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Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand
Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard-labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand.
Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand's urban centres and rural landscapes, and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely a hidden history in plain sight.
Blood and Dirt explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. Jared Davidson asks us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand.
Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand's urban centres and rural landscapes, and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely a hidden history in plain sight.
Blood and Dirt explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. Jared Davidson asks us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand.
- GenresNonfiction
Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2023
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144 people want to read
About the author
Jared Davidson
5 books6 followersAn archivist by day and author by night, Jared Davidson is a writer based in Lower Hutt, Aotearoa New Zealand. His research explores the lives of workers overlooked by traditional histories – from radicals of the early twentieth century to farmhands and convicts of the nineteenth. He is currently the Research Librarian Manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 11, 2024
A grim look in to past (and present) of unfree and forced labour and how it has shaped Aotearoa New Zealand. From roads to farms, ports, schools, universities, botanical gardens, plantations, and the Milford Track; the stain of unfree labour surrounds us. A must-read.
May 22, 2024
I’ve lived in Auckland for more than 10 years, which, being a measly 22 year-old, has been most of my life. Maybe it makes sense then that everything I’ve seen in terms of Aotearoa New Zealand’s cities, roads, farms, and natural landscapes has had, to me, a quality of permanence to them.
On holidays, I’ve made along with family/friends the drive from Auckland to Rotorua no less than 5 times in the 10+ years I’ve lived in Auckland, rolling along State Highway 1 and then veering off on SH5 toward the sulfurous scented city. 3/4 of those times we extend the drive past Taupo, getting back onto SH1 by way of SH30 and then toward the occasionally-smokey mountains of Tongariro National Park. One of the most common sights along the drive, apart from the gridded and chain-link fenced pastures of cattle and sheep with the occasional horses atop clovers and ryegrass extending as far as the eye can see — significant for different (shaped by “free” and prison labour alike) as well as similar (both are among the largest exports of NZ, both predicated upon violent dispossession of land, and the expansions of both demanded by the endless drive toward capitalist accumulation) —, are neatly lined arrays of pine trees, pointing sentinel-like skyward.
At the risk of pretentiousness, I’ve found it to be a somewhat internally revolutionary sort of act — where our default disposition is to encounter objects outside of us as alienated from their process of production, the social relations that made them possible — to approach everything I see starting from the attitude of: somebody had to make these. Qualities of permanence obfuscates their process of generation, and a telling of history that attends to the how does the work of denaturalisation and historicisation. In the case of those pine forests radiating out from Rotorua, that somebody/those somebodies are prisoners.
In Blood & Dirt, Davidson provides us with an encyclopedic documentation of the indispensable role prison labour played in Aotearoa New Zealand from the sealers and whalers of the 18th century and the Hohi mission in the 1820s (Ch.1), to the construction of prisons and mobilisation of prison labour wherever labour was demanded for public works (Ch.2), to the prison industries of printing, brickmaking, quarrying, reclamation of land and construction of ports (like in Lyttleton), along with the gendered and invisibilised reproductive work of women prisoners inside the prison that allows the work of chain gangs outside of the prison to continue, and the construction of prisons themselves (Ch.3), to the role of prison labour in the construction of military forts, and the growing imprisonment of Maori especially alongside the dispossession of Maori land following resistance to colonial rule (Ch.4), to the large-scale planting of pine forests that have become a staple of our national exports thanks in no small part to the work of prisoners (Ch.5), to the mixed use of prison labour alongside indentured servitude in NZ’s pacific colonies, in their plantations, and their violent resource extractions (Ch.6), to the role of prison farms in the grasslands revolution (Ch.7). Davidson tells this history by weaving within it stories of prisoners and instances of resistance, and the history is made more engaging, and grounded, for it.
The book is at its best when it treats prisoners as part of the working class formation upon which the accumulative imperatives of capitalism depends. When it foregrounds the necessary yet tediously repetitive or bodily damaging work which prisoners are relegated to, with a fluid but otherising demarcation from wage labour. I think it’s for this reason that I felt this book would have benefited from more analysis that connects the various projects documented in the book that have relied upon prison labour with capitalism. I went to the author’s talk at the Writer’s Fest a few days ago, and during it he said that (paraphrasing) the less theoretical writing style he adopted for this book made people like his dad — an old white guy uninitiated in radical history — his ideal audience. But it seems to me that that’s just as good a reason to include analysis of the links between the use of prison labour and the structure of capitalism: lest it becomes just another telling of history that fall into the trap of “this happened, and then this happened,” a telling of history that obfuscates the material forces which drive the things that happen in the first place.
On holidays, I’ve made along with family/friends the drive from Auckland to Rotorua no less than 5 times in the 10+ years I’ve lived in Auckland, rolling along State Highway 1 and then veering off on SH5 toward the sulfurous scented city. 3/4 of those times we extend the drive past Taupo, getting back onto SH1 by way of SH30 and then toward the occasionally-smokey mountains of Tongariro National Park. One of the most common sights along the drive, apart from the gridded and chain-link fenced pastures of cattle and sheep with the occasional horses atop clovers and ryegrass extending as far as the eye can see — significant for different (shaped by “free” and prison labour alike) as well as similar (both are among the largest exports of NZ, both predicated upon violent dispossession of land, and the expansions of both demanded by the endless drive toward capitalist accumulation) —, are neatly lined arrays of pine trees, pointing sentinel-like skyward.
At the risk of pretentiousness, I’ve found it to be a somewhat internally revolutionary sort of act — where our default disposition is to encounter objects outside of us as alienated from their process of production, the social relations that made them possible — to approach everything I see starting from the attitude of: somebody had to make these. Qualities of permanence obfuscates their process of generation, and a telling of history that attends to the how does the work of denaturalisation and historicisation. In the case of those pine forests radiating out from Rotorua, that somebody/those somebodies are prisoners.
In Blood & Dirt, Davidson provides us with an encyclopedic documentation of the indispensable role prison labour played in Aotearoa New Zealand from the sealers and whalers of the 18th century and the Hohi mission in the 1820s (Ch.1), to the construction of prisons and mobilisation of prison labour wherever labour was demanded for public works (Ch.2), to the prison industries of printing, brickmaking, quarrying, reclamation of land and construction of ports (like in Lyttleton), along with the gendered and invisibilised reproductive work of women prisoners inside the prison that allows the work of chain gangs outside of the prison to continue, and the construction of prisons themselves (Ch.3), to the role of prison labour in the construction of military forts, and the growing imprisonment of Maori especially alongside the dispossession of Maori land following resistance to colonial rule (Ch.4), to the large-scale planting of pine forests that have become a staple of our national exports thanks in no small part to the work of prisoners (Ch.5), to the mixed use of prison labour alongside indentured servitude in NZ’s pacific colonies, in their plantations, and their violent resource extractions (Ch.6), to the role of prison farms in the grasslands revolution (Ch.7). Davidson tells this history by weaving within it stories of prisoners and instances of resistance, and the history is made more engaging, and grounded, for it.
The book is at its best when it treats prisoners as part of the working class formation upon which the accumulative imperatives of capitalism depends. When it foregrounds the necessary yet tediously repetitive or bodily damaging work which prisoners are relegated to, with a fluid but otherising demarcation from wage labour. I think it’s for this reason that I felt this book would have benefited from more analysis that connects the various projects documented in the book that have relied upon prison labour with capitalism. I went to the author’s talk at the Writer’s Fest a few days ago, and during it he said that (paraphrasing) the less theoretical writing style he adopted for this book made people like his dad — an old white guy uninitiated in radical history — his ideal audience. But it seems to me that that’s just as good a reason to include analysis of the links between the use of prison labour and the structure of capitalism: lest it becomes just another telling of history that fall into the trap of “this happened, and then this happened,” a telling of history that obfuscates the material forces which drive the things that happen in the first place.
October 19, 2023
Another great book from Jared Davidson! Really interesting read about the history of prison labour in NZ.
One of my favourite types of history, one that tells important stories about things we think we are familiar with but there is actually so much more beneath the surface. Thought-provoking and will make you see lots of places in a new light.
As an aside, physically this is a very beautiful book. Lovely pictures throughout which complement the storytelling.
One of my favourite types of history, one that tells important stories about things we think we are familiar with but there is actually so much more beneath the surface. Thought-provoking and will make you see lots of places in a new light.
As an aside, physically this is a very beautiful book. Lovely pictures throughout which complement the storytelling.
September 30, 2023
This book has provided me a new lens to view the familiar. Many of the places and landscapes I grew up around were shaped by a hidden history of prison labour. I had no idea until this book. I was already for the abolishment and rethinking of our prison system; this book affirmed my opinion on the issue. Highly recommend. Compelling and well written.
November 12, 2023
Good story telling along with the well documented real history of how many places in nz came to be, like the Aramoana mole near Dunedin or North Head in Auckland.
January 8, 2024
Couldn’t put this down - an absolutely maniacal reevaluation of the role of prisons in the making of New Zealand
February 5, 2024
Not the easiest book to read, due to its necessarily dry tone, but making vital arguments about the use and abuse of prisons in this country, as an instrument of colonialism and capitalism.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews