The Forgotten Coast
The Forgotten Coast
On the 5th of November 1881 my great-grandfather, Andrew Gilhooly, marched into Parihaka with 1,588 other men and tore the place down. A member of the Armed Constabulary, he would stay on at the pā for three years as part of an occupation force, returning a decade later to buy a farm on the South Road, one small part of the huge swathe of Taranaki that had been confiscated from mana whenua in 1865.
In time, Andrew and his wife, Kate Fleming, would run three farms. That land enabled my great-grandparents to break with a long history of Irish poverty by reinventing themselves as members of a tightly knit coastal Taranaki community. Dispossessed in their own land, they came to this one and turned themselves into New Zealanders. But they did so on land that the colonial state had taken from other people. What was a beginning for them was an ending for others.
I didn’t know any of this detail when I was growing up, and only stumbled across it in the process of writing a book called The Forgotten Coast. Since its publication I’ve heard from a great many other people with stories not unlike mine. Like me, a lot of them are both unsettled by the part their ancestors played in the colonisation of this country and keen to understand what those personal histories mean for them today. They understand that we are a consequence of our past – and that finding what has been forgotten is one way of contributing to a better future.
This website makes available some of what I have written about forgotten family stories and the ways in which the descendants of settler-colonial families benefit from their histories – and gives people with an interest in these sorts of things the chance to contribute to an ongoing research project.
Thanks for visiting The Forgotten Coast.
Richard Shaw
About the Author
Richard Shaw
I am Pākehā and also a French citizen. In my day job I am a professor of politics at Massey University, where I teach New Zealand politics and research the ins and outs of government decision-making.
Please feel free to contact me at [email protected]
Publications & Media
The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation
Publications
After The Forgotten Coast was published a lot of other people who are also trying to get their heads around their settler-colonial family histories got in touch with me. Many of them, too, have only recently realised that their roots in this place lie in damage and violence done to Māori. I learned a great deal from these people - about the things we, as Pākehā, choose to remember (or forget); about how we make sense of our family histories; and about what we do when we figure out that the pioneer stories many of us grew up with sometimes mask another, darker side to our pasts that we do not much speak of. This book - published by Massey University Press in 2024 - is about those people and their stories.
The Forgotten Coast
Publications
I did not set out to write The Forgotten Coast. The book began as a story about two men – my father, Bob, and a great-uncle, Dick, who studied at the Irish Pontifical College in Rome and was ordained a priest at the age of 22 – but became about something much bigger than either of them. The story contains many characters: armed constables, stroppy Irish matriarchs, academic prodigies who were also good boxers, and a quiet man who grew up in an orphanage in Masterton. Mostly, though, it is about parts of a settler-colonial family’s history that were quietly forgotten, how I benefitted from the silence, and what I think might be gained by ending that selective historical amnesia.
If you’d like to learn more about the book and to read reviews written by Rachel Buchanan, Paul Diamond, David Hill, and others, please visit the publisher's website.
Research
Most of those who have got in touch after reading The Forgotten Coast tell me that they are keen to put together a more honest and accurate version of the small parts their ancestors played in the colonisation of this country. This would help them, they tend to say, to stand upright here a little more comfortably.
We don’t really know all that much about these ‘small stories’ of colonisation – the ones woven from encounters between colleagues, friends and family members that take place far from the ‘big stories’ forged in ministers’ offices, government departments and court rooms - but I think there's an appetite to hear them.
So I've put together a wee research project, the aim of which is to gather together the ‘small stories’ of Pākehā New Zealanders. Some of the people who are already participating in the project come from families who have been here for a long time; others are more recent arrivals. Time is not the point – what I want to do is give people the chance to share their thoughts on the ways in which their own personal histories intersect with the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand.
The project – which has been approved by my University’s Ethics Committee (read the information sheet) – comprises an online questionnaire which can be completed below. You can also download the questionnaire as a Microsoft Word file and email it to me at [email protected].
Because of the sensitive nature of the research, unless you choose otherwise your responses will be anonymous: i.e. I will not attribute them to you by name in articles or books. However, I also appreciate that some people want to have their words attributed to them. If this is the case for you, please jot your name down here: If you leave this space blank I will not attribute your words to you in publications emerging from this research.
I’m keen to provide readers of the publications that will come out of this project with a sense of the people who contributed to it. Regardless of your response to Q1, if you are happy to tell me a little about yourself (where you come from; your age; where you live; what you do; etc.) please do so here. (And if you’re not, simply leave the space blank.)
Many Pākehā/European New Zealanders grow up with stories of how their families came to Aotearoa New Zealand and established themselves here – whenever that might have been. (Mine is the standard ‘migrated from Ireland and became a farming family’ one.) What sorts of stories about how your family established itself in this place did you grow up with?
My sense is that the origin stories of many Pākehā/European New Zealander families leave certain things out. (Mine certainly did: I did not know, growing up, of my great-grandfather’s participation in the invasion of Parihaka, nor that the family farms were on land that had been confiscated from Taranaki Māori.) Are there things you feel your own family stories leave out? If so, what were they?
Why do you think these things don’t feature in your stories (which is another way of asking if you think that forgetting certain things might not be accidental; that it might serve some purpose)?
Of course, there are also Pākehā/European New Zealander families in which those sorts of challenging things have not been forgotten. If that is the case for you, please tell me more about this. I am interested, too, in your thoughts on what these stories might say about the part your people may have played – if any – in the colonization of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Historian Lucy McIntosh speaks of how ‘the present moment is inflected with remnants of earlier histories’, which I read as meaning that resources generated in previous generations flow through to and benefit subsequent generations (e.g. through the process of inheritance). Thinking back to the people in your family who first came to this country, to what extent do you think their circumstances have contributed to your own current situation?
Also, what sorts of things have been handed down to you? They might be material (e.g. land or inherited wealth) but they might also be less tangible (e.g. the sense of self and identity that comes from having a place to stand).
Some Pākehā/New Zealanders (including me) are unsettled by aspects of the circumstances in which their ancestors established themselves in Aotearoa New Zealand. If that is the case for you, what is the cause of that discomfort?
What do you think could be done to address the sense of unease or discomfort referred to in Q9? Are these things you can do (or perhaps are doing) yourself? Are they things your family could address? Are they things that are the responsibility of the wider national community?
I’m interested in why you agreed to participate in this research, and I’m interested in what the process of responding to these questions has been like for you (has it, for instance, had any influence on the way you think or feel about your past, or altered your views on the future?). If you’d like to offer your thoughts on either or both of these issue, please do so
If there is anything else you’d like to share with me, please feel free to do so.
Finally, are you happy for me to contact you again if I need to clarify anything to do with your responses?
Thank you for taking the time to share your stories.
All done!
Public Speaking
I've been surprised - and heartened - by the interest shown in my writing on Pākehā memory and forgetting. Here's a list of some of the presentations I've done and conversations I've been part of: New Plymouth Springboard (2021, 2024); Friends of Te Papa (2021, 2024); Auckland Writers Festival (2022); Going West (2022); Palmerston North Public Library (2022); Taranaki Womens Club (2022); Featherston Booktown (2023); New Zealand History Teachers' Annual Conference (2023); Taranaki Heritage Month (2023, 2024); Queenstown Catalyst Trust (2023); the National Library's Public History series (2024); WORD Christchurch; VERB Wellington