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Friday, October 4, 2024

Australian Historical Studies review of Blood and Dirt


This review of Blood and Dirt comes from the journal Australian Historical Studies and was written by Peter Clayworth.

The opening pages of Jared Davidson’s Blood and Dirt display a photograph of Napier’s Marine Parade, taken in 1895, followed by a painting from the 1860s centred on Dunedin’s First Church. In the margins of each image small groups of workers toil away. The Napier photo has a gang of hard-labour prisoners quarrying metal near a sea wall built by convicts. The Dunedin painting features prisoners demolishing Bell Hill to extend the city’s road network. The aim of Davidson’s work is to take these unfree workers out of the historical margins and highlight their crucial role in creating New Zealand’s colonial society and its infrastructure. Davidson unashamedly views prison labour through a class struggle lens. He makes no pretence to be a neutral observer, instead taking the approach that the historian should state their position clearly and present the evidence to back up their stance. His own sympathies are clearly with those imprisoned rather than the system that imprisoned them.

Before the publication of Blood and Dirt, New Zealand’s penal historiography did not have a study focused on the role of prison labour in developing the colonial economy. Imprisonment was a form of punishment entirely absent from Aotearoa prior to European colonisation. Davidson is clear that he is not discussing traditional Māori institutions such as slavery. His account is strictly concerned with the labour of those imprisoned by a state-based justice system. As its subtitle indicates, Blood and Dirt is first and foremost an account of the substantial role prison labour played in New Zealand’s colonial and early twentieth-century economy. New Zealanders have long been under the illusion that, unlike most Australian colonies, their colonial economy and infrastructure was built almost entirely by free labour. Davidson explodes this myth, showing convicts made up a significant portion of the New Zealand workforce from the 1800s when Australian convicts were members of sealing gangs and acted as workers for the early missionaries. Davidson examines the role of New Zealand prison labour in a range of forms through to the 1930s.

Blood and Dirt shows prison labour as central to transforming what European settlers regarded as ‘unproductive’ land and water systems into what were supposedly ‘productive’ economic units. In the process, human beings regarded as unproductive by the ruling classes were intended to be transformed into productive workers. Prisoners reclaimed (or destroyed) estuaries and wetlands, built urban and harbour infrastructure, constructed defensive fortifications, and worked in manufacturing, forestry, and agriculture. Davidson never loses sight of the fact that the system these prisoners worked in was based on coercion and violence, sometimes to a lethal degree. Throughout the work, points are illustrated by the stories of named individuals, which keeps the reader aware of prison labourers’ humanity.

Blood and Dirt gives only brief coverage to the labour of women prisoners. Davidson points out that women made up a small proportion of the prison population during the period considered and that the work they carried out was highly gendered. Women generally remained within the prison walls, working in appalling conditions on the heavy domestic labour of cooking, cleaning, washing, making and mending. This was the work on which the more public labour of male prisoners was based. Women also carried out the soul-destroying task of picking apart old ropes to produce oakum fibres. Davidson describes women’s prison labour as ‘the hidden history within an already hidden history’ but does not devote more than a few pages to that labour. A more detailed published account of women’s prison labour remains to be written.

Davidson largely concentrates on Pākehā (European) prisoners, reflecting the fact that until the urban migration of the 1950s and 1960s Māori usually only made up a very small proportion of the prison population. Davidson provides a number of accounts of Māori prison labourers incarcerated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and also notes that during the 1860s the Crown forced many Māori prisoners of war to work as labourers as it attempted to break Māori independence and take their land. In the 1880s large numbers of Māori became prison labourers after being imprisoned for taking part in non-violent protests at Parihaka against land confiscation. Blood and Dirt also examines the role of Pasifika prison labour in New Zealand’s colonisation of Niue, the Cook Islands and Western Samoa; and in working the phosphate mines of Malden, Banaba and Nauru which fed New Zealand’s pastureland revolution.

Overall, I consider Blood and Dirt to be a work that enables the reader to see the shaping of New Zealand’s urban and rural environments in a completely fresh light. Jared Davidson should be congratulated for bringing to our attention a long-neglected aspect of New Zealand’s history.

Friday, July 26, 2024

Eras review of Blood and Dirt


This review of Blood and Dirt comes from Eras Journal 25:1 and was written by Daisy Bailey. Image by Archi Banal for The Spinoff.

Blood & Dirt excavates the roots of power relations in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa—the Pacific, providing grist to the mill for Marxist historians of settler-colonialism. The title links to the quote by Karl Marx in Capital (1867): “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. What Davidson does with this is give insight to whose blood, and what dirt. For this is a history from below that connects labour history to environmental history. The author balances the human, subjective experience, with the collective, systematic and more-than-human to present the making of New Zealand through the prism of prison labour. For prisons, as the author argues, need to be viewed “as a set of social relations that helped shape New Zealand’s human and extra-human environment” (16). This book demonstrates that although New Zealand was forbidden from becoming a penal settlement with transported convicts like the neighbouring Australian colonies, diverse systems of punishment were constructed to provide free labour for resource extraction, to “open up” (and later enclose) Indigenous land and to make a profit.

The book begins with the first convicts and prison at Hohi mission in 1814 and spans to the prison farms amidst the grassland revolution of the 1920s and 1970s to bring readers to the present. The seven chapters are framed around core themes and titled: Improvement, Heavy Metal, Industry, War, Plantation, Empire, and Prison Land. The first chapter demonstrates how capital sought to counter idleness. In chapter two the author illustrates that the imprisonment of flows of workers from the maritime industry met a need for unfree labour. Chapter three argues that prisons were sites of class struggle, with Davidson dismantling the line that has been drawn between free and unfree workers. Chapter four demonstrates that prisons were instrumental in combating Māori resistance to occupation. Chapter five focuses on prison forestry, the colony’s need for timber and the agency of the environment. Chapter six refers to New Zealand’s annexation of Pacific Islands and the mining of phosphate for fertiliser by incarcerated Islanders and Chinese indentured labourers. The impact of this labour is illuminated in chapter seven on the grassland revolution: the dispossession of Māori land fuelled by phosphate fertiliser and the making of the pastoral economy. This primary industry, again, was created through the unfree labour of prisoners.

Following his previous works on marginalised histories, The History of a Riot (2021), Dead Letters (2019) and Sewing Freedom (2013), Davidson is transparent in his motivation to take a political stance and challenge norms through his work. He does this in three ways. Davidson’s approach is decolonial, moving the centre away from English to foreground Māori language, history, and culture. Secondly, he takes up the methodological challenge of writing a history from below, piecing together archival records to reveal aspects of voice and agency. Lastly, Davidson positions prison labour as environmental history using the concept “workscapes”, a term from historian Thomas G. Andrews. Workscapes are used to describe places where transformation happens in “messy and ever-changing” ways that melt boundaries between the human and more-than-human environment. While Davidson brings the optics of punishment back into the fore, these three approaches illuminate broader silences and blind spots in language, history, society, and the landscape.

This book is for scholars interested in free and unfree labour, crime and punishment, settler-colonialism, history from below and environmental history. Davidson’s work adds to historian Kristyn Harman’s Aboriginal Convicts (2012) and Cleansing the Colony (2017), which document the transportation of convicts from New Zealand to the Australian penal colony Van Diemen’s Land from 1843 to 1853 and the interconnectedness of imperialism and colonialism. Davidson has however shown that the labour of New Zealand’s own prisoners fundamentally shaped the country—challenging national histories of New Zealand exceptionalism. Blood & Dirt also links to Australian scholars Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan’s recent book Unfree Workers (2022), which exposes how the idea of “convictism” justified the exploitation of prisoners and contributed to the silencing of convict workers as they were swept to the margins in official histories. Similarly, Davidson presents prisoners with agency—but he intervenes in the field of convict history by folding in the more-than-human as well.

Blood & Dirt is also more than a scholarly work. The vivid colours, and double-page archival photographs and paintings are transportive, Davidson’s practice as an archivist shines through, as well as the attention to detail of designers Katrina Duncan and Keely O’Shannessy. Additionally, the lyrical writing style makes for engaging storytelling. People living, working, and travelling in Aotearoa New Zealand who pass through the places that Davidson has described and linked to prison labour are called to read this book. For as the author states, “As well as the cityscapes and rural industries that still benefit from the forced labour of prisoners, it is harder and harder to separate everyday working life from the work of prisons” (229). It is undeniable that New Zealand has been shaped by regimes of punishment. The silencing of convictism from the national story has been undone by Davidson. This is a history of Blood & Dirt, and it leaves an indelible mark.

Friday, July 5, 2024

The 2024 Public Environmental History Prize


At the AANZEHN’s annual gathering at the Australian Historical Association Conference on 3 July, the Network’s Steering Committee announced that Blood and Dirt was the winner of the 2024 Public Environmental History Prize. Awarded every two years, the prize recognises outstanding work in public engagement on topics in the environmental history of Australia and/or Aotearoa New Zealand (broadly conceived), including international perspectives that shed new light on the environmental history of Australia and/or Aotearoa New Zealand.

The 2024 Prize was judged by Dr Lucy Mackintosh, Senior Research Fellow at Tāmaki Paenga Hira/Auckland War Memorial Museum (and co-winner of the 2023 AANZEHN Environmental History Book Prize) and Assoc. Prof. Nancy Cushing, University of Newcastle. Here is their citation in full:
Jared Davidson’s book, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, with its associated public talks and media interviews, constitutes an outstanding work of public history. In this project, Davidson achieves the kind of transformation of understanding that great histories aim for, leaving readers with new perspectives on the operation of the colonial project in Aotearoa. Starting with the roles of imperial convicts who laboured in the earliest mission at Hohi in 1814, and following through to the 1970s when prisoners made Napier’s Centennial Gardens, Davidson demonstrates that modern New Zealand and its Pacific Empire sit on a foundation built by unfree labour, specifically work extracted from those under criminal sentence.

While this revelation is a significant scholarly contribution, the way it is presented shows that Davidson aims to reach a much broader audience. With the support of Bridget Williams Books, Blood and Dirt is as much a visual work as a written one, with large format, high quality images on almost every page, including many in colour. Davidson uses these images and their captions to draw attention to otherwise overlooked details of familiar scenes that confirm the ubiquity of imprisoned people at work in both urban and rural settings.

Blood and Dirt is innovative as an environmental history in emphasising the importance of place in what he calls workscapes. His descriptions make mud, rain, cold and rock itself agents in shaping the experience and efficacy of prison labour. The reader is drawn in by the nature and range of these projects, with traces still visible in the environments through which New Zealanders, and indeed those living on other Pacific Islands, move each day. Exemplary public historians ask, what is history for? Davidson’s clear response is that understanding the history of unfree labour in Aotearoa sheds light not only on how building the nation’s economy, society and built environment relied on dispossession, coercion and violence but also how these practices continue within contemporary criminal justice systems.
It was a real honour to receive this prize - and I found out in uncanny circumstances. The news landed in my inbox just minutes after being told by a researcher that, before attending my talk for the Friends of the Turnbull Library, they had no idea that so much of New Zealand’s forestry had been forged by prisoners. I am not making this up! It confirms for me how crucial it is to engage with a wide audience; to ground our work and our stories in place; and to challenge the idea that historical production is removed from contemporary issues.

Thank you to the judges for their kind citation, to Bridget Williams Books for their ongoing support, and the many scholars – including those among the network – who showed me the importance of the more-than-human world. When I started Blood and Dirt I thought I was writing a social history. It quickly became clear that it was also an environmental history, and that my past work had been guilty of treating the extra-human environment as mere backdrop. Blood and Dirt is the result of taking seriously the idea that history from the ground up means the ground up, literally. And while I was late to the party, I hope that my book will encourage others to recognise the importance of environmental history in their everyday lives. 

Friday, June 7, 2024

History Australia review of Blood and Dirt


This review of
Blood and Dirt comes from History Australia 21:2 (2024) and was written by David Andrew Roberts. Image by Tina Tiller for The Spinoff.

Jared Davidson’s book takes its title from Marx’s bullish note at the end of his history of capitalism (volume one), that capitalism permeates the world through violence and exploitation, ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’. The imagery is certainly apt for an account of the connections between coerced labour and settler colonialism. The protection and accumulation of property required the criminalisation of insecure labour, and this underscored settler capitalism through providing cheap, coercible labour to power territorial expansion and the ‘improvement’ of ‘wastelands’. The paradigm is very well known in the national narratives of Australia. However, Davidson’s book provides a compelling account of forced labour and colonisation in a historic theatre that is not widely remembered as a model of that phenomenon. Indeed, Blood and Dirt is propelled by the surprise of discovering the hidden role that penal labour played in the making of New Zealand’s urban centres and rural landscapes.

Though it may contradict New Zealand’s long-held national narratives, it can be argued that prisoners built the country, literally. Davidson demonstrates this by locating ‘the imprint left by the incarcerated’ (13) – the physical imprints mainly, because, as Robert Hughes and so many others discovered, the social and cultural legacies of a criminal past are somewhat harder to define. And the evidence in the case of New Zealand is ample, in the archive and in surviving buildings, port facilities, roads, and plantations. On closer inspection, the foundation stones of the nation seems quietly ‘riddled with unfreedom’ (41).

The result is a very sound and satisfying piece of work. Davidson mostly pursues the people/workers of the story, rather than the loftier matters of penal policy and administration. The latter are canvassed sufficiently to contextualise the broader ideas and forces that shaped New Zealand’s complicated history of punishment and work, although the evolution of ideologies and policies concerning punishment as a form of retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation are dealt with minimally. The book is strong in its communication of the human story, and in capturing the grittier dimensions of penal labour – the blood and the dirt – related in many moments that are woven throughout the bigger episodes in the story of coerced labour and capitalism. Blood and Dirt succeeds in convey ing a lot of detail and a great many ideas in a short space. The book is not long – slightly over 220 pages (and another 70 pages of endnotes), and lavishly illustrated – its impact owing much to some very punchy and clever communication.

Certainly, Davidson’s writing is evocative and striking. The first chapter opens with the 1814 spectacle of Reverend Samuel Marsden throwing his guts over the side of the brig Active as it set forth on its civilising mission to New Zealand, bearing a number of Irish convicts from New South Wales who would build the first European infrastructure at Waitangi. If the flourish here and elsewhere seems over the top, this is on the whole a lively history that is entertaining, thoughtful, and intelligent. There are some rich reflections on working conditions for penal labourers, on class struggles and resistance strategies in prison ‘workscapes’, as they are frequently called in this book, and on the use of penal labour in service industries. The book is largely about male labour, although the work of female prisoners, which reinforced gendered subversion, is raised briefly, while the connections between the prison system and Maori dispossession is noticed on numerous occasions.

I found chapter five, on the use of prisoners on large scale plantations – the ‘felons among the firs’ (151) – particularly interesting, combining granular detail of life and routines at Waipa prison with broader reflections on how penal labour has bequeathed a multi-billion dollar export industry. There are interesting reflections on the exploitation and radical transformation of nature, alongside some less convincing angles (the contemplation of whether ‘manure has agency’ (160) was not a strong moment, in my view). Similarly, chapter six on the New Zealand ‘Empire’ is very strong, explaining how penal labour was integral to the conquest of the Pacific (Samoa, the Cook Islands, Nauru, etc), as a means of subjugating local populations and exploiting local resources. Davidson succeeds in conveying a sense of the great variety of penal workplaces and the many different experiences – and the varied forms of resistance – they engendered. Chapter seven deals with prison farms and the role of prisoners in New Zealand’s grassland revolution from the 1910s, seen as enormously successful in rehabilitating criminals into farmers.

Throughout, prison labour is tied to conquest, militarism, and the enforcement of oppressive class and racial and gender relations. These are inglorious foundations for any nation, and a shocking corrective to New Zealand’s historical amnesia. At least some relief is offered by an assurance that it would be ‘too much of a stretch to put New Zealand in the same camp as convict Australia’ (221). Still, representing New Zealand as having been, in some ways, an ‘an open-air prison at the bottom of the earth’ (60) is an important reminder that the nexus between coerced labour and colonisation was a wider, perhaps almost universal, phenomenon.

Thursday, May 16, 2024

Convictism and the Neolithic: A Response to Erik Olssen

Prisoners under armed guard remove Bell Hill in Dunedin, c1875. Ref: P2014-014/3-003, Hocken Library.

If one’s book is “like a friend that you want to look after, advocate for and celebrate”, I feel that a response to Erik Olssen’s review of Blood and Dirt in the latest New Zealand Journal of History is what any good friend would do. Despite my weariness at becoming one of those people who react to mixed reviews, some of Olssen’s comments are disingenuous at best.

I can accept differing points of view regarding style and the approach of historians to their work. I can accept that I did not make more use of Australian convict historiography (for the very simple fact that Australian convictism was a particular and historically-specific labour regime – although I do reference Australian examples where applicable, including the excellent work on capitalism and convictism by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan). And I can even accept that some still think the production of history is objective, neutral or somehow separate from the person producing that history and the social context in which they work. But I cannot accept the claim that information is missing when it is not only present but key to my arguments. For someone who is clearly affronted that historians might have political values that inform their work (and are open about them), Olssen’s own political reaction has caused him to overlook or misrepresent the content in Blood and Dirt.

Leaving aside Olssen’s opening line for now (what a way to send your colours up the mast), and his strange comment about neolithic labour (more on this later), Olssen claims that Chapter 2 focuses on the building of early towns and then shifts to roadbuilding. In fact, this chapter is all about roadbuilding, as indicated in the Prologue and in the opening paragraphs of the chapter. After wrongly attributing a quote from Ben Shrader’s The Big Smoke to me, Olssen writes:

Only occasionally are we told how many prisoners there were, or the proportion sentenced to hard labour, and as a rule Davidson relies on other histories for the 'clinching' detail. Despite my on-going frustration at the lack of specificity about the numbers of prisoners, and the actual streets and roads they built (seemingly without supervision from engineers or help from free labour), this chapter, like all the others, illustrates Davidson's skill as a writer, his eye for interesting illustrative detail, and his broad sympathy with the downtrodden generally.

I appreciate the compliment, but it rings hollow considering the chapter features numerous examples of the streets where prisoners worked under supervision. Here’s an example (p.49): “At 7.45 a.m., the hard- labour men were called to order, given a tool and told how much work was expected of them that day… an armed overseer lead the men out of the gaol in pairs and into the neighbouring streets.” Four lines later, I list no less than twenty-one of those Wellington streets, while also indicating that the sheer volume of the roads prisoners made or repaired, and the sometimes-vague archival record (“making roads about town” was a typical entry) means it was hard to list them all. On page 52, after talking about the regular lack of overseers and engineers, I follow with this:

Whenever they could be, prisoners were put to work on the streets with vigour. ‘The history of Dunedin and its prisons are entwined,’ wrote Bill Martin in his history of Dunedin Gaol. Multiple gangs were used ‘in the building, development and maintenance of Maitland Street, Caversham Road, Peninsula Road, Port Chalmers District Road, Russell Street, Moray Place, Pelichet Bay Road, Bond Street, Kaikorai Road, Anderson Bay Road, High Street, Crawford Street, Hanover Street, Police Street and many other general road works’, including Rattray, Cumberland and Castle Streets.

Then there are examples of streets and armed warders in the same sentence: “on Winchester Street, prisoner Joseph Strong was killed instantly when a warder’s gun accidentally discharged into the back of his head” (pp.56-57); “a warder in charge of the Adelaide Road work gang died after the rifle he was leaning on fired through his armpit” (p.57); “on Brougham Street in Wellington an epic struggle between Constable Thomas Bryan and a passer-by named William Preston erupted when Preston tried to smuggle money to one of the road gang” (p.57); “the eight men had been working on Ingestre Street – the stretch of road between The Terrace and Cuba Street known today as Vivian Street... two armed guards watched them shuffle in, followed by their overseer John Chitty” (p.74).

I was clear that Blood and Dirt is a narrative nonfiction covering the long nineteenth century (there’s a reason why “there is little on the last 75 years”). I was also clear that readers wanting more detailed histories of prison administration should consult work like John Pratt’s Punishment in A Perfect Society. Here I concur with Olssen: I am openly guilty of relying on other histories to ‘clinch’ the details when those details have already been covered by others. And as I write in the Prologue, my focus on prisoners instead of their warders and engineers is a deliberate choice.

However, I cite numbers and engineers where it is appropriate to the narrative. For example, in Lyttelton “in 1872, the daily average number of hard- labour prisoners was fifty- three” (p.53); “in June 1892, Hume shipped twenty- five prisoners from Wellington [to Rocks Road, Nelson] to begin the work, leasing them out at 10 pence per cubic yard. They were marched by armed warders from the aging Shelbourne Street gaol and over Pitts Hill (now Richardson Street), and became known as ‘Sam Jickell’s football team’ after the Nelson City engineer who designed the road” (p.65). And likewise in the chapter on New Zealand’s Pacific: “in 1915, for example, fifty- six people were put to labour rather than paying a fine” (p.174); “thirty prisoners were sent from Rarotonga [to Manuae] between 1911 and 1915 alone” (p.178).

I can understand the want for a facts and figures history, complete with tables and neat categories. But that is not what Blood and Dirt is nor was ever intended to be. As I write in the Prologue, “as a history from below, it is a story that focuses on work outside of the prison and the people doing that work, rather than a history of prison policy and its administrators.” I then follow with a footnote:

Although based on years of archival research and the careful consideration of sources, evidence and perspectives, Blood and Dirt is political. In recalling, interpreting and constructing this account of the past, I do not claim to be detached or neutral. All histories are political, whether explicitly stated or not. All writers draw upon methods and practices within their ideological framework, including (and especially) historians who claim to be disinterested, even- handed and simply recalling the facts. The writing of history, argued Douglas Hay, ‘is deeply conditioned not only by our personal political and moral histories, but also by the times in which we live, and where we live’. Whether we acknowledge it or not, historians ‘take stands by our choice of words, handling of evidence, and analytic categories. And also by our silences.’ My choice to tell the story the way I have is grounded in the idea that history should challenge norms and inspire change. History with a social aim. History that asks us to reflect on the present as much as the past.

Blood and Dirt and its inclusions and omissions is exactly as I intended. And while I can understand others may have wanted a different history, as Olssen clearly does, I had hoped the NZJH reviewer would engage with the book on its own (explicit) terms.

Olssen then references my key argument that the boundary between free an unfree labour was fluid in nineteenth century New Zealand. But, oddly, he also claims that: “everything Davidson says to distinguish the evils of prison labour – physically laborious and often dangerous work – can also be said not only of free labour working in the same occupations in New Zealand, but of almost all outdoor occupations other than professional ones since the Neolithic.” He charges that I am “especially critical of the fact that they [prisoners] were expected to undertake manual work. The work is always ‘painstaking’ or ‘dirty’, the hands ‘calloused.’” Olssen then asks what “what Davidson thinks the state ought to have done with prisoners.”

Again, my argument is that the boundaries between prison labour and free labour were blurry in colonial New Zealand, and that we need to think about labour within capitalism as a continuum of coercion rather than as existing in separate worlds. I devote paragraphs to this argument in Chapter 3 and elsewhere. And rather than implying that the evil of manual work stretches back to the Neolithic, I am very clear that we need to bring historical specificity to the study of labour within capitalism. Not only do I trace the historical development of prisons and their labour regimes within the rise of capitalism, I was careful to emphasise the specific geographical context of colonial New Zealand and its Pacific Empire; the key similarities between free and unfree labour; but, also, the different coercive pressures that could be brought to bear upon certain labourers (flogging, solitary confinement, etc). To imply that I am critical of unfree labour simply because it was ‘hard work’ is a strange comment from a historian of labour and class. I expected Olssen to understand the nuances of different work regimes across time and space, rather than labour as some transhistorical activity.

Nowhere do I say that the evil of prison labour is that prisoners had to undertake manual work. The evil, if we want to call it that, is the mobilising force of dispossession that turns all of life into work for capitalism’s reproduction, on pain of ruin (including incarceration). The question of what I believe the state should have done with prisoners is moot – while capitalism and its prisons was never inevitable and is the result of specific social relations, I cannot change the past. I wonder if Olssen would expect other historians to provide alternative realities to the ones they have studied?

I can only assume that, again, Olssen has felt confronted by an explicitly anti-capitalist and abolitionist history. His comments speak powerfully to how ingrained the idea of punitive retribution is in our society, and how naturalised capitalism and its prisons have become.

That Olssen is confronted by this work is signalled by his dismissal of the “sizeable number of Anglo-American left-wing historians anxious to condemn capitalism”, and his comment that I frequently dismiss “labour history” and “traditional accounts” for “falling to appreciate the central importance of ‘unfree labour’” (the scare quotes are his). I have an immense amount of respect for his past work. But until someone can point to any dedicated research by labour historians on prisoners as a working-class formation and the work they did outside of the prison in colonial New Zealand (or any general history of New Zealand, for that matter), I will stand by the claim that prison labour has been overlooked by labour historians – including by Olssen himself. I hope this might change in the future, despite his scepticism.

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Unfreedom Forest: A History of New Zealand’s Prison Plantations


In February 2024 I gave a Friends of the Turnbull Library lecture on the history of New Zealand’s prison plantations, reproduced below. The talk drew upon Chapter 5 of Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (BWB, 2023). Anyone interested in this topic will find more in that chapter.

I want to begin with a question that unexpectedly arose during the writing of Blood and Dirt. Does manure have agency? When a jailer at Kāingaroa requested five tons of manure in mid-1920, the prison forest was on the cusp of closure. Manure was an expense the Prisons Branch was unwilling to spend, and within a month the tree-planting camp was shut down. Was manure the nail in the proverbial coffin?

Thinking about the more-than-human world in this way led to other questions. Can trees really influence human relations and historical development? Are animals part of the working class? And where do we draw the line between ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’? Suddenly, I realised I was writing an environmental history as well as a social history. For like the extra-human environment more generally, manure played a part in human decision-making over the direction of New Zealand prison labour. As forests gave way to lucrative prison farms, agricultural labour became the mainstay of New Zealand prisons during the twentieth century. By 1923, 70 percent of the country’s incarcerated workers were employed in farm work, including clearing and opening land for settlement. Instead of planting trees, prisoners helped to forge dairy farms. And fueling their work was another type of manure – guano from the Pacific.

The more-than-human world has been an important protagonist in our history – and continues to play its part. Take the planting boom of the last decade. More and more land is being converted into pine plantations, sparking arguments between farmers and foresters, iwi and the state. Looming large is the government’s Emissions Trading Scheme and the One Billion Trees Project, schemes that aim to address climate change via the market. And like the prison forests of the 1910s and 1920s, pine plantations today are just as divisive. For anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond, the ‘lock up and leave’ model of pine plantations is pure folly. For the directors of New Zealand Carbon Farming, however, covering unproductive land in pine is the path towards an enhanced environment.

Locked up. Locked in. Locked out. Value unlocked. The rhetoric is telling. That’s because the history of New Zealand’s pine plantations is inseparable from incarceration, forced labour and unfreedom. And a key imperative, then and now, was making the environment productive by addressing waste and attacking idleness. As we shall see, it’s in this sense that manure and the more-than-human world definitely has agency.

In the late nineteenth century, the fear was not climate catastrophe but timber famine. New Zealand’s native forests had been cleared at alarming rates, burned off to make way for farms or felled for export across the Tasman. What would the country do when the trees ran out? The state responded by establishing forest plantations, with a focus on afforestation – the planting of trees where no trees had stood before. And to do so, it made use of another Crown asset: the labour of its incarcerated prisoners.

From 1901 onwards, imprisoned men were siphoned out of city jails and onto vast prison plantations, where their handiwork created forests out of scraggy tussock. Across Aotearoa, forests that we take for granted today were pitted, planted and nurtured by prisoners. As they struggled among freezing conditions, overbearing jailers and themselves – launching strikes, fighting fires, sabotaging equipment and pitting trees in the millions – incarcerated workers remade the extra-human environment and in turn made history. Pinus radiata would become a New Zealand hallmark.

‘The planting of treeless areas was a response to local timber supply problems,’ writes Michael Roche. ‘But it was also a facet of the ‘improvement’ of the natural environment.’ The use of prison labour for colonial development was also an established practice – if not the driving practice – by this time. For the state and capital, an unimproved environment needed ‘improving’, yet the labour to do so was not always available. Prisoners often filled the gap. As the historian Robert Burnett wrote, ‘There was too much to be done on the frontier fringes to think of leaving untapped labour behind some hastily erected fences.’ The tapping of that labour is the focus of my book.

Roadmaking was paramount in the early years, and from 1840 onwards, male chain gangs were used to construct and repair roads in every major urban centre, including the first highways through the North Island’s Central Plateau. Prison labour was also used on a range of public works, including clearing and levelling hills, reclaiming harbours and constructing moles, jetties and seawalls, draining swamps, diverting waterways, building bridges and retaining walls, creating foundations for schools and universities, and maintaining cemeteries, reserves and botanical gardens. Prisoners were also used to build their own enclosures – prisons – as well government buildings such as hospitals, asylums, police stations and millions of arrow-marked bricks. And in times of war and peace, unfree labour contributed to the colony’s military and state power, in the form of harbour fortifications.

But it was prison forests that bridged nineteenth century punishment and twentieth century reforms, as well as the trend towards moving prisons out of the city and out of sight. No longer was it considered appropriate to have jails and their punishment regimes smack band in the middle of town – having a jail in the city was ‘like a man having a rubbish heap on his front lawn’, complained a politician in 1900. Competition with free labour and the unemployed was also a factor. So, after roadmaking prisoners were sent to Milford Sound in 1890 and Rocks Road, Nelson in 1892, remote prison camps began to replace the chain gang. As Premier Richard Seddon argued in 1899, ‘the more humane way to deal with these men would be to put them away in the bush.’ By 1901, prisoners were not just in the bush. They were planting it.

Prison plantations sought to transform so-called wastelands into ordered, productive landscapes and male criminals into productive workers. ‘Fallen men could redeem wasted landscapes and redeem themselves in the process,’ writes Benedict Taylor, and be made as upright as trees. Like the millions of exotics planted by prisoners, the idea that prisons could ‘cure’ criminal tendencies rather than just deter people from committing crimes had taken root, leading to a shift from classical modes of justice. Rather than retribution and a set punishment for a set crime, consideration of the person and their moral treatment became important.

Because of this, only good- conduct prisoners and those considered ‘hopeful cases’ – men who appeared ‘anxious to reform’ – were meant to be sent from the city gaols to the new prison plantations. Habitual criminals, sexual offenders and men convicted of serious crimes were theoretically barred, as were the very young and very old. Those destined for tree- planting camps also had to pass a medical examination to make sure they were up to the hard work of pitting and planting. In practice, however, there weren’t enough first offenders or well- behaved prisoners to meet the plantation’s need for labour. All sorts were sent.

The average number of prisoners at the camps ranged from around 12 at the smaller plantations, to 60 at the larger ones. There is no doubt that for many of them, planting trees entailed more freedoms than breaking rock in a dusty quarry or being confined within the walls of Victorian-era jails. Yet despite the reforming rhetoric, hard labour remained a central feature of the tree-planting camps. Prisoners were not paid for their labour – apart from a select few, inmates did not earn gratuities until the 1920s, and even then, it was only for prisoners with dependants. And the work was hard. To produce perfection, prisoners were forced to pit the ground every four feet to exact instructions. Bent over steel spades, their hands calloused and blackened from dirt or stinging from fern cuts, they were expected to dig around 500 of these pits a day each. It was painstaking work, repeated millions of times across acres and acres of plains. Winters were especially difficult. A forestry worker in the 1930s remembered how, ‘as the long line of men stumbled across the plain, blinded by wind, the pumice squeaking under their feet, each with his hessian bag filled with infant pines around his waist, he’d often hear the men next to him crying with cold’. Injuries were common. Fingers and thumbs were severed cutting firewood or pruning older trees, while ferns scratched at eyeballs. Some prisoners died of pneumonia or drowned in swollen rivers.

In other words, prisons and forced labour were not going away. They just changed shape and moved inland. The state’s motto for its prisons at this time made this clear – nothing without labour.

On the vast prison plantations of Waiotapu, Whakarewarewa, Waipā and Kāingaroa in the North Island and Hanmer and Dumgree in the South, this motto was made a reality. Between 1901 and 1920, prisoners planted 15,932 acres of so-called wasteland with over 40 million trees. When they were thinned and harvested years later, those trees were turned into valuable firewood for homes and businesses, pulp for the country’s newspapers, or industrial items like butter boxes, door cores and frames, plywood, telegraph poles and props for mineshafts. The plantations themselves and the sawmills that spun from them were also extremely valuable and remained so when they were sold off in the 1990s. Their privatisation was dubbed “the Sale of the Century.” To this day, New Zealand forestry is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Unfree labour cultivated valuable commercial assets.

The country’s first prison forest – and perhaps the first in the world – was located at Waiotapu in the North Island’s Central Plateau. Crown land taken from Māori under various scenic and geothermal legislation was made available for the prison. As a result, their workscape was utterly unique: a workscape that was created from volcanic ash, complete with earthquakes, geysers and boiling mud. A reporter named Constant Barnicoat visited Waiotapu Prison in January 1903 and left a vivid description of the environment: ‘In the vast expanse of scrub- covered land, white as snow in spring with the blossoms of the aromatic manuka, and in which steam is constantly rising in all directions from the numberless hot springs, one cluster of plain, unadorned, white buildings at once strikes the eye.’ These were the huts of the prison, arranged in a U-shape and designed to be moved as the land was planted out. Indeed, the prison moved from its original site to a second location in April 1908, where it continued to alter the make-up of the Central Plateau.

An early photograph by Thomas Pringle held in the Alexander Turnbull Library – perhaps of Barnicoat’s visit – shows a group of men and women standing outside of the prison huts. Except for some windswept toetoe and the beginnings of a garden, the surrounding landscape is completely empty of trees. Today, the area is covered in pine, as if the trees has always been there.

Other photographs in the Turnbull capture this development in prison work regimes and their environmental impact. Government reports issued by the Lands and Surveys Department feature the photography of Grace Matthews, the talented wife of Chief Forester Henry Matthews. Together they visited the various plantations, and it is her images that bring the reports to life – documenting the life cycle of trees, the work of Māori women in the propagation stages, and the prisoners and their white huts. In a way she was a predecessor of the well-known nature photographer John Johns, although it’s unclear if and where her negatives have survived (I suspect there’s some in the cool stores at Archives New Zealand, but that’s another matter).

Also in the Turnbull is a ceremonial trowel used to lay the first block at Waikeria Prison Farm; a printing specimen book from Lyttleton Prison, where prisoners mass-produced reams of government forms, registers and other documents; accounts of prison life collected and published by Blanche Baughan in 1936 as People in Prison; and letters from prisoners to Edwin Arnold, a Justice of the Peace who visited the incarcerated in order to hear their complaints. Such letters are rare, for even though prisoners were constantly measured, managed, surveilled and recorded by the state, they have left very few accounts of their working experience. Included in Arnold’s papers are accounts of Point Halswell Prison on the Miramar peninsula, where prisoners were set to work covering the wind-swept hills with pine. The trees are still there today.

Prison labour was used to plant trees across Miramar because, although detractors argued prisoners were having a merry old time off in the great outdoors, in 1903 the state had expanded the tree-planting experiment. In April of that year, fifteen prisoners were ferried to Matiu/Somes Island in the middle of Wellington Harbour, where they dug more than 28,000 pits for saplings, and planted a mix of trees and scrub. In June 1903, Dumgree prison plantation was opened near Seddon in Marlborough. Hanmer, in Canterbury, followed three months later, as did Waipā, which opened near Rotorua in 1904 before shifting to the northern shore of Lake Rotokākahi (Green Lake) in July 1909. Whakarewarewa Prison opened in 1916, and Kāingaroa extended and then replaced Waiotapu in 1913. By 1921, these three prisons alone stretched to nearly 25,000 acres, or 64 per cent of the total area of state plantings.

The environmental change at the camps were startling. At Hanmer, a forest emerged from the wind-swept tussock, giving rise to an alpine village complete with trails, birdsong and exotic trees. The prison forest is a hiker’s and biker’s paradise. At Kāingaroa, native orchids, beetles, frogs, birds and even fish have made the plantation home. By the 1960s, Kāingaroa had the highest density of native birds recorded on the New Zealand mainland.

As indigenous landscapes were replaced with unfree forestry, prison plantations and their inmates experienced the full range of extra-human forces. Fire, frost, water, wind, sun, deer, rabbits, birds, seeds, soil and yes, manure, all shaped the actions of the incarcerated and the state. Sometimes the extra-human environment fostered success. Sometimes it sowed discord and failure. When it came to felons among the firs, the extra-human environment was as much of a protagonist as people.

For example, working rhythms were intimately shaped by water. Local waterways at the plantations were used for cleaning men, food, clothes and equipment. On Saturdays, a washday, rows of heavy pants hung across fence wire like a string of half- finished scarecrows. Planting, too, was fully determined by rain. The planting season would start around May or June and continue until late spring, when prisoners reverted to digging pits, fencing and other work. What was good for trees, however, wasn’t always good for human relationships. Rain could seep through the tin roof of a hut or the crease of a collar, fray tempers or dampen them, sow doubts or seed action. Rain also complicated the plantation’s productivity. At Waiotapu in October 1905, a full nineteen days were lost to rain; at Waipā the year before, it rained for almost 35 per cent of the planting season. Too much rain could undo months of hard work, prevent planting, upset routine and shift power dynamics within the prisons. Did rain benefit prisoners? Power seems to have swung either way as prisoners were momentarily freed of planting but then forced to make up for lost time or perform different types of jobs. Hydrology raised the human stakes.

An example from Waipā prison illustrates this point. Over a 200 day period in 1909, there were ninety- six days that noted at least one prisoner sick, sixty- two days that mentioned an accident of some kind, thirty- four days that were too wet for planting, and thirty days plagued by prisoners refusing to work. There were strikes at Waiotapu, too. In August 1904, twenty- two prisoners went on strike over their hours of work – severe frost had meant their working day had started an hour late and they were expected to make up for lost time in the evening. After refusing to work for two days, they won a change in hours. Here was a strike in a period of New Zealand history said to be free of strikes, and a winning one at that.

Conflict between the Prisons Branch and the Lands and Surveys Department, who controlled the foresters, was also rife at a number of plantations. And as the state’s prison farms began to reap significant financial returns, the Prisons Branch was less willing to send prisoners into the forests. ‘Our farming properties now provide a better and more satisfactory outlet for the labour of our physically fit prisoners’, argued the Branch. It was now the view that planting trees did little to prepare prison workers for wage labour, unlike farming, which was ‘a far better proposition both for the State and for the individual prisoner’.

One by one, the prison plantations closed or were converted to tree-planting camps for paid workers. The drought-plagued prison at Dumgree closed in 1908 and was eventually replaced by awarding-winning vineyards, including Yealands and Villa Maria. Hanmer Prison converted to employing free labour in 1913, as did Kaingaroa in 1920. By the scheme’s end, prisoners are estimated to have planted over 40.7 million trees at a labour-saving value of 65,435 pounds – close to five million dollars in today’s money.

Although the bulk of the tree-planting prisons existed for less than two decades, it is impossible to ignore the contribution prison labour has made to New Zealand’s billion- dollar forest industry. As the newly formed State Forest Service declared in 1921, ‘a lasting monument of achievement has been established by the prison tree-planters in the wonderful forest plantations of the Rotorua region and those of the South Island.’ According to Michael Roche, prison plantations were ‘a valuable and very large- scale trial which proved the qualities of some exotic trees and indicated that extensive afforestation was technically feasible’. They were like the opening act at a concert, setting the stage for the forestry boom that followed – both in the public and private sector. Indeed, the company afforestation of the 1920s and 1930s, which is well documented in the papers of the Turnbull and something I wrote about in the latest Turnbull Record, would not have been possible without the example set by prisoners. And the state forests at Kāingaroa, Hanmer and elsewhere all reaped the benefits of unfree labour – and continue to do.

Although at a smaller scale, unfree forestry also remained a feature of prison labour beyond 1920. At Hautū and Rangipō prisons near Turangi, forestry was (and is) an important part of the prison’s work regimes. In 1923, almost 8,000 trees were planted; in 1925, a further 20,000 Pinus radiata were lined out, and 13,000 more were planted a year later. Here, unfree forestry has continued into modern times. Tongariro- Rangipō Prison still includes forestry among its list of work schemes, and its products feed local sawmills and planting initiatives. At Waikune Prison near National Park, forestry was also key throughout the twentieth century. And as recently as 2019, the Department of Corrections used Northland prisoners to plant seedlings as part of the One Billion Trees programme.

So, to return to our opening question about the more-than-human world. It’s now clear to me that while social historians are known for digging deep into the nitty- gritty of human relationships, many of us seem to shelve our shovels when it comes to the land itself. The extra- human environment is often used as an interesting setting but little more, a stage prop rolled in to give colour to the real – human – drama. People have agency, environments do not. Humans alone are the motor of history.

Yet prison plantations upend this false divide between ‘Society’ and ‘Nature’. As dynamic workscapes, prison forests show how capitalism is not just an economic system, not just a social system, but a way of organising nature. It is an ecological regime. Relations between people ‘are always bundled with the rest of nature, flowing inside, outside, and through human bodies and histories’, argues Jason W. Moore. ‘Nature is an active participant in every labour process: the web of life, both visible and invisible to humans, is always at work.’ As the state channelled seed, soil and forced labour into a national asset, prison plantations both altered the extra- human environment and were profoundly shaped by it. Entire landscapes were forever changed by trees, while the trees themselves shaped prison policy, labour regimes and statecraft on a national and international scale. Besides spurring similar prisons across Australia, unfree forestry helped to transform ‘a remote and undeveloped south seas colony’ into a sophisticated economy with commercial interests across the Pacific Rim. Today, China alone consumes more logs in five days than the South Island exports in a single month.

Significant parts of New Zealand’s exotic forests were birthed and raised by prisoners, in response to, and continuously shaped by, the extra-human environment. It’s in this way that I’ve come to understand state forests, incarceration and the more-than-human world – including manure – in a whole new light.

Saturday, March 30, 2024

'Blood and Dirt' recognised by the International Labor History Association


Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand has received an International Labor History Association Honorable Mention Award!

On Blood and Dirt, the judges (who included Dave Roediger) wrote: 'In this unique account of prison labor and the development of New Zealand from the 1790s to the recent past, Davidson has unearthed a history of forced labor and how it shaped the landscape, development, and building of a country. Thoroughly illustrated with historical photographs and drawings, this work brings to light the work of many generations of prisoners who created roads, infrastructure, housing, public works, and lands for farming. This book’s definitive contribution to prison-labor history, underscores the need for historians to give greater future attention to the topic of prison labor. '

Blood and Dirt is one of three international books to receive this recognition. You can learn more about the Award here.

Friday, December 8, 2023

'Blood and Dirt' one of the best books of 2023!


Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (BWB) has been out for four months now, and the positive feedback has been amazing. I've been overwhelmed by the response of readers who have emailed me their thoughts - thank you. Published reviews, videos and talks/podcasts about the book can be found on the BWB website here: https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/blood-and-dirt/ 

To top this off, Blood and Dirt has been featured on a number of best books of 2023 lists. The only New Zealand history book to make the list and one of the few New Zealand nonfiction titles, The New Zealand Listener wrote:  
"Lively account of how crime and punishment, capital and labour, came together, in this reappraisal of incarceration since colonial settlement, prisoners’ efforts – streets, breakwalls, defence fortifications – hiding in plain sight."
On The Spinoff, Claire Mabey and Kiran Dass wrote:
Before this book I had never considered, or heard of, prison labour contributing to the built environment of Aotearoa New Zealand. This book is an essential history that will make you look with fresh eyes at the colonial project and the inequities of the justice system. / Claire Mabey

This book hits all the sweet spots for me – Aotearoa social history with a strong narrative drive. This is an important book about labour, capitalism, colonisation, and the crucial role that prisoners played in public infrastructure, with the idea that history should be challenging while leading to radical social change. Blood and Dirt is an exemplary example of what beautiful and intelligent publishing can look like in Aotearoa. / Kiran Dass, WORD Christchurch

The Sunday Star Times included Blood and Dirt alongside three other best local titles, noting:

With the incoming coalition government promising to crack down on crime, there’s no better time to acquaint yourself with New Zealand’s punitive system – measured in the very infrastructure laid by prisoners over the decades. As Jared Davidson writes, forced labour is evident in the country’s streets and urban spaces, from the Bay of Islands, to Milford Sound, to our biggest cities. Davidson told the Start-Times in September, “I think it will change the way we think about New Zealand and the places we take for granted today.”

And across the Tasman, the Australia Institute included Blood and Dirt on their 2023 Essential Reading List.

I was lucky enough to share my own best reads of 2023 with The Spinoff, including Audition by Pip Adam and The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa by Catherine Comyn. Two others that could have easily made the list were The Words For Her by Thomasin Sleigh and Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History by Ryan Bodman.

Speaking of Pip Adam, a highlight of my literary year was being able to share a stage (and kōrero) with Pip as part of VERB Wellington. Pip recorded the session for her Better Off Read Podcast. Have a listen and support her work here: https://betteroffread.substack.com/p/ep-133-jared-davidson-blood-and-dirt

There's some more talks and events to come in 2024, including the Auckland Writers Festival - details can be found on my website: www.jared-davidson.com.


Sunday, August 20, 2023

Prison labour, history-making and power: Notes on Trouillot’s 'Silencing the Past'

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History was published by Haitian writer and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in 1995. As I’ve written elsewhere, Silencing the Past profoundly shaped the way I understand archives and the production of history. It is a go-to text for writers, educators and students across the globe and continues to offer insights into why some stories are remembered and others are not, and how historical narratives are produced and reproduced.

 

In Silencing the Past, Trouillot is less interested in what history is, but how history works. He writes, ‘This book is about history and power. It deals with the many ways in which the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production. The forces I will expose are less visible than gunfire, class property or political crusades. I want to argue that they are no less powerful.’

 

Trouillot begins chapter one with the example of the Alamo, which was won by Santa Anna in March 1836 but ‘lost’ in the longer narrative. A few weeks after the Mexican victory at the Alamo, Santa Anna was captured by the Americans at San Jacinto. The American victory was punctuated with shouts of ‘Remember the Alamo’. With their battle cry and its reference to Alamo, writes Trouillot, the men under Sam Houston doubly made history: ‘as actors, they captured Santa Anna… as narrators, they gave the Alamo story a new meaning.’ They reversed for more than a century the victory Santa Anna thought he had gained at the Alamo.

 

This is Trouillot’s way of introducing a key tenet of the book: the double meaning of the word ‘history’. The double meaning (or the double-sided historicity) he is interested in is history as what happened and history as that which is said to have happened. The first places emphasis on the sociohistorical process, while the second places emphasis on our knowledge of that process or the story about that process. As Trouillot demonstrates, neither are as straight forward as they seem.

 

From the Alamo through to the Haitian Revolution and the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Columbus, Trouillot examines the blurriness of this double meaning, tracking power and the production of history through multiple examples, especially their silences.

 

First, Trouillot offers a critique of the storage model of history, in which history is understood as the simple recall of important past experiences and events. In this model, history is to a collective what remembrance is to an individual, ‘the more or less conscious retrieval of past experiences stored in memory.’


Trouillot points out the flaws in this model, using the example of a person recalling in monologue form all their memories of a particular event, or even their life. ‘Consider a monologue describing in sequence all of an individual’s recollections. It would sound as a meaningless cacophony even to the narrator.’ And what about the events that shape us, but which we may not be able to remember or recall. The idea that the past is fixed and separate and can be accurately recalled at will is not only cognitively impossible, it does not form a history. As Trouillot notes, ‘the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present.’ In this sense, ‘the past has no content. The past – or more accurately, pastness – is a position.’

 

The problem of determining what belongs to the past is even harder when that past is said to be shared. When does the life of a collective start? How does a collective decide which events to recall, to include or exclude? ‘The storage model’ writes Trouillot, ‘assumes not only the past to be remembered but the collective subject that does the remembering.’ Who are the ‘we’ in this example?

 

Trouillot comes back to the double meaning of the word history and how the search for what history is has led people to either a) demarcate precisely and at all times the dividing line between historical process (what happened) and historical knowledge (that which is said to have happened), or b) to conflate them completely. Instead, Trioullot suggests that between the two extremes of a mechanically “realist” or positivist approach, or the naïve “constructivist” or relativist approach, there is a middle approach – one that asks how history works rather than what history is. ‘For what history is changes with time and place or, better said, history reveals itself through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the processes and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.’

 

Silences


Trouillot’s treatment of silences in the production of history are especially important. Rather than mere absences or presences – which are too passive for Trouillot – silence is ‘an active and transitive process: one “silences” a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active.’ Trouillot emphasises that history is constantly produced, that what we understand as ‘history’ changes with time and place, and that what is said to have happened as the recall of facts is indeed a process filled with silences. For Trouillot, it is not just a matter of what is remembered or forgotten. Silences are produced and reproduced throughout any telling of a story.

 

In one of the most important and oft-cited passages of the book, Trouillot writes that ‘silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).’



We will come back to these soon. But for now, he writes that these moments ‘are not meant to provide a realistic description of the making of any individual narrative. Rather, they help us understand why not all silences are equal and why they cannot be addressed – or redressed – in the same manner.’ In other words, ‘any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.’

 

Hence the mention of power in the by-line of Silencing the Past. For Trioullot, power ‘does not enter the story once and for all, but at different times and from different angles. It precedes the narrative proper, contributes to its creation and to its interpretation.’ ‘Power is constitutive of the story’ writes Trouillot. ‘Tracking power through various moments helps emphasise the fundamentally processual character of historical production, to insist that what history is matters less that how history works.’

 

Archives 101 (or the moment fact assembly, the making of archives)


This is where an understanding of context is so important, and why provenance and original order are keystones to archival practice. It is context that allows us to make sense of a source and its creation, and to place it in relation to others. And context helps us to think about the four moments that silence can enter the historical process.

 

Like the word history, the word archive has a double meaning. There are archives as evidence, and archives as an institution or repository. Both have power to marshal narratives and make meanings. And stories are key to both.

 

At their most basic, archives are stories. Whether we’re talking about archives as evidence or archival institutions, all peoples use archives as stories, whether transmitted through speech, written in text, woven within tāniko patterns or embodied in tā moko, performed as ritual or shared in everyday practices, or displayed in objects or in the land itself. For Trouillot, ‘archives are the institutions that organise facts and sources and condition the possibility of existence of historical statements.’ These ‘historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power’. As Rodney Carter writes,

 

‘Archival power is, in part, the power to allow voices to be heard. It consists of highlighting certain narratives and of including certain types of records created by certain groups. The power of the archive is witnessed in the act of inclusion, but this is only one of its components. The power to exclude is a fundamental aspect of the archive. Inevitably, there are distortions, omissions, erasures, and silences in the archive. Not every story is told.’

 

Yet throughout the twentieth century, public archives were seen as passive, objective and neutral. The public archivist was an impartial custodian – interpretation was the job of those using archives and not that of the archivist. ‘The good Archivist’, wrote Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the grandfather of the Western archival canon, was ‘perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.’ Archives were the evidence from which Truth (with a capital ‘T’) could be found.

 

More recently, the post-custodial turn has challenged this view. A questioning of the profession’s objectivity has reframed or refigured archives and archival institutions. Archives are increasingly viewed as social constructs – they don’t simply ‘arrive or emerge fully formed, nor are they innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications . . . all archives come into being in and as history as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures.’ And for Trouillot, this is also true of the moment of fact creation – the making of sources, or archives as evidence.

 

Facts and Historical Facts (or the moment of fact creation and the moment of fact retrieval)


Following Trouillot and others, the evidential nature of archives as sources have been questioned: no longer can we think of sources as the simple bearers of fact or truth. Just as much as oral testimony, a written document reflects the biases and needs of its creator. It seems obvious, but it is important to note that sources are not neutral or natural but are created. And as Trouilott writes, ‘facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.’

 

‘Silences are inherent in history’ argues Trouillot ‘because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded.’ The ‘facts’ people choose to record come with their own ‘inborn absences, specific to its production.’ Indeed, silences are necessary to any account, otherwise that account would be unintelligible.

 

Think back to the storage-model example. A similar process happens at the moment of fact creation, the making of sources. Trouillot uses the example of a sportscaster or commentator calling a game. If the commentator ‘told us every “thing” that happened at each and every moment, we would not understand anything.’ Things are left out. Some facts are ignored while others are highlighted. Silences are inherent (and necessary) at the moment of fact creation.

 

It's useful here to clarify that Trouillot is not arguing there are no such things as facts. Following Trouillot and others, Kevin Gannon gives the following example of how the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives) is an active process:

 

There are facts, and there are historical facts. Fact: lots of people crossed the Rubicon. Historical fact: Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE. A fact is embedded within a historical context that gives it historical significance and meaning. So when does a plain old “fact” rise to the level of “historical fact?” The short answer: when a historian decides it does. The fact and its context acquire historical meaning in retrospect, as they are recovered, interpreted, and presented by the historian.

 

In other words, ‘significance is not inherent, but bestowed’. For Gannon, ‘the myth of objectivity presupposes inherent significance’. Yet defining what fact is ‘important’ or ‘significant’ is contested, is wrapped up in cultural and political meanings, is shaped by relations of power that are themselves historical, and shifts over time. What is important to some people is not for others. ‘The assertion of “historical importance” is really a claim about things that matter, and more tellingly, things that don’t matter.’

 

It’s in this way that all writing and historical research is political. The topics we choose to study and the facts, stories and people we give significance to is not objective. The facts cannot speak for themselves, just as a historian cannot simply record the past ‘as it happened’. As I write in Blood and Dirt, all historians draw upon methods and practices within their ideological framework, including (and especially) historians who claim to be disinterested, even-handed and simply recalling the facts. The writing of history, argued Douglas Hay, ‘is deeply conditioned not only by our personal political and moral histories, but also by the times in which we live, and where we live’. Whether we acknowledge it or not, historians ‘take stands by our choice of words, handling of evidence, and analytic categories. And also by our silences.’ Or to echo Trouillot: ‘one engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active.’

 

This brings us all the way back to archives as stories, history as produced by power, and the importance of context. And back to Trouillot’s four moments of silencing.


Matthew Conroy and the four moments of silencing



Recall Trouillot’s argument that silences can enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments. There are countless examples I could use to illustrate these from a book like Blood and Dirt, which charts the hidden history of prison labour in New Zealand and its Pacific. But perhaps a good start would be the story of Matthew Conroy.


Matthew Conroy was a United Irishman, an Irish political prisoner who was transported to Australia for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. When Matthew and close to 300 other male convicts arrived in New South Wales in February 1800, the Irish political prisoners were seen to pose a serious threat to the balance of power. Several plans for an armed uprising were afoot, and Matthew was firmly in the middle of them – he was said to be a ‘principal Ring leader’ and part of a secret group that met on 23 August 1800 to discuss ‘the Business’, including hiding pikes at Parramatta and recruiting convicts to the cause. A lack of evidence appears to have saved him from the 300 lashes and banishment to Norfolk Island that was handed down to the other ringleaders, and by 1814, he had joined the mission to New Zealand as a convict sawyer.

The moment of fact creation (the making of sources)

Yet in all his letters and journals, Samuel Marsden leaves Matthew Conroy off the Active’s passenger list for November 1814, despite Matthew advertising his intention to sail to the Bay of Islands in the Sydney newspapers and despite Marsden acknowledging the importance of his pair of sawyers in subsequent letters. What’s more, Samuel Marsden knew Conroy – it was Marsden who had led investigations into the plot of August 1800.


Samuel Marsden to Josiah Pratt, 28 November 1814 (Hocken)


Writing to Josiah Pratt on 28 November 1814, Marsden outlines the passengers aboard the Active and its historic mission:

 

‘When I wrote the last hasty Line I hoped to be near New Zealand before this time— we have been lying at the mouth of the Harbour detained by contrary winds ever since till, this morning— we are now leaving the Heads of Port Jackson with a fair wind— The number of Souls on Board men women and Children are 34— Europeans, Thomas Hansen Master, and his wife— Messrs Kendall Hall & King and their wives, and five Children John Hunter Carpenter— Alexr Ross mate Henry Shaffery Sailor- Richd Stockwell, Servant to Mr Kendall Thomas Namblton Cook— Wm. Campbell weaver— and Flax dresser— Walter Hall Smith.’

 

In other letters (later compiled as Marsden's account of the 1814 sailing), the passenger list is different again:


On Monday the 28th we weighed Anchor, and got out to sea, the number of persons on board (including women and children, were thirty-five— Mr Hanson, Master, his wife and son, Messrs Kendall, Hall, and King with their wives and five children;— 8 New Zealanders— two Otaheitans and four Europeans belonging to the vessel, besides Mr Nicholas, myself, two Sawyers, one Smith, and one runaway convict (as we found him to be afterwards)


Here, at least, the presence of two sawyers aboard the Active are mentioned. But why is Matthew Conroy never named in these sources? There are several possibilities. For one, Marsden hated Irish convicts. Was Conroy’s transportation as an Irish rebel and his role in the 1800 plot the reason Marsden left his name off the historic passenger list? Marsden names other convicts as passengers, including the ticket-of-leave seaman Henry Shaffery. Is this an example of the dialectics of silences Trouillot observes in the story of Sans Souci, where naming one thing actively silences the other (in other words, by naming Shaffery the convict seaman, Marsden silences Conroy the Irish rebel)? Or did he simply forget Matthew Conroy was onboard when he penned this first list?

 

The moment of fact assembly (the making of archives)

As a convict, Matthew Conroy did not leave his own account of his passage in the form of manuscripts or diaries. In the words of Trouillot, he was an actor but not a narrator. His convict status and working life contributed to the inequalities of his historical narrative at the source. The content of the traditional archive, shaped as they are by power and the preservation of certain voices over others, cemented this fact. Yet he is present in other archives such as newspapers (which recorded his presence aboard the Active on the November 1814 sailing). And reading Marsden’s own archive for silences reveals Conroy’s presence too.

 

Upon his return to Sydney, Marsden wrote that: ‘The following number of persons were left at Runghee Hoo [sic]. Mr & Mrs Kendall 1 Servant and 3 boys – Mr and Mrs Hall and 1 Boy – Mr and Mrs King & 2 Boys These belonging to the Society. One pair of Sawyers and a Black Smith bound for a time’ [my emphasis]. The pair of sawyers were William Campbell and Matthew Conroy, who were some of the first people ashore when the Active arrived. In the same letter Marsden writes: ‘I have since sent over the Wives of the Smith, and one Sawyer (the other being a single Man) and 2 Children.’ These are Eleanor Hall, wife of the blacksmith Walter Hall, and Ann Kelly, wife of Matthew Conroy. Both are listed as intending to sail on the Active in April 1815 to join their husbands, who were already in New Zealand, having sailed on the Active in November 1814. Campbell, Conroy and their families would soon move to Waitangi, where they built the first ever European structures on the site.

 

The mention of sawyers in Marsden’s later correspondence does not make it through to the various online archives that list the Active’s passengers. Entries on genealogical websites such as WikiTree and Yesteryears reproduce the lists and sources without Matthew Conroy present. In doing so, these online archives reproduce the original moment of silencing and shape the narratives that will make use of them.


Screenshot of the entry for the Active on Yesteryears (accessed 20 August 2023)


The moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives)

Nearly every account since has continued this silence which, for such a pivotal event in New Zealand’s history – a Mayflower- esque, birth- of-the- nation moment for some – is telling. It was continued at the time by a fellow passenger and friend of Marsden, John Liddiard Nicholas, in his Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand: Performed in the Years 1814 and 1815 in Company with the Rev. Samuel Marsden (Hughes and Baynes, London, 1817). And it has continued into the present, from Robert McNab and John Rawson Elder to Judith Binney and Anne Salmond.


Passenger list for the Active in Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand (ENZB)


Of course, to focus on Matthew Conroy is to silence the presence of the other convicts, Māori rangatira, missionaries, women, children and crew on board the Active. Instead, my narrative of Hohi centres Matthew and places him aboard the Active in November 1814 for several reasons. First, the lists of those said to be aboard the Active and who arrived to found New Zealand’s first mission are wrong. That which is said to have happened is incorrect. Second, the fact that Irish convicts like Conroy helped found New Zealand’s first mission is important to my argument: that convict labour was not marginal but core to the colonisation of New Zealand. Third, it connects New Zealand (through Matthew Conroy) to Irish political and social struggles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that’s just plain interesting!

 

The moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)

What others will make of my narrative about the role of prison labour in New Zealand is yet to be determined. I believe the role of convicts like Matthew Conroy is significant, for it shapes our wider understanding of the use of convict labour in the making of New Zealand from the very beginning of Pākehā settlement. From 1814 onwards, the unfree labour of workers such as Matthew Conroy have contributed to the making of modern New Zealand in important-yet-overlooked ways. The example of Matthew Conroy speaks to these moments of silences, to the various makings of sources, archives and narratives that in turn shape the making of history in the final instance. But as Trouillot would no doubt remind us, nothing is final in history.

 

These notes come from a talk I gave for the Kapiti WEA, 19 August 2023. Some of the content is republished from my Overland article on Silencing the Past, as well as my chapter for Public Knowledge. The edition of Silencing the Past I reference is the Beacon Press anniversary edition.