The opening pages of Jared Davidson’s Blood and Dirt display a photograph of Napier’s Marine Parade, taken in 1895, followed by a painting from the 1860s centred on Dunedin’s First Church. In the margins of each image small groups of workers toil away. The Napier photo has a gang of hard-labour prisoners quarrying metal near a sea wall built by convicts. The Dunedin painting features prisoners demolishing Bell Hill to extend the city’s road network. The aim of Davidson’s work is to take these unfree workers out of the historical margins and highlight their crucial role in creating New Zealand’s colonial society and its infrastructure. Davidson unashamedly views prison labour through a class struggle lens. He makes no pretence to be a neutral observer, instead taking the approach that the historian should state their position clearly and present the evidence to back up their stance. His own sympathies are clearly with those imprisoned rather than the system that imprisoned them.
Before the publication of Blood and Dirt, New Zealand’s penal historiography did not have a study focused on the role of prison labour in developing the colonial economy. Imprisonment was a form of punishment entirely absent from Aotearoa prior to European colonisation. Davidson is clear that he is not discussing traditional Māori institutions such as slavery. His account is strictly concerned with the labour of those imprisoned by a state-based justice system. As its subtitle indicates, Blood and Dirt is first and foremost an account of the substantial role prison labour played in New Zealand’s colonial and early twentieth-century economy. New Zealanders have long been under the illusion that, unlike most Australian colonies, their colonial economy and infrastructure was built almost entirely by free labour. Davidson explodes this myth, showing convicts made up a significant portion of the New Zealand workforce from the 1800s when Australian convicts were members of sealing gangs and acted as workers for the early missionaries. Davidson examines the role of New Zealand prison labour in a range of forms through to the 1930s.
Blood and Dirt shows prison labour as central to transforming what European settlers regarded as ‘unproductive’ land and water systems into what were supposedly ‘productive’ economic units. In the process, human beings regarded as unproductive by the ruling classes were intended to be transformed into productive workers. Prisoners reclaimed (or destroyed) estuaries and wetlands, built urban and harbour infrastructure, constructed defensive fortifications, and worked in manufacturing, forestry, and agriculture. Davidson never loses sight of the fact that the system these prisoners worked in was based on coercion and violence, sometimes to a lethal degree. Throughout the work, points are illustrated by the stories of named individuals, which keeps the reader aware of prison labourers’ humanity.
Blood and Dirt gives only brief coverage to the labour of women prisoners. Davidson points out that women made up a small proportion of the prison population during the period considered and that the work they carried out was highly gendered. Women generally remained within the prison walls, working in appalling conditions on the heavy domestic labour of cooking, cleaning, washing, making and mending. This was the work on which the more public labour of male prisoners was based. Women also carried out the soul-destroying task of picking apart old ropes to produce oakum fibres. Davidson describes women’s prison labour as ‘the hidden history within an already hidden history’ but does not devote more than a few pages to that labour. A more detailed published account of women’s prison labour remains to be written.
Davidson largely concentrates on Pākehā (European) prisoners, reflecting the fact that until the urban migration of the 1950s and 1960s Māori usually only made up a very small proportion of the prison population. Davidson provides a number of accounts of Māori prison labourers incarcerated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and also notes that during the 1860s the Crown forced many Māori prisoners of war to work as labourers as it attempted to break Māori independence and take their land. In the 1880s large numbers of Māori became prison labourers after being imprisoned for taking part in non-violent protests at Parihaka against land confiscation. Blood and Dirt also examines the role of Pasifika prison labour in New Zealand’s colonisation of Niue, the Cook Islands and Western Samoa; and in working the phosphate mines of Malden, Banaba and Nauru which fed New Zealand’s pastureland revolution.
Overall, I consider Blood and Dirt to be a work that enables the reader to see the shaping of New Zealand’s urban and rural environments in a completely fresh light. Jared Davidson should be congratulated for bringing to our attention a long-neglected aspect of New Zealand’s history.
