Ruth Shaw has embodied many roles throughout her life: pig farmer, navy deserter, solo sailor, illegal gambler, environmentalist, chef to archbishops, psychiatric patient, failed escort. She’s been arrested twice and married four times.
But the descriptor she appears most proud of is matchmaker.
“I suppose I really am that,” she muses with obvious delight. “Yes, I match humans with books.”
The 75-year-old New Zealander’s life has been a constant whirl of phone interviews since releasing her memoir, The Bookseller at the End of the World, earlier this month.
Yes, there are booksellers living further south in the world than her (there are several bookshops in the small city of Invercargill, at the southernmost tip of New Zealand), but none are as remote as Shaw’s, nestled on her property in the country’s deep south of Fiordland, on the banks of Lake Manapōuri.
The Wee Bookshop is just that: a cheerily painted toy town shack with a brass captains bell on the door, and a sign that reads: “Open, please ring bell loudly if I am not here”.
Once inside, Shaw concedes she’s almost as likely to give you a book as sell you one.
“I really don’t care if they don’t buy anything,” she says. “I’m lucky – I’m retired and I don’t need to sell the books. But when somebody finds a book and shares it and everybody’s laughing or making comments about it, it is just such a wonderful feeling. That’s why I give away so many books … I’ll ask, ‘Well, what do you like?’ And then I’ll think, ‘oh, I know the perfect book for that person’.”
Shaw describes a customer she had earlier in the day. The man had grudgingly appeared in the Wee Bookshop with his wife more than two years ago, and she sent him away with a copy of John Hall-Jones’ Goldfields of Otago: An Illustrated History.
“He came back today and said: ‘At the time I didn’t think you knew what you were talking about. But I’ve come to buy another copy because I’ve read it so many times it’s worn out and the back is broken’.
“That gives me so much joy,” she says. “I know I’m doing my job, I’m giving my readers something that they will hold really close.”
At the height of the summer tourist season, the cars and campervans parked outside Shaw’s home are sometimes deemed a traffic hazard. Soon after opening four years ago, the Wee Bookshop became Two Wee Bookshops, to handle the overflow. A dedicated children’s library shed was built, where young readers could stretch out on the floor.
And then, two years ago, she opened another – this time inspired by what she saw as a male reluctance to read. As she writes in her book:
Many men sit in their vehicles while their wives or partners come into the shop to browse … one man tooted his horn after a while; others just passive-aggressively start the car, or hover on the doorstep asking, ‘Ready to leave yet … I’m still waiting for you’. But you should never rush a book purchase.
“I think I need another bookshop,” she told fourth husband, Lance.
“Oh god, will you ever stop?” was his response. The couple are supposed to be retired.
The Snug was duly erected: an open-air, gumboot-friendly space built under an old lacebark tree, with a covered verandah. Its shelves are stacked with, as Shaw puts it, “books on hunting, fishing, farming, tractors and trains … and maps in a drawer”. (And old copies of Playboy in another, joked Lance at the time.)
Shaw’s bookshops make up only a small part of her memoir, a book interspersed with heartwarming and occasionally heartbreaking vignettes detailing unexpected encounters with humans who cross her threshold – a traumatised NSW firefighter; a barely literate young man; a woman Shaw refuses to sell to, who only wants to buy books of certain colours to go with her decor.
But it is also the story of Shaw’s unconventional, adventurous and at times extraordinarily tragic life.
‘My survival instincts kicked in’
Shaw was raised in a loving conservative Catholic family across various rural and urban locations around New Zealand’s South Island, in the 1950s and 1960s. At the age of 17, she was raped in the back of a bus outside a dance hall. Her attacker was a local boy, assisted by two of his friends.
A confrontation between Shaw’s father and that boy resulted in the handing over of a £50 note, which her father passed on to her. She writes:
The crisp banknote didn’t solve anything; it only raised raw, hurtful questions. Was that the going price for the rape, or my silence?
Two months later she discovered she was pregnant. The £50 was used to cover her living expenses while she was sent away to Wellington to hide the pregnancy from family and friends.
Her son was born in April 1964. He was removed from her immediately at birth, and Shaw never saw him. It was a trauma and heartbreak that would see her running scared from relationships and permanent roots for the next 20 years – and it wasn’t until the late 1980s that she finally tracked down her only surviving child, Andrew.
A year after the birth of her son, Shaw enlisted as a Wren in the New Zealand navy, stationed in Auckland. But she baulked at the discipline, routine and limited roles offered to women in the defence forces of the 1960s, and, desperate to see her family, who were by then running the only hotel on remote Stewart Island/Rakiura, she went awol. Shaw travelled the length of the North Island before being arrested while attempting to cross Cook Strait and being hauled back to base. It took another six months to convince the navy to discharge her.
It was on Stewart Island she met “the love of my life”, Lance, a young fisherman. But as a Protestant, he was unable to accept the Shaw family’s insistence that their children should be raised Catholic. The marriage was called off after the invitations had gone out, and the final fitting of the dress had been completed. (It would be 20 years and three husbands later before Shaw heard a vaguely familiar voice down the other end of the phone: “You still a Catholic?”)
Shaw fled north and got a job as chef to the Archbishop of Wellington (she had honed her cooking skills in her parent’s hotel on Stewart Island), but the underlying heartbreak over her lost child haunted her, and she had slipped into a pattern of restlessness.
Soon she was sailing the Pacific, working as an unpaid cook on a yacht named for the famous clipper ship Cutty Sark. When the boat was slipped for maintenance in Papeete, Tahiti, she was broke. Without speaking the lingo and unable to find work, she began running an illegal card game racket at a local market.
She was arrested by Tahitian authorities and ordered to leave the island, but not before a marriage proposal from one of the Cutty Sark’s crew members, Australian journalist “Peter” (Shaw has changed many names in her book to protect privacy). The couple married onboard and landed in Brisbane; Shaw believed her transient lifestyle might be over. But little over a year later – when she was pregnant with her second child – Peter was killed in a car accident. Their baby, Joshua, lived for just 13 hours before succumbing to rhesus disease.
“The Ruth I projected to everyone was only skin deep; the inner Ruth was in complete turmoil,” she writes in the book. “Yet my survival instincts kicked in again; like a wild animal I was preparing to turn and run as fast as I could … I knew I needed to get as far away from the nightmare as possible.”
A month later, Shaw was living in Papua New Guinea, working as a cook in a Rabaul hotel, and as an illegal bookie’s penciller on the side. Fleeing another offer of marriage from fellow expatriate Matt, she joined the crew of the nine-metre sloop Islander. In the Java sea the vessel was boarded by Indonesian pirates. Armed with three automatic rifles and what Shaw assumed might be a bazooka, they ransacked the boat as the Islander crew sat hostage in the cockpit.
“They loaded the whiskey, clothing, food, boat gear and fuel into their runabout, and then they actually shook our hands and politely thanked us,” Shaw tells the Guardian.
“So I asked them if I could take their photo.”
The pirates pointed their weapons away from crew and struck a pose.
“One of them even smiled for me,” Shaw says.
Slipping the Islander in Singapore, Shaw was once more on dry land and broke. A fellow backpacker introduced her to an escort service, assuring her the sex part was optional with the mainly wealthy Chinese businessmen clientele. The madam looked the skinny flat-chested New Zealander up and down and pronounced: “Small, no titties, no nice clothes, maybe no good.” That night on her first assignment, when her client asked how much for sex, she panicked and fled. “Told you, you no good,” was the madam’s verdict the next day, as she was sacked.
Shaw returned to Papua New Guinea to marry Matt, and began running a cafe. But the marriage lasted only a few years and at the age of 28 she found herself back in a presbytery kitchen, cooking for priests in south-east Melbourne.
Shaw recalls those days as some of her darkest. A suicide attempt and a stint in a psychiatric hospital followed.
Upon recovery Shaw landed in northern NSW and found herself in her third ill-fated marriage, living on a semi-rural property nurturing her newly found hobby of pig rearing. After it ended she took to the seas again: this time on her own nine-metre yacht Magic. She ended up in Tasmania, standing alongside Bob Brown in the early 1980s in a bid to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam; and then in Sydney, hired as a welfare officer to sex workers by Sydney City Mission, working the beat of Kings Cross in the era of Abe Saffron, Roger Rogerson and Neddy Smith.
“Rogerson was a very charming man,” she recalls. “But he used that charm to get what he wanted out of people. The bottom line – he was a psychopath.”
‘My life was totally insane’
In June 2020, one of New Zealand’s most respected broadcasters, Kim Hill, interviewed Shaw about her Manapōuri bookstore. The story of how she got there, and her extraordinary life – where grief and a sense of failure and loss had kept her on the move for decades – enthralled Hill’s audiences, and the journalist urged her to start writing her memoir. Within days, Shaw was approached by Australian publisher Allen & Unwin with an offer.
The writing was a joyful, confronting and at time intensely painful experience, she admits.
“I was brought up Catholic, expected to get married, have children and lead a reasonably sane life,” she says.
“Looking back, I know I felt at the time that my life was totally insane and out of control. And it just seemed that every decision I made was the wrong one.”
Now truly anchored, Shaw believes the events of her life have shaped who she is as a septuagenarian bookseller: determined, focused, hard to live with, deeply emotional, loyal, and not easy to love, as she concludes in her memoir.
“There are too many books I love to ever pick a favourite, a life full of so many wonderful books,” she says. But amongst the most cherished are Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a poetic exploration of the consequences of choosing a life that dances to a different beat; and the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, about a stuffed toy that yearns to become real.
Shaw has learnt to accept the wisdom the always truthful Skin Horse gives to his rabbit friend: “Real isn’t how you are made, it’s a thing that happens to you.”
Does it hurt, asks the rabbit?
“Sometimes, but when you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
The Bookseller at the End of the World is out now through Allen & Unwin
