Settlers wage war on iwi

The Space Between by New Zealand

By Lauren Keenan, Penguin, $37 Reviewed by Louise Ward

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It’s 1860 in New Plymouth and Frances is a recent arrival to New Zealand, her family’s circumstances having been greatly reduced. In London she was a lady, gloved hands and crinolines; in Taranaki her hands are hardened by raising vegetables, pigs and chickens, and by kneading dough.

They only have one servant. Oh the shame. It was hard for me to like Frances, at first.

Nearby, Mata¯ria lives on her papka¯inga with her children, twins Betsy and Edwin, and her Pa¯keha¯ husband Henry.

She is an outsider within her community having been taken as a slave many years earlier, only to return home with a white husband. Her sister, Atarangi, willingly looks after The Boy and The Girl, but offers no warmth to Mata¯ria.

The two worlds collide when Frances meets Henry in New Plymouth. He is the man who disappeared from their imminent engagement years before and she understandably has some questions for him.

More urgently though, the settlers are agitating for more land and Te

tiawa, Mata¯ria’s people, are not prepared to sell. History buffs will be well aware of what happens next.

Lauren Keenan (Te ti Awa ki Taranaki) is an historian, a writer of short stories, articles and children’s fiction and this her first “grown-up” novel, as impeccably researched as one would expect.

She is interested in exploring not only the history of her own whenua and its people, but in the space between, where many have been obliged to dwell, postcolonisation.

Frances and Mata¯ria have no clear place in their society or family, they occupy a grey place where they were once one thing, and now another. Their lives are vastly different but their experiences make them alien to themselves.

This is a story of the New Zealand Wars, of two characters so well rendered as to bring the women of the time, Ma¯ori and Pa¯keha¯, to the fore.

It’s an historical novel, and a social, feminist history, as well as a drama in the vein of Jenny Pattrick and Fiona Kidman. The Space Between does something new, something pertinent to right now, and it does it very well indeed.