The Unsettled by Richard Shaw

Author:Richard Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Massey University Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The work is slow, laborious, often frustrating. Neither does it really seem to end, taking on the raiment of a process of becoming rather than a state of being.

There are moments when something clangs into place, and you wonder how you could possibly have missed it before. I have long known that the Irish were unsettled by and because of the poverty created by centuries of English colonisation. I have not long known that, long after the Tudors and Cromwell, my great-grandparents — still impoverished, still landless, still dispossessed — sailed to the other side of the world where, unwittingly or otherwise, they contributed to the unsettling of mana whenua on the Taranaki coast. I do not understand why it took me so long to understand that what is an Irish staple — valorising the heroic position of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the colonised — is not extended to the tangata whenua of Aotearoa.

Six hundred years after the confiscation of land in Ireland my ancestors were still living in poverty, scrabbling about on small pieces of dirt owned by absentee English landlords; still bearing out Sir William Martin’s warning that ‘the claim of the dispossessed owner is remembered from generation to generation’. And here we are — some of us, anyway, including people with ties to Ireland who harbour strong views about perfidious Albion — telling Māori to get over it and move on.4

There is a double standard at work here, and the only explanation for it is that it justifies our (my) place here and conveniently absolves us (me) of responsibility for Māori disadvantage. And ‘the worst of it’, as Susan says, ‘is that it was so recent — not 500 years ago, but the middle of the nineteenth century, a time when the British people who were directing the massacres here were well educated and knew exactly what they were doing’.

When we begin digging around in our past, familiar places — the ‘tiny landscapes’ that carry the memories of earlier times — start to look different.5 Our relationship with them can start to shift, too. St Joseph’s Church in New Plymouth is an important place for me. I served on its altar when I was a schoolboy (having figured out that having stuff to do — ringing bells, carrying the wine up to the priest and generally ferrying the paraphernalia of the Roman Catholic mass around the stage — was how you made it interesting); I sang alongside my great friend Bernard Leuthart in its choir; and generations of my dead — including my father — have had the Requiem Mass said for them in that church. It is part of the backdrop of my life.

I don’t spend a lot of time there these days, but I like visiting it when I return to New Plymouth to see Mum. There is a quiet sense of peace to be found in sitting there, alone, thinking about how the different threads of my past come together in that place. Tucked

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