Monty Soutar is a respected New Zealand historian who took a big step and turned his life upside down to write a game changing novel. Kāwai For Such A Time As This, is the first instalment in what is to be a three book family saga, which went straight to the top of the bestseller lists in New Zealand and stayed there for 22 weeks.

Hi there, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And it’s quite likely no one else but Monty has the knowledge and understanding to undertake a book like it, in the tradition of Alex Haley’s Roots, introducing readers to pre-European Maori life in much the same way as Alex Haley’s tale of tracing his roots back to Africa captivated an international audience.

Monty tells the fascinating tale of how he came to write it and explains how all of his life experience seemed to be leading up to this point. A perfect preparation for writing a trilogy, telling a story of nation building through the eyes of its original people.

Our Giveaway for this week is Free Historical Fiction for June and Sadie’s Vow, my Book #1 in the Home At Last trilogy is included in a good range of other selections.

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Links for Monty’s Episode:

Alex Haley Roots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots:_The_Saga_of_an_American_Family

NZ East Coast and Gisborne: https://www.newzealand.com/int/feature/auckland-to-wellington-east-coast-journey/

https://www.tairawhitigisborne.co.nz/

Whakatane: https://www.whakatane.com/

NZ Wars of 1860s: https://teara.govt.nz/en/new-zealand-wars#

Ngati Porou:  https://ngatiporou.com/

Ngati Awa: https://ngatiawa.iwi.nz/

Monty Soutar Nga Tamatoa: The Price of Citizenship: C Company 28 , (Maori Battalion) 1939 – 45, in the Second World War https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5509025

Monty Soutar: Whiti Whiti Whiti, Maori in the First World War: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51092025-whitiki-whiti-whiti-e

Captain James Cook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cook

Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Part:  https://www.amazon.com.au/Things-Fall-apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547

Victoria Hislop, The Island: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/922991.The_Island

The Red Tent, Anita Diamant:  https://www.amazon.com.au/Red-Tent-Novel-Tenth-anniversary/dp/0312427298

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: https://www.amazon.com.au/Wolf-Hall-Hilary-Mantel/dp/0312429983

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton:  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333230-the-luminaries

Patricia Grace, Tu: https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/tu-9780143019206

Witi Ihimaera: https://www.penguin.co.nz/authors/witi-ihimaera

Where to find Monty Online

Publisher website: https://www.batemanbooks.co.nz/product/kwai-for-such-a-time-as-this/Amazon

Facebook: @montysoutarauthor

Booktopia: https://www.booktopia.com.au/kawai-monty-soutar/book/9781776890309.html

Amazon.com.au: https://www.amazon.com.au/K%C4%81wai-Such-Time-As-This-ebook/dp/B0BPJNP3QC/

Introducing Kawai author Monty Soutar

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Monty. Hello there, Monty, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us

Dr Monty Soutar, respected historian and author of a new NZ historical series

Monty Soutar: Thank you, Jenny. I’m pleased to be beyond the show. Kia ora ki a koe. (Ed note: Greetings and Hello to you.)

Jenny Wheeler: Kia ora. (Hello Yes.) Now we’ve mentioned in the intro about how Roots was partly the thing that sparked this and. Alex Haley’s roots was published way back in the late seventies when you were just a wee toddler. So how did you come to be aware of it and what sort of an impact did it have on you when you were a younger boy?

Monty Soutar: Well, no, I wasn’t a toddler. I was at secondary school when I saw the series. So I never read the book. I saw the series on television. It was one of the I think it was the biggest television series in terms of audience in New Zealand up until that time.

And what intrigued me about it was that this guy was able to track his family’s history through really some oral accounts that had been passed down through the family. And it reminded me so much of how Maori keep their records orally. And the other thing that impressed me was his own journey.

Towards the end of the series it looked at his story about how he found this information about his family and it resonated with me because I was doing that at pretty much at the same time as young as I was. I was trying to find out more about my family history and in watching the program, it was almost like it grabbed him in a way that he couldn’t let it go.

It’s almost like he was meant to do this, and I had that same feeling. I didn’t know why I was interested in history, particularly Maori history. Why in my family, there was seven in my family, brothers and sisters, but I was the one who had this passion to know who we were. Something had been planted it in me.

That’s what I found and that’s why Alex Haley’s Roots resonated with me and him particularly, in his journey.

Monty Soutar’s starting point in his writing journey

Jenny Wheeler: Great. So give us a picture of yourself at that stage. For those who aren’t so familiar with New Zealand, where in New Zealand were you? What tribal affiliations did you have? Set the picture for us a little bit.

Monty Soutar: Yes, well, everybody thinks Maori are one group of people. We’re tribal. And there’s slight differences between the tribes. Where you come from actually matters.

And I come from on my mother’s side, the East Coast of the North Island from a tribe where people known as Ngati Porou, and on my father’s side, I come from Whakatane from a tribe known as Ngati Awa, who had two entirely different experiences of colonization.

One, on my father’s side, they lost all their land as a result of the wars fought in the 1860s. And that meant that their journey post the 1860s was quite a depressing one, and had huge psychological impacts on the people, I believe.

 But on my mother’s side, we retained all our land and we fought on the side of the New Zealand government or the British Crown. And so we had a much more favorable future as a result.

I was at boarding school in the late seventies – a Catholic boarding school in Fielding at the time. We were born Anglicans, but we’re pretty flexible as Maori people.

We all believe we’re praying to the same God and it was the education we were after rather than the religion. That’s where I was as a young person. I wasn’t studying history, because the priest told me it wouldn’t get me a job once I got out of school.

I never pursued it then. But I just had this innate interest in learning more about my own history and particularly Maori history.

The first in a trilogy covering 200 hundred years

Jenny Wheeler: Probably it’s good to point out that this is the first in a trilogy, so this book takes us to the point when the European “discoverers” in the form of Captain James Cook arrive in 1769.

The next two books are going to cover the much later development of the story. It’s very much a work in progress at the moment.

But the subtitle of the book is, For Such A Time As This, and it’s very much a book of its time. Talk a bit about that subtitle, it comes up in the book, but also it’s relevant to what’s happening in New Zealand right now.

Monty Soutar: Yes, it appears a number of times during the story, but right now in New Zealand, we seem to be on the cusp of change in my view.

Right now, this year, 2023, we’ve introduced into the New Zealand School Curriculum compulsory learning of New Zealand history, right through from I guess the infants through to the end of secondary school. And that’s a first, which suggests to me that attitudes have changed, where we realize knowing about our past is important.

And I think this particular book is written with a view to being introduced in the curriculum.

And that’s another reason I did it. I think that 10 years ago maybe, 15 years ago, I don’t think the country was ready to visit the past in terms of our pre-colonial history.

Nobody really wants to go there and look at the impact of colonization on the indigenous people of this country and how it shaped New Zealand.

I think that this younger generation that’s coming through, they don’t have the issues we had growing up with, I guess with our race relations, with knowing who we really are.

A ‘road to Damascus’ experience in the birthing

But you know, I do believe that to go forward you’ve got to know where you come from.

I think For Such A Time As This is right now is that time and we are ready to revisit our past and I think this novel actually opens the door to the past in a way that none other has done so far.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I do agree with you there. You tell the story of how you came to write it, almost like it’s a spiritual odyssey. It’s like ‘a road to Damascus’ encounter that you had as you were planning or thinking about it.

Can you tell us how everything that you’d been doing, perhaps up into that point in your life, grew together and created something quite new and sudden and rather challenging.

Monty Soutar: In 2019, I finished my most recent non-fiction book, which was a Nga Tamatoa, History of Maori participation in the First World War. It’s a huge book.

It took me about five years to research and write, so I was pretty almost burned out after that and decided to go on holiday with my wife. And because I’d put so much time into that I felt there was an opportunity to just to sit back and have a blow, really.

We were heading to Greece for three months to spend time with our friends. But before I left, I had an inkling that there’s something I’m supposed to do next, and it’s not non-fiction.

I was thinking about it and I thought it might be that I’m going to turn to fiction, largely because I felt that the audience through non-fiction is not as great  and as well, the audience I was really interested in was young people, I felt that fiction was the way to reach them, but I just didn’t quite know what I was going to write.

I was in bed with my wife at about 4:30am, if I remember right.

I guess because I was thinking about it. I was half asleep and I heard this voice. I didn’t actually hear it, but this impression in my mind just said, ‘Get Roots.’

It was clear and I woke up about an hour and a half later and I said to my wife, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get this book, Roots.’

The voice of ‘intuition’ speaks

I knew all it said was ‘Get Roots,’ but somehow I knew and understood what that meant.

It was to get the book Roots and read it which I’d never read. As I was mentioning to you before Jenny, the Roots TV series was well known to me from the 1970s.

My wife has heard me before say that I’ve heard things and she knows enough about me to know that this is actually could be real.

I wasn’t sure, but we were heading back to Gisborne. It was a Sunday in Auckland, so there’s no bookshops open. And I said, well, the book’s so old, you probably have to go to second hand bookshop or a rare bookshop.

We’re driving back to Gisborne and we get to this little place called Paeroa, which is a little town between Auckland and Gisborne, on a Sunday when you wouldn’t expect anything to be open.

I was asleep and my wife was driving and she nudged me and she said, “Hey, look. There’s a Red Cross book sale on the side of the road,” and I looked up and sure enough, and there were these boxes of books there that were being sold and on a Sunday. It’s was pretty amazing that there was one.

We stopped and we said, ‘well, let’s have a look. Who knows, that book Roots might be here?’

They had them in alphabetical order in the boxes A- Z and I walked straight to the box that had the Rs, the books with Rs, and they’re all spine down.

You had to look at the spine to see what the title was, but in this particular box there was one book sitting on top of all the others with the cover down.

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But it wasn’t spine down. The book was sitting there like it was waiting for somebody, and I turned it over and it was the Roots book by Alex Haley.

I looked at my wife, she looked at me, and we knew then that whatever I had heard, whatever this impression voice was, meant something that I was supposed to do.

I took the book to Greece and I read it, Alex Haley’s novel. And long story short, I came to the understanding in my mind that I’m supposed to write a novel like this. Roots is about six generations of a Black American family starting from their ancestor being captured in Africa and brought to America.

I felt that I was to write a saga like that, which followed a number of generations of a Maori family in order to tell the history of this country in a way that it’s never been told before.

That’s what I had come up with. I spent a bit of time in France after Greece, and we went to a resort where it was really quiet and I know from the past that if you block everything else out and you focus, you can start to hear things that you mightn’t if you’re busy with life.

After a seven day fast and a retreat, which I had learned from the Catholics when I was at boarding school, I started, well, even five days into it, I started to hear this impression again in my head.

And I wrote down what I was being told. And there were three things, three big things that I believed I had to do once I got back to New Zealand.

Three points of action required

One was to, to leave my job. I worked for the government as a historian. Two was I had to sell my house or our house, my wife and I. I understood that was to give me some income to be able to write the series that I’ve started on.

The third one was to write the series. So leave work, sell the house, write the series.

I’m that sort of person who’s, if I hadn’t seen the Roots book there, sitting on that box, I might’ve been had some doubts, but I believed that there was some sort of divine guidance that was leading me into doing this, that I was ready to do it, no questions asked, but I had to ask my wife, of course, because it was going to have an impact on her.

And I can say that she wasn’t keen, immediately, but through some things that happened I think she realized this is something that has to be done and, I’m meant to do it.

We came back to New Zealand and I followed that plan and that’s how I got to into writing the Kawai series.

Jenny Wheeler: Is she reassured that it is the right thing to do? Now that you’ve got one book out, is she on board with it now?

Monty Soutar: Yes. Definitely. I mean, what’s happened with this first book you can’t put this down to me because, I don’t have any experience in writing novels. I’ve never written fiction before. The response that I’ve had to the book, she’s seen it too.

She was my greatest critic actually, because she’s read a lot of novels.

A best seller at the top for 22 weeks

And she used to say all the way through the drafting of it. ‘This doesn’t sound like a novel. This sounds like you, a historian, writing nonfiction.’ And it used to grate at me.

But I used to measure how good the book was based on the feedback she’d give to me.

Just the things that have happened with this book and just how it’s taken off, I know you can’t put that down to me and my ability. That whatever this was that’s guiding me, this is all meant to happen and I have no doubt about that.

Jenny Wheeler: And it has sold very well, hasn’t it

Monty Soutar: Well, it went straight to number one, New Zealand fiction in the week it was launched and it stayed there for 22 weeks at number one.

I heard of some sort of a record. And I really can’t explain why people, well, such a diverse group in the population, are reading it, because it’s not one group of people.

It’s a wide range. I mean, the greatest thrill I get is people who come to me and say, ‘Look, I’ve never read a book since I left secondary school, but this book has encouraged me to read’ and I think that has to be put down that people do actually want to know something about the history of this country.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right. Now the book does tackle some difficult subjects because Maori culture had it’s wars and brutal aspects, and you’ve tackled those head on with a great deal of honesty and made it understandable, how that culture operated and the way it really hung together as a cohesive unit.

Tell us a bit about how you managed to get to that and was it hard to front up to some of those issues?

Telling a difficult, brutal story

Monty Soutar: For those who don’t know much about New Zealand, the Maori ancestors arrived here some 800 years ago from the Pacific. And they peopled the two islands, well, there’s more than two islands, but the two main islands.

As the population grew, in order to protect food resources there was a lot of fighting that went on.

And in our history, there was cannibalism, so you ate your enemies and there was polygamy. We had more than one wife or one husband.

That’s the kind of culture that was here. It was a tough existence for people, depending on where you were ranked in the tribal structure. If you were a chief, it wasn’t so bad, but if you were less than that, life was quite difficult.

But it was also, as the novel describes it a beautiful place, and when the fighting wasn’t happening, people were good to each other and they were close to nature and they had strong spiritual beliefs. So that’s the environment that existed here in this country.

I basically start this novel in the 17 hundreds, and we’re right in that environment. There are no, non-Maori here, there were just our ancestors. And I tried to describe what it was like.

The other thing about Maori people back then you had to be careful what you said.

It was easy to insult somebody. You could say something that was taken the wrong way and that would lead to sometimes the destruction of a whole tribe of people.

And with all this fighting going on, if you attack one tribe, you can be assured that they were going to attack you back.

A young boy witnesses a traumatic murder

If they weren’t going do it immediately because they didn’t have the soldiers to do it or the warriors to do it, they would wait a generation, two, three sometimes, but they would never let it lie.

Right up until the first Europeans arrived it was a lot about balancing the books. ‘We owe you for something you did to our ancestors two or three generations ago.’

That’s what I’ve really tried to do in the novel, to create that society so that it’s believable, and to get people to understand how important vengeance was to that society.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Your main character as a young boy, witnesses a massacre where his father and a lot of his close relations die, and he almost miraculously manages to escape from that scene.

But it’s obviously very traumatic for him. And then you jump to when he’s young man, 19 or 20 years old, having his first son.

And that son is dedicated to basically restoring the mana (the status, the power, the respect) of the tribe by. carrying out warfare against the people that had killed their people a generation before.

And we follow that character right through in a very touching way, so that we understand really the dilemma that a person like that faces, whether they were naturally of a warrior spirit or not.

If their position in the tribe required it, they had to fulfil that role. Now I know that it’s based on a lot of work you have done on your own genealogy, but you have not called the characters by the names of your family.

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