Book review: The Good Settler by Richard Shaw

The Parihaka Album by Rachel Buchanan analyses photographic and archival material related to Parihaka, exploring how images have shaped understandings of the 19th-century settlement and its invasion. Buchanan situates the album within broader discussions of memory, representation, and the politics of documenting indigenous resistance. The book illuminates silenced perspectives and the power dynamics embedded in colonial visual culture. It offers critical context to stories of Parihaka and complements scholarship on settler histories and remembrance. The work has been influential in reframing public conversations about apology, accountability, and archival recovery.

The Forgotten Coast began as personal writing by Richard Shaw after his father's death, exploring family stories tied to colonisation and land in coastal Taranaki. The book prompted public response and dialogue, leading Shaw to further research and subsequent books. It blends memoir, local history, and critical reflection on how settler families benefited from land confiscations. Shaw uses the book to connect intimate family narratives to larger national histories of dispossession and contested memory. The work contributed to a broader conversation in New Zealand about acknowledging and teaching the fuller history of colonisation.

Richard Shaw's The Good Settler collects essays that trace personal and national histories tied to colonisation, focusing on how settler families inherited land and narratives in Aotearoa. Drawing on Shaw's family history — including an ancestor involved in the 1881 Parihaka invasion — the book interrogates myths of equality and the settler story. Shaw situates personal recollection alongside wider historical examples of land confiscation, broken deals, and legal mechanisms that disadvantaged Māori. The essays aim to prompt readers, especially Pākehā, to confront uncomfortable truths about inheritance, identity, and the country's past. The book completes a trilogy that began with The Forgotten Coast and continues Shaw’s public engagement on historical remembrance and reckoning.