Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Harbouring, by Jenny Pattrick.

 

  

        Jenny Pattick’s tenth novel is set in 1840, in the fledgling settlement of Port Nicholson founded by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his brothers, proprietors of the New Zealand Company – a business set up in Britain to sell ‘country acres’ to wealthy investors, and single acre lots to those providing commerce and the means to house and feed those well-heeled investors who felt adventurous enough to make the four-month journey to this new and exciting land by ship, a journey fraught with discomfort and danger;  even more so for the migrants and their young families who travelled in the bowels of the ship, enduring terrible hardship and privation, all so that they could be servants to said investors – if they made the journey alive.

            Huw and Martha Pengellin of Wales are a just such a ‘steerage’ family; they are forced by grinding poverty and political unrest into considering the unthinkable:  to make a start in the Great Unknown, or starve, cheated out of what they own by English overlords.  When she arrives in New Zealand, Martha will be a washerwoman, but Huw travels first;  he is useful to the Wakefields for his quartermaster skills;  they have heard that the natives will sell land for all manner of implements, but muskets are preferred – the more a tribe is armed, the more powerful against its enemies.  Huw has a good ear for languages, too, and learns Maori from Rere and Te Whaiti, two crew members on his ship, but he is dismayed to learn that after their arrival, there appears to be different versions between Maori and the Wakefields as to what actually is for sale:  in Port Nicholson, survey pegs are hammered into Maori vegetable gardens and long-established Pa.  It is not long before hostilities arise – and pakeha diseases spread:  it doesn’t take long for drinking water from streams to be polluted when night soil is emptied into it.

Ms Pattrick, as always, enthrals us with her wonderful characters, each of whom narrate their chapters and propel the plot forward at dizzying speed;  such is her artistry that the reader feels the joys of a new world – and its tragedies – as they happen.  And it is thrilling for this reader to recognise in the nascent settlement of Port Nicholson the bones of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand’s capital city.  And the ‘native’ point of view is exemplified by Hineroa, a slave whose tribe was conquered by Te Rauparaha and his bloodthirsty nephew Te Rangihaeata.  She was given to whalers, one of whom taught her to read the Bible, and her future hand-to-mouth existence and life-choices are the gripping heart of the story.  Bravo, Ms Pattrick.  SIX STARS.