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.

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.