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.