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.