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.
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.
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.
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.
