March 17, 2025

Unsettling NZ History

Ko Vincent O’Malley toku ingoa

He kaimahi hītori au

Nō Airangi, Koterangi me Ingarangi ōku tīpuna

I tipu ake au ki Ōtautahi

E noho ana au ki Te Whanganui-a-Tara

No reira, nau mai, haere mai ki tēnei kōrero.

Tēnā koutou katoa and welcome to this first edition of Unsettling: Aotearoa New Zealand History. My name is Vincent O’Malley and I am a historian of colonial New Zealand. You can read more about me here or here but briefly, I am a Pākehā of Irish, Scottish and English descent. I grew up in a big Irish Catholic working class household in Christchurch, the ninth of nine kids, living in a state house in Upper Riccarton. My dad worked at Addington Railway Workshops as a wood machinist and my mother was a cleaner. Actually I was too. I started in the history department at Canterbury University at the age of 15, working as a cleaner after school. My mum was my boss. Three or four years later I went back to actually study there and remembered those who had been kind to me when I was simply there to empty their bins and vacuum their floors. 

I have talked many times before about how I had no real exposure to New Zealand history at school and stumbled across it almost accidentally at university. Since that time I have been passionate about the need for all New Zealanders to learn about our own history. And that is why I write books or blog or spend time on social media preaching the need to engage with our history warts and all. Because if we know one thing, it is that so many of us either learnt no New Zealand history during their own school years or else got the rose-tinted version (best ‘race relations’ in the world, etc). Only a very lucky few, with dedicated and extraordinary teachers who went out of their way to teach it, got a real education in our history. 

So as adults many of us are trying to catch up. And I see this newsletter as an extension of my mission to assist with that process. I still have a blog open available to everyone. And I will post other material on here for everyone from time to time. But I’ve also made the decision to introduce a paid subscription tier in this newsletter as a way of ensuring I am able to deliver regular content. That, in my experience, is the big challenge when you are not in a salaried role or position. For those who do take up a paid subscription, I will aim to provide exclusive content at least a couple of times a month. 

As for what I write, expect a large dose of Aotearoa New Zealand history. I’m a historian, after all. But since the past permeates the present, I expect I might from time to time also introduce a historical lenses to contemporary debates. And since I’m also interested in the wider history of colonisation and imperialism, expect occasional forays into this wider context also. I might even post the occasional piece of work in progress. 

Before I sign off from my inaugural post on here, a word about the title of this newsletter. In 2006 I was invited to contribute a chapter on two New Zealand historians to a book about Oceania historiography published by the University of Hawai’i Press as Texts and Contexts: Reflections in Pacific Islands Historiography, edited by Doug Munro and Brij. V. Lal. The two works I was asked to write about were Keith Sinclair’s The Origins of the Maori Wars, published in 1957, and Alan Ward’s magisterial 1973 work A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand. But Ward also wrote a later (and slimmer) book, An Unsettled History: Treaty Claims in New Zealand Today (Bridget Williams Books, 1995), and it was this volume that inspired me when it came time to think of a chapter title. 

Ward was essentially using the term ‘unsettled’ in a prosaic way to refer to unsettled Treaty of Waitangi claims. But in titling my chapter ‘Unsettling New Zealand History: The Revisionism of Sinclair and Ward’, I had another meaning in mind. I was using the word ‘unsettling’ as a metaphor for decolonising. Moving beyond a settler mentality might be another way of thinking about it. 

More recently, Richard Shaw’s wonderful book The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation (Massey University Press, 2024), uses ‘unsettled’ to refer to those disturbed or un-nerved by this process of decolonisation. That is another aspect to it. In order to decolonise you first have to be confronted with the truth and that is going to be unsettling for some. Paulette Regan writes about this also in her book about the residential schools system in Canada (Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada, UBC Press, 2010), quoting Webster’s Dictionary definition of ‘unsettle’: ‘to loosen or move from a settled state or condition…to perturb or agitate mentally or emotionally’. 

I hope I don’t leave my readers here too agitated, mentally or emotionally. You be the judge of that and I hope you do take the opportunity to read and subscribe for future editions of Unsettling: Aotearoa New Zealand History.

Noho ora mai rā

Vincent