possibility of taking control over one’s life and realising one’s purposes) is apposite. Sir Isaiah was big on pluralism… Berlin is a behemoth in the liberal tradition but Dr Parmar seems not to have read him.’

I would have liked to have read Shaw’s take on the phenomenon of the young Pākehā burdened with guilt and envy, wishing that they too had Māori ancestry to feel like real New Zealanders. Another minor gap in the work, perhaps, is an examination of guilt itself and how we can learn to live without it dragging at our hearts, if ever. The pudding is a little overegged in the final essay, where he describes how since the publication of his first book he has enjoyed attending writers’ festivals and events and meeting his readers. He feels guilty that he in some way benefits from land theft and the horror of Parihaka: ‘Each time, violence done to others lies behind some small pleasure for me.’

Shaw’s anger is more constructive than his guilt. He finishes ‘A room of their own’ with all guns blazing:

We came for the land, as colonisers do. But our appetite is never slaked. Not content with the confiscations, broken commitments and dodgy land deals, we Pākehā want all the other spaces too. All the rooms, all the wards, all the constituencies. All the power. All the control. Wherever and whenever Māori manage to push the margins back and carve out a bit of room to stand as themselves, we are in like a shot, doing our best to shut them down before it gets out of hand.

Why are we such gluttons?

The titular essay offers hope that in the future there will be such a thing as a good settler, who – fully cognisant of all the dark, shameful and frightening aspects of their history – will find a way to dispel remaining ignorance, fear and racism. ‘What many of us want to leave is not this place but its past,’ Shaw suggests. ‘We are trying hard to move on from ourselves, as if we are internally displaced people in search of safe haven.’ He believes that anger results because ‘a narrative forged at a time when Pākehā were accustomed to having their way is no longer making sense. The deep story is losing its grip on the imagination.’ He acknowledges the difficulty incurred in readdressing family history: ‘When word gets out that the past is being revisited, both the living and the dead have plenty to say.  For some among the quick, a family’s collective memory is the emotional equivalent of a war memorial: sacrosanct and not to be tampered with under any circumstances. It can get a bit testy.’

In the wider community, Shaw knows more than most exactly how testy it can get.