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.