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.
