An Uncommon Land

A Review by Paul Dalziel

In May 2025, Catherine Knight published her fifth book, An Uncommon Land: From an ancestral post of enclosure towards a regenerative future. Further details are available on Catherine’s website at https://www.catherineknight.nz/.

On 12 August 2025, Scorpio Books in Christchurch hosted a function to celebrate the publication of An Uncommon Land. I was asked to introduce the book and then to facilitate a question and answer session between Catherine and the audience of about 40 to 50 people.

I began with a short mihi.

Catherine wanted the evening to be interactive, so to begin the audience participation, I asked those present to put up their hand if they were not surprised by my short mihi in te reo. It turned out this was everyone – no one was surprised.

I then asked people to put up their hand again if they understood, perhaps roughly, at least some of what I had said in the mihi. This was almost everyone – I saw only two people with their hands still down.

I observed that I did not think there would have been anywhere near as many hands raised at an event like this one even 25 years ago in 2000, and certainly not 50 years ago when Dame Whina Cooper led the 1975 Māori Land March. I observed, “We are changing as a people. By ‘we’ I mean we descendants of settlers.”

We are learning to hear the voices of tangata whenua. We are learning to acknowledge the intergenerational trauma caused by violent dispossessions during colonisation. We are learning to listen to the cry of the land as human overconsumption wreaks havoc on the planet’s ecosystems. Perhaps not all of us, but a lot of us.

Writers are helping us. Michael King in 1985 called it Being Pākehā. Alison Jones entitled her 2020 book, This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir. Last year, Richard Shaw entitled his book, The Unsettled: Small stories of colonisation.

Catherine’s book is part of this ‘unsettling’ tradition. Like those other authors, Catherine writes beautifully. Like their books, her book offers a deeply personal story describing people and places important to Catherine’s extended family. This book stands out in this literature in at least three ways.

First, Catherine’s five previous books were all concerned with the natural environment, and so this sixth book is able to build on her deep engagement with what her first book called this country’s ‘ravaged beauty’.

Second, this new book provides a compelling narrative about people and place but adds the further dimension of intergenerational time, using Catherine’s skills as an historian to take us on a journey through our ancestral past in search of a more hopeful future.

Third, the book draws on Catherine’s extensive experience in public policy to analyse systems and mindsets standing in the way of a regenerative future that could promote what really matters to us as human beings.

In short, this is an important book written by a person of considerable mana that offers us a new way of seeing the place of our generation in this place. This new way of seeing comes from consciously recovering our historical memories.

Another Pākehā author writing in Catherine’s tradition is Hugh Campbell. Hugh’s 2020 book, Farming Inside Invisible Worlds, is available open access at https://www.bloomsbury.com/ uk/farming-inside-invisible-worlds-9781350120549/. His title makes the similar point that we descendants of settlers have buried our histories where they cannot be seen.  Catherine explains her own perspective in one of my favourite sentences of her book, on page 199:

The central premise of this book is that our collective histories abound with experience and memory, from which can be distilled wisdom – wisdom transmitted through our DNA but perhaps not consciously remembered, wisdom that hints at paths of the road not taken in our social history: signposts signalling the possibilities of a different future.

Thus, Catherine makes visible ancestral stories and how her ancestors connected to the land, benefitting from the violent dispossession of tangata whenua. Catherine tells these stories within their own historical context. This then becomes the foundation for the second half of the book that reimagines a future with ‘a commons mindset’. It is a superb read.

The evening then moved into a question-and-answer session with Catherine. I did not take notes and so will not attempt a summary. Each question led to thoughtful and wide-ranging answers from Catherine.

I congratulate Catherine on her book and thank the whole team at Scorpio Books for their organisation of the event and their hospitality on the night.