‘Dead Letters’ wins the 2020 Bert Roth Award

From the LHP website: Jared Davidson is the winner of the 2020 Bert Roth Award for Labour History for his book, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920, published by Otago University Press.

The award was announced at the Labour History Project AGM on Tuesday 11 August.

Named for the late historian Herbert Roth, the award is presented annually to the work that best depicts the history of work and resistance in New Zealand published in the previous calendar year.

The award was judged this year by Paul Maunder, Cybele Locke, Claire-Louise, Ross Webb, and Mark Derby.

‘In his excellent book, Dead Letters, archivist and historian Jared Davidson introduces us to a range of extraordinary characters whose stories and struggles challenge the nationalist narratives of the war’, the judges found.

‘These historical characters, as introduced in the blurb of the book, include “a feisty German-born socialist, a Norwegian watersider, an affectionate Irish nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, a cross-dressing doctor, a nameless rural labourer, an avid letter writer with a hatred of war, and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent”’.

‘What connects this cast of characters is that their activities, their letters, and in some cases their activism against the war, was of interest to the New Zealand state. The letters they wrote, to loved ones, friends, and comrades, were never delivered, but were intercepted by the state. They are now held at Archives New Zealand, in the Special Registry File, where Davidson discovered them 100 years later’.

‘In telling their stories, Davidson not only provides a compelling historical narrative, he also contributes to our understanding of the First World War home front, to the early history of surveillance, to the history of political and industrial activism and dissent (often in the most surprising places!), and more broadly to New Zealand social history and the history of the modern state’.

2020 Runner Up

Tony Sutorius, Director, Helen Kelly – Together, 2019.

2020 Shortlist

Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns, Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance, Te Papa Press, 2019.

Barbara Brookes, Jane McCabe and Angela Wanhalla. eds., Past Caring? Women, Work and Emotion, Otago University Press, 2019.

Hilary Stace, JB Munro: Community Citizen, Wellington, 2019.

Caitlin Lynch, Director, Harriet Morrison – Fighting for Fairness, 2019.

Max Nichol, An ‘Organ of Student Opinion’? Alternative Print, Protest, and the Politics of Education in Salient, 1973-1989, MA Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019.

Rachel Standfield and Michael J. Stevens, ‘New Histories but Old Patterns: Kāi Tahu in Australia’ in Victoria Stead and Jon Altman, ed., Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia, Canberra, 2019.

Toby Boraman, ‘Indigeneity, Dissent, and Solidarity: Māori and Strikes in the Meat Industry in Aotearoa New Zealand During the Long 1970s’, International Review of Social History, 64, 1, 2019, pp.1-35.

Past Winners of the Bert Roth Award

2019 Winner: David Haines and Jonathan West, ‘Crew Cultures in the Tasman World’ in Francis Steele, ed., New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives, Bridget Williams Books.

2019 Runner-up: Caren Wilton, My Body My Business: NZ Sex Workers in an Era of Change, Otago University Press

2018 Winner: Helen McNeil, A Striking Truth, Cloud Ink Press.

2018 Runner-up: Renée, These Two Hands: a memoir

2017 Winner: Tearepa Kahi, Director, Poi E: The Story of our Song

2016 Winner: Melissa Williams, Panguru and the city: Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua: An urban migration history, Bridget Williams Books

2015 Winner: Nicholas Hoare ‘Imperial Dissenters: Anti-Colonial Voices in New Zealand, 1883-1945’, MA, Victoria University of Wellington.

2014 Winner: Rebecca Macfie, Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and why 29 Men died, Awa Press.

Silencing the past: reflections on remembering and forgetting

Issues of public history continue to raise important questions on both sides of the Tasman. From the attacks on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Invasion day protests in Australia, to the ongoing effects of the New Zealand Wars and the compulsory teaching of history in Aotearoa New Zealand’s schools, more and more people are grappling with narratives about the past. Social media feeds are flooded with programmes such as the civics series The Citizen’s Handbook and live, COVID-clouded discussions on colonisation and constitutional transformation. Debates on remembering and forgetting are more and more common, helped along by the tweets and press conferences of an embattled President Trump. As an archivist and labour historian, it’s exciting to see such a public engagement with history.

For me, it’s also timely. This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of a book that profoundly changed the way I understand the production of history. I’m only now realising that it also influenced my working trajectory as an archivist and my own practice as a historian. More importantly, the book continues to offer insights into why some stories are remembered and others are not, and how historical narratives are produced and reproduced.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Haitian writer Michel-Rolph Trouillot was first published in 1995. Twenty-five years on, its weaving of personal narrative with stories of slave rebellion, black Jacobins in the Haitian Revolution and the ‘discovery’ of the Americas still resonate. As I write, filmmaker Raoul Peck is using it as one of the key sources for Exterminate All the Brutes, a four-part docuseries about the exploitative and genocidal aspects of European colonialism. Written with a nod to postmodernism and a critique of structuralism, Silencing the Past nonetheless blends such an approach with the best aspects of social history and its analysis of power relations.

This, however, is not intended as a review (of which there are plenty online, and I’d encourage you to read them). Instead, I want to pull out the bits that speak directly to discussions of remembering and forgetting; the bits that remind us that history is more than just individual or collective memory recall.

There are several insights in Silencing the Past that now seem like common sense but were relatively novel at the time: ‘The past – or, more accurately, pastness – is a position’; 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 … in history, power begins at the source.’ As an archivist, I geek out at statements like ‘historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power’ and ‘archives are the institutions that organise facts and sources and condition the possibility of existence of historical statements.’

Silence and the act of silencing have become buzzwords in historical scholarship, used as markers or tropes without further explanation. In response, some historians have pointed to the wealth of archival sources available to us, from oral histories to nineteenth century documents. Yet it’s Trouillot’s treatment of silences in the production of history that are especially important.

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.’ He 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.

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).

And further: 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.’

I’ve written about the last three moments for Overland before, reflecting on the WW100 commemorations or the hidden history of prison labour. The writing of history from below is a partial attempt to amplify the voices of the silenced. However, questioning the moment of fact creation is just as crucial.

As Trouillot notes, ‘silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded.’ Take the Imperial officer reporting on an engagement with Māori during the Waikato War, or the Tasmanian colonist recording hints of a frontier massacre in his diary; the ‘facts’ they choose to put down on paper come with their own ‘inborn absences, specific to its production.’ Historical facts are not created equal, nor are they neutral. The mentions or silences engaged in by the person creating a story ‘reflect differential control of the means of historical production’ from ‘the very first engraving that transforms an event into a fact.’

Even if we are blessed with a wealth of sources, they are still shaped by silences. In my day job as an archivist I work with documents from German Sāmoa, during the period before New Zealand invaded the country with its own imperial ambitions. At that time, indentured Chinese labourers (or ‘coolies’) were shipped in by boatload to work the various Sāmoan plantations mostly owned by German or British nationals. Thousands of Chinese men flushed through these capitalist ventures, by choice or by circumstance. In some cases, they challenged their poor conditions and treatment through riots, strikes and absenteeism. Yet, while we hold container after container of German Sāmoan records, the names of Chinese labourers are nearly never recorded. They exist in the documents as Kuli. No.323, or simply Kuli (the German word for coolie). Only by painstakingly cross-referencing scattered fragments (or mentions) can the names and human agency of some Chinese labourers be rescued from the produced silences of German clerks.

Hence the mention of ‘power’ in the by-line of Silencing the Past. ‘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.’ This not only includes power from above, but power from below. As Vincent Brown notes in his masterful history of ‘Tacky’s revolt’, the Jamaican slave war that influenced the Haitian revolution: ‘as surely as wind and water change the contours of stone, slavery’s archival sources have been shaped by the black people they rarely describe.’

An understanding of context is radical, in the original meaning of the term (of relating to a root, to get to the root of something). It is context that allows us to make sense of a source and its creation, and to place it in relation to others. It is context that can unveil the legal fictions of state or white supremacist narratives. As we continue to discuss the past and its impact on our present, as we question what stories are remembered and what stories are forgotten, I look to Trouillot and the scores of critical writers since as a reminder of how power relations continue to shape history; how context matters; and how, sometimes, remembering alone is not enough.

First published by Overland Literary Journal, 28 May 2020

Covid lockdowns give us a chance to reimagine Anzac Day and consider war more honestly

A wreath made from fallen Kauri tree leaves commemorates Anzac Day in a driveway in Auckland, New Zealand. Photograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images

My latest article for The Guardian.

Public memory is a funny business.

The New Zealand government spent $65m on its first world war commemoration programme. According to its own figures, 93% of New Zealanders aged 15 and over engaged in the centennial in some way. The futility of war was the most-cited emotional response, which is interesting when put alongside the programme’s objective to strengthen “national identity” (read: the nation state) and an “enduring commitment to peace, global security and international cooperation” (read: current and future wars).

The foundation stone of this nationalist and militarist commemoration was, and is, Anzac Day. Every year on 25 April the country marks the anniversary of New Zealand and Australia’s 1915 colonial invasion of Turkey. State events and dawn ceremonies have been present from the very beginning, held every year since 1916.
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But this year Aotearoa New Zealand will not mark Anzac Day with public services. Lockdown restrictions to eliminate Covid-19 has seen all dawn ceremonies and other civil events cancelled. Instead, people can decorate their letterbox, lay a virtual poppy or hashtag their tweets. For the first time since 1916, Anzac Day will be relatively free of the state.

For some, the idea of not having a public dawn service will be hard. Even this historian of wartime resistance has trouble imagining what Anzac Day will look like without them. Some of my earliest memories of Anzac are of emerging into the cold, autumnal morning to attend a dawn service. My understandings of why were vague. Yet the message was clear. The simple act of getting out of bed and attending a dawn service was enough to say to an eight-year-old boy: if you fight and die for your country, you will be remembered.

This year, we have an opportunity to jettison the militarism and remember the trauma of war in a different way. This year, we may be able to escape what the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen calls the “industrialisation of memory” and consider the root causes of war, as well as the voices that are heard in wartime commemorations and those that are not. Not having a public commemoration defined and organised by the state might just enable a “just” remembering of war.

What would a just remembering of war look like? This year we don’t need to ban politicians, as Guardian writer Paul Daley has suggested, as there are no public events for them to crash. Would it be to focus on the horror of war, what David Aldridge claims to be the only justifiable approach to the commemoration of war, especially in education? Would it be to widen our remembering to others, to those our grandfathers and great-grandfathers killed with bullets and bayonets, and the millions of civilians killed and maimed? Would it mean recognising the thousands of wartime resisters – Māori included – who would not fight for the state? Would it mean refusing the day altogether?

“When it comes to war, the basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is not only about remembering and forgetting certain events or people,” writes Nguyen. It is also “about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity.” For Nguyen, doing justice to the historical trauma caused by war involves recognition of both the humanity and inhumanity within ourselves and within others.

Personal reflection at home might be the perfect way to start. So, as we stay in our bubbles and avoid state-sanctioned memory-making, we can decide to commemorate Anzac Day (or not) on our own terms. And maybe it will mark the dawn of an honest, meaningful, and “just” remembering of war.

'Dead Letters' longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Last week I was happy to have finally finished my article on the 1843 Nelson labourers' revolt. To learn that Dead Letters had made the long list of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards was mind-blowing! The category of general non-fiction is a field packed with some amazing titles, and I'm so happy to be one of the ten writers in the running for the shortlist: http://www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealand-book-awards/2020-awards/longlist/

Thanks to the team at Otago University Press and everyone who made Dead Letters possible, including the descendants of those whose stories feature in the book. 

A Hundred Little Treaties

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Sharing my 2016 article for Mana Magazine about the Crown Purchase Deeds held at Archives New Zealand. Click on the image to read the article.

#AuthorsForFireys - signed books in aid of a good cause

To support our Australian friends in this time of need, my #AuthorsForFireys offer is a signed copy of all three of my books shipped free to NZ or AUS:

- Dead Letters
- Remains to Be Seen
- Sewing Freedom

You can bid an amount on my Twitter feed, and the full amount of the winning bid will go to the CFA in Australia. Info on the hashtag auction here: https://authorsforfireys.wixsite.com/website. Auction closes 11 Jan.

Here's the Twitter post for any bids: https://twitter.com/anrchivist/status/1213994577796812800