The Forgotten Coast

  • 12 August 2024

A book I thoroughly enjoyed, one for its history and story, and second, I felt a strong recognition of his perspective. Richard Shaw is Pakeha, and his great-grandparents were settlers. Richard grew up focused on family farming history and was proud of the stories. But behind the scenes, another story had been forgotten. In most cases, I haven't commented on Richard's quotes - they seem so apt about how I am feeling that I don't seem to be able to add to them.

p.21
"In this country you can no longer simply put statements like these quietly aside (although that is exactly what I have done for the better part of fifty years). They must be comprehended and made sense of. Above all else for me, they need coming to terms with."

And so for me. Shaw does this by writing, and I hope to do this with my painting practice.

p.22
Shaw describes where his great grandfather comes from - poor, Irish, one of 10 children, paying rent to an Englishman to farm 29 acres. My great grandfather was Scottish, came to NZ when he was 22, farmed, married and had 13 children. His father was a blacksmith.

p.44
Shaw quotes a French priest, Michel Quoist: "It matters not whether you are among those that hit or among those that watch, among those that perform or among those who let it happen. You are guilty, actors and spectators." Something to remember, great words.

p.45
"Forgetting is rarely innocent. People have to work hard not to know, not to recall, not to see, to be truly ignorant."  Rachel Buchanan, Ko Taranaki Te Maunga (Wellington: Bridget William Books, 2018), 63

p.57
"Early in the piece there will invariably be an origin sentence such as 'My family arrived in Taranaki in 1883 and has been there ever since.' or some such. But what came before these sentences almost always remains untold. History begins with the purchase of the family farm." And so for my family - our story begins with the 1910 land ballot.

p. 63
"Maps are hard working things whose job is to control space and give it meaning."
I want to paint, recreate the old maps around the Hauraki Plain area. I want to point out that taking control, taking over that the new government did.

"...the purpose is to impose Pākehā order on te ao Māori..."

p.65
"The maps have done the political work of Bryce, Rolleston and the AC, slicing open the acres, roods and perches, obliterating the presence of Māori and erasing the history inscribed on the land."

p.89
"Yet it is unquestionably where I come from: the ghosts and the histories and the memories and the stories and the characters and the landmarks and the living and the dead...."

p. 90
".. and I don't doubt that what I see as a landscape is seen by others as a "traumascape" in which the past is never over.

p. 198
"The past flows through the present and on into the future. Hilary Mantel knows this: "True. Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labour on, screened from us by smoke."

p. 199
"Most of the rest would be purchased by the Crown through a torturous system of vouchers, gratuities and other dubious financial intsruments which collectively comprised a process that the 1880 West Coast Commission called 'simply make-believe' and 'nothing but secret bribery'.

p.202
"This history cannot be peeled off and put aside. Now that I know it, it cannot be unknown. It is not enough, I find, to take refuge in the fact that as far as the law at the time was concerned, Andrew and Kate's purchases, and the lease of the Opourapa Road Farm, were legal."

p. 203
"There was nothing remotely impartial about the decisions that flowed from that system, so let's not hide behind that sort of drivel."

p. 205
"Neither is it acceptable to say, as some people will, that the events recounted in this book are ancient history and we should all move on. This is simply another form of forgetting...."

p. 207
" I was close to fifty-five years of age before these thigs finally began to disturb the comfortable rhythms of my days."
And I was close to sixty, and that is disturbing - a long time to be living, listening, but not yet being too disturbed.

p. 219
"And so around and around I go, trying to untangle things I don't fully understand. Trying to get this story right is part of the unravelling, but for moment I accept that I need to live with and in the uncertainty and the discomfort.

p. 221
On gathering as much information as he can: "I'm trying to make sense of it, not seek redemption from it."

p. 224
"...best I get my story straight. Best I end the forgetting."

More to follow.


Richard Shaw. The Forgotten Coast. Massey University Press Auckland New Zealand 2021

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