New Zealander's lost story fills gap in Taiwan history

By ANDREW PERRIN

TAIPEI - An unpublished manuscript written by a New Zealand man more than 50 years ago and kept locked away in an old trunk in Wellington has gone on display in a museum teaching a new generation of Taiwanese the truth about their dark but little-known history.

The manuscript, Formosa Calling, gives one of the few foreign witness accounts of the tragic post-war period in Taiwan when Nationalist troops from mainland China descended on the island and began systematically murdering tens of thousands of Taiwanese.

In Taiwan at the time of the 1947 massacre - referred to locally as the 2-28 Incident - was Allan Shackleton, then a 50-year-old engineering teacher at Gisborne High School. He had accepted a position with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to help rebuild Taiwan, then called Formosa, after the war.

His moving account of the bloodbath he saw during the 11 months he spent in Taiwan was written in a matter of weeks on his return to New Zealand.

The manuscript was rejected by publishers, but through the efforts of a Taiwanese-born New Zealander, Stanley Liao, it has now seen the light of day.

Mr Liao, former president of the New Zealand Taiwanese Association, heard of the manuscript's existence in 1997 when he was researching an event in Auckland for the 50th anniversary of the 2-28 Incident.

A contact made on the Internet told him that in the definitive book on Taiwan's post-war period, Formosa Betrayed, written in 1965 by an American diplomat, George Kerr, two New Zealanders working for UNRRA were quoted as sources.

One was Allan Shackleton, and the book referred to his manuscript.

"I had never heard of this manuscript, but I knew it was very important that I find it," Mr Liao said in Taipei this week.

"Many documents relating to 2-28 were destroyed during the period known as White Terror that followed.

"The Government banned all mention of the subject up until just a few years ago and anyone who did mention it, or had documents, was branded as a communist sympathiser and jailed."

Mr Liao immediately began ringing every Shackleton in the phone book and after more than 100 calls found Mr Shackleton's eldest son, Colin, living in Wellington.

Colin Shackleton told him his father had died in 1984, but the manuscript was still in an old trunk containing his possessions.

"I was suspicious at first," said the 63-year-old Mr Shackleton. "My father had always warned me that he was persona non grata in Taiwan because of his active opposition to the regime, and in particular because of a critical broadcast he made on short-wave radio from Sydney in 1947 that reached Taiwan.

"He told me never to go to Taiwan because I might be arrested. And then one day I have a Chinese-sounding man ringing me telling me he wanted to see the manuscript."

But Mr Liao's interest reflected a growing reformist movement in Taiwan that ended 38 years of martial law in 1987, ushered in a new era of democracy and sought a reckoning with the past.

The breakthrough for many Taiwanese came in 1997 when the island's first native Taiwanese President, Lee Teng-hui, publicly apologised on behalf of his Government for the 2-28 Incident.

Colin Shackleton realised that his father's manuscript, far from being a curious piece of family memorabilia, was an important piece in Taiwan's missing history.

In 1997, he allowed the manuscript to be printed in the United States, and later to be translated into Mandarin for a Taiwanese audience.

This year he decided to hand over the original manuscript, the typewriter it was written on and a selection of his father's photos to the recently opened 2-28 Memorial Museum in central Taipei.

Travelling with his wife, Jenny, to Taiwan, he honoured that commitment on the 53rd anniversary of the incident.