Richard Shaw: We are not one people: From Parihaka to a Pākehā myth

On the morning of the 5th November 1881, an Irishman called Andrew Gilhooly formed up alongside other members of the Armed Constabulary at the entrance to Parihaka pā; he was there for the invasion, the occupation and — much later — for the farming of land taken from Taranaki iwi.

But those events dropped out of the family stories handed down to Gilhooly’s descendants; neither do they feature in national narratives of fairness, egalitarianism and equal treatment.

Richard Shaw, one of Gilhooly’s descendants, will explore the relationship between historical amnesia amongst (some) descendants of settler families and the stories we tell each other of the nation we live in.

Speaker

Richard Shaw is a professor politics at Massey University. His academic publications include the Edward Elgar Handbook on Ministerial and Political Advisers (2003) and Core Executives in a Comparative Context (2022). His work has been published in leading international journals. He is also the author The Forgotten Coast (2021), The Unsettled (2024), short listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and The Good Settler (2026) which address matters of memory and forgetting amongst settler families in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In person or via Zoom.

Free. Koha from non-members appreciated.