Convictism and the Neolithic: A Response to Erik Olssen

Prisoners under armed guard remove Bell Hill in Dunedin, c1875. Ref: P2014-014/3-003, Hocken Library.

If one’s book is “like a friend that you want to look after, advocate for and celebrate”, I feel that a response to Erik Olssen’s review of Blood and Dirt in the latest New Zealand Journal of History is what any good friend would do. Despite my weariness at becoming one of those people who react to mixed reviews, some of Olssen’s comments are disingenuous at best.

I can accept differing points of view regarding style and the approach of historians to their work. I can accept that I did not make more use of Australian convict historiography (for the very simple fact that Australian convictism was a particular and historically-specific labour regime – although I do reference Australian examples where applicable, including the excellent work on capitalism and convictism by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan). And I can even accept that some still think the production of history is objective, neutral or somehow separate from the person producing that history and the social context in which they work. But I cannot accept the claim that information is missing when it is not only present but key to my arguments. For someone who is clearly affronted that historians might have political values that inform their work (and are open about them), Olssen’s own political reaction has caused him to overlook or misrepresent the content in Blood and Dirt.

Leaving aside Olssen’s opening line for now (what a way to send your colours up the mast), and his strange comment about neolithic labour (more on this later), Olssen claims that Chapter 2 focuses on the building of early towns and then shifts to roadbuilding. In fact, this chapter is all about roadbuilding, as indicated in the Prologue and in the opening paragraphs of the chapter. After wrongly attributing a quote from Ben Shrader’s The Big Smoke to me, Olssen writes:

Only occasionally are we told how many prisoners there were, or the proportion sentenced to hard labour, and as a rule Davidson relies on other histories for the 'clinching' detail. Despite my on-going frustration at the lack of specificity about the numbers of prisoners, and the actual streets and roads they built (seemingly without supervision from engineers or help from free labour), this chapter, like all the others, illustrates Davidson's skill as a writer, his eye for interesting illustrative detail, and his broad sympathy with the downtrodden generally.

I appreciate the compliment, but it rings hollow considering the chapter features numerous examples of the streets where prisoners worked under supervision. Here’s an example (p.49): “At 7.45 a.m., the hard- labour men were called to order, given a tool and told how much work was expected of them that day… an armed overseer lead the men out of the gaol in pairs and into the neighbouring streets.” Four lines later, I list no less than twenty-one of those Wellington streets, while also indicating that the sheer volume of the roads prisoners made or repaired, and the sometimes-vague archival record (“making roads about town” was a typical entry) means it was hard to list them all. On page 52, after talking about the regular lack of overseers and engineers, I follow with this:

Whenever they could be, prisoners were put to work on the streets with vigour. ‘The history of Dunedin and its prisons are entwined,’ wrote Bill Martin in his history of Dunedin Gaol. Multiple gangs were used ‘in the building, development and maintenance of Maitland Street, Caversham Road, Peninsula Road, Port Chalmers District Road, Russell Street, Moray Place, Pelichet Bay Road, Bond Street, Kaikorai Road, Anderson Bay Road, High Street, Crawford Street, Hanover Street, Police Street and many other general road works’, including Rattray, Cumberland and Castle Streets.

Then there are examples of streets and armed warders in the same sentence: “on Winchester Street, prisoner Joseph Strong was killed instantly when a warder’s gun accidentally discharged into the back of his head” (pp.56-57); “a warder in charge of the Adelaide Road work gang died after the rifle he was leaning on fired through his armpit” (p.57); “on Brougham Street in Wellington an epic struggle between Constable Thomas Bryan and a passer-by named William Preston erupted when Preston tried to smuggle money to one of the road gang” (p.57); “the eight men had been working on Ingestre Street – the stretch of road between The Terrace and Cuba Street known today as Vivian Street... two armed guards watched them shuffle in, followed by their overseer John Chitty” (p.74).

I was clear that Blood and Dirt is a narrative nonfiction covering the long nineteenth century (there’s a reason why “there is little on the last 75 years”). I was also clear that readers wanting more detailed histories of prison administration should consult work like John Pratt’s Punishment in A Perfect Society. Here I concur with Olssen: I am openly guilty of relying on other histories to ‘clinch’ the details when those details have already been covered by others. And as I write in the Prologue, my focus on prisoners instead of their warders and engineers is a deliberate choice.

However, I cite numbers and engineers where it is appropriate to the narrative. For example, in Lyttelton “in 1872, the daily average number of hard- labour prisoners was fifty- three” (p.53); “in June 1892, Hume shipped twenty- five prisoners from Wellington [to Rocks Road, Nelson] to begin the work, leasing them out at 10 pence per cubic yard. They were marched by armed warders from the aging Shelbourne Street gaol and over Pitts Hill (now Richardson Street), and became known as ‘Sam Jickell’s football team’ after the Nelson City engineer who designed the road” (p.65). And likewise in the chapter on New Zealand’s Pacific: “in 1915, for example, fifty- six people were put to labour rather than paying a fine” (p.174); “thirty prisoners were sent from Rarotonga [to Manuae] between 1911 and 1915 alone” (p.178).

I can understand the want for a facts and figures history, complete with tables and neat categories. But that is not what Blood and Dirt is nor was ever intended to be. As I write in the Prologue, “as a history from below, it is a story that focuses on work outside of the prison and the people doing that work, rather than a history of prison policy and its administrators.” I then follow with a footnote:

Although based on years of archival research and the careful consideration of sources, evidence and perspectives, Blood and Dirt is political. In recalling, interpreting and constructing this account of the past, I do not claim to be detached or neutral. All histories are political, whether explicitly stated or not. All writers draw upon methods and practices within their ideological framework, including (and especially) historians who claim to be disinterested, even- handed and simply recalling the facts. The writing of history, argued Douglas Hay, ‘is deeply conditioned not only by our personal political and moral histories, but also by the times in which we live, and where we live’. Whether we acknowledge it or not, historians ‘take stands by our choice of words, handling of evidence, and analytic categories. And also by our silences.’ My choice to tell the story the way I have is grounded in the idea that history should challenge norms and inspire change. History with a social aim. History that asks us to reflect on the present as much as the past.

Blood and Dirt and its inclusions and omissions is exactly as I intended. And while I can understand others may have wanted a different history, as Olssen clearly does, I had hoped the NZJH reviewer would engage with the book on its own (explicit) terms.

Olssen then references my key argument that the boundary between free an unfree labour was fluid in nineteenth century New Zealand. But, oddly, he also claims that: “everything Davidson says to distinguish the evils of prison labour – physically laborious and often dangerous work – can also be said not only of free labour working in the same occupations in New Zealand, but of almost all outdoor occupations other than professional ones since the Neolithic.” He charges that I am “especially critical of the fact that they [prisoners] were expected to undertake manual work. The work is always ‘painstaking’ or ‘dirty’, the hands ‘calloused.’” Olssen then asks what “what Davidson thinks the state ought to have done with prisoners.”

Again, my argument is that the boundaries between prison labour and free labour were blurry in colonial New Zealand, and that we need to think about labour within capitalism as a continuum of coercion rather than as existing in separate worlds. I devote paragraphs to this argument in Chapter 3 and elsewhere. And rather than implying that the evil of manual work stretches back to the Neolithic, I am very clear that we need to bring historical specificity to the study of labour within capitalism. Not only do I trace the historical development of prisons and their labour regimes within the rise of capitalism, I was careful to emphasise the specific geographical context of colonial New Zealand and its Pacific Empire; the key similarities between free and unfree labour; but, also, the different coercive pressures that could be brought to bear upon certain labourers (flogging, solitary confinement, etc). To imply that I am critical of unfree labour simply because it was ‘hard work’ is a strange comment from a historian of labour and class. I expected Olssen to understand the nuances of different work regimes across time and space, rather than labour as some transhistorical activity.

Nowhere do I say that the evil of prison labour is that prisoners had to undertake manual work. The evil, if we want to call it that, is the mobilising force of dispossession that turns all of life into work for capitalism’s reproduction, on pain of ruin (including incarceration). The question of what I believe the state should have done with prisoners is moot – while capitalism and its prisons was never inevitable and is the result of specific social relations, I cannot change the past. I wonder if Olssen would expect other historians to provide alternative realities to the ones they have studied?

I can only assume that, again, Olssen has felt confronted by an explicitly anti-capitalist and abolitionist history. His comments speak powerfully to how ingrained the idea of punitive retribution is in our society, and how naturalised capitalism and its prisons have become.

That Olssen is confronted by this work is signalled by his dismissal of the “sizeable number of Anglo-American left-wing historians anxious to condemn capitalism”, and his comment that I frequently dismiss “labour history” and “traditional accounts” for “falling to appreciate the central importance of ‘unfree labour’” (the scare quotes are his). I have an immense amount of respect for his past work. But until someone can point to any dedicated research by labour historians on prisoners as a working-class formation and the work they did outside of the prison in colonial New Zealand (or any general history of New Zealand, for that matter), I will stand by the claim that prison labour has been overlooked by labour historians – including by Olssen himself. I hope this might change in the future, despite his scepticism.

Unfreedom Forest: A History of New Zealand’s Prison Plantations

In February 2024 I gave a Friends of the Turnbull Library lecture on the history of New Zealand’s prison plantations, reproduced below. The talk drew upon Chapter 5 of Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (BWB, 2023). Anyone interested in this topic will find more in that chapter.

I want to begin with a question that unexpectedly arose during the writing of Blood and Dirt. Does manure have agency? When a jailer at Kāingaroa requested five tons of manure in mid-1920, the prison forest was on the cusp of closure. Manure was an expense the Prisons Branch was unwilling to spend, and within a month the tree-planting camp was shut down. Was manure the nail in the proverbial coffin?

Thinking about the more-than-human world in this way led to other questions. Can trees really influence human relations and historical development? Are animals part of the working class? And where do we draw the line between ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’? Suddenly, I realised I was writing an environmental history as well as a social history. For like the extra-human environment more generally, manure played a part in human decision-making over the direction of New Zealand prison labour. As forests gave way to lucrative prison farms, agricultural labour became the mainstay of New Zealand prisons during the twentieth century. By 1923, 70 percent of the country’s incarcerated workers were employed in farm work, including clearing and opening land for settlement. Instead of planting trees, prisoners helped to forge dairy farms. And fueling their work was another type of manure – guano from the Pacific.

The more-than-human world has been an important protagonist in our history – and continues to play its part. Take the planting boom of the last decade. More and more land is being converted into pine plantations, sparking arguments between farmers and foresters, iwi and the state. Looming large is the government’s Emissions Trading Scheme and the One Billion Trees Project, schemes that aim to address climate change via the market. And like the prison forests of the 1910s and 1920s, pine plantations today are just as divisive. For anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond, the ‘lock up and leave’ model of pine plantations is pure folly. For the directors of New Zealand Carbon Farming, however, covering unproductive land in pine is the path towards an enhanced environment.

Locked up. Locked in. Locked out. Value unlocked. The rhetoric is telling. That’s because the history of New Zealand’s pine plantations is inseparable from incarceration, forced labour and unfreedom. And a key imperative, then and now, was making the environment productive by addressing waste and attacking idleness. As we shall see, it’s in this sense that manure and the more-than-human world definitely has agency.

In the late nineteenth century, the fear was not climate catastrophe but timber famine. New Zealand’s native forests had been cleared at alarming rates, burned off to make way for farms or felled for export across the Tasman. What would the country do when the trees ran out? The state responded by establishing forest plantations, with a focus on afforestation – the planting of trees where no trees had stood before. And to do so, it made use of another Crown asset: the labour of its incarcerated prisoners.

From 1901 onwards, imprisoned men were siphoned out of city jails and onto vast prison plantations, where their handiwork created forests out of scraggy tussock. Across Aotearoa, forests that we take for granted today were pitted, planted and nurtured by prisoners. As they struggled among freezing conditions, overbearing jailers and themselves – launching strikes, fighting fires, sabotaging equipment and pitting trees in the millions – incarcerated workers remade the extra-human environment and in turn made history. Pinus radiata would become a New Zealand hallmark.

‘The planting of treeless areas was a response to local timber supply problems,’ writes Michael Roche. ‘But it was also a facet of the ‘improvement’ of the natural environment.’ The use of prison labour for colonial development was also an established practice – if not the driving practice – by this time. For the state and capital, an unimproved environment needed ‘improving’, yet the labour to do so was not always available. Prisoners often filled the gap. As the historian Robert Burnett wrote, ‘There was too much to be done on the frontier fringes to think of leaving untapped labour behind some hastily erected fences.’ The tapping of that labour is the focus of my book.

Roadmaking was paramount in the early years, and from 1840 onwards, male chain gangs were used to construct and repair roads in every major urban centre, including the first highways through the North Island’s Central Plateau. Prison labour was also used on a range of public works, including clearing and levelling hills, reclaiming harbours and constructing moles, jetties and seawalls, draining swamps, diverting waterways, building bridges and retaining walls, creating foundations for schools and universities, and maintaining cemeteries, reserves and botanical gardens. Prisoners were also used to build their own enclosures – prisons – as well government buildings such as hospitals, asylums, police stations and millions of arrow-marked bricks. And in times of war and peace, unfree labour contributed to the colony’s military and state power, in the form of harbour fortifications.

But it was prison forests that bridged nineteenth century punishment and twentieth century reforms, as well as the trend towards moving prisons out of the city and out of sight. No longer was it considered appropriate to have jails and their punishment regimes smack band in the middle of town – having a jail in the city was ‘like a man having a rubbish heap on his front lawn’, complained a politician in 1900. Competition with free labour and the unemployed was also a factor. So, after roadmaking prisoners were sent to Milford Sound in 1890 and Rocks Road, Nelson in 1892, remote prison camps began to replace the chain gang. As Premier Richard Seddon argued in 1899, ‘the more humane way to deal with these men would be to put them away in the bush.’ By 1901, prisoners were not just in the bush. They were planting it.

Prison plantations sought to transform so-called wastelands into ordered, productive landscapes and male criminals into productive workers. ‘Fallen men could redeem wasted landscapes and redeem themselves in the process,’ writes Benedict Taylor, and be made as upright as trees. Like the millions of exotics planted by prisoners, the idea that prisons could ‘cure’ criminal tendencies rather than just deter people from committing crimes had taken root, leading to a shift from classical modes of justice. Rather than retribution and a set punishment for a set crime, consideration of the person and their moral treatment became important.

Because of this, only good- conduct prisoners and those considered ‘hopeful cases’ – men who appeared ‘anxious to reform’ – were meant to be sent from the city gaols to the new prison plantations. Habitual criminals, sexual offenders and men convicted of serious crimes were theoretically barred, as were the very young and very old. Those destined for tree- planting camps also had to pass a medical examination to make sure they were up to the hard work of pitting and planting. In practice, however, there weren’t enough first offenders or well- behaved prisoners to meet the plantation’s need for labour. All sorts were sent.

The average number of prisoners at the camps ranged from around 12 at the smaller plantations, to 60 at the larger ones. There is no doubt that for many of them, planting trees entailed more freedoms than breaking rock in a dusty quarry or being confined within the walls of Victorian-era jails. Yet despite the reforming rhetoric, hard labour remained a central feature of the tree-planting camps. Prisoners were not paid for their labour – apart from a select few, inmates did not earn gratuities until the 1920s, and even then, it was only for prisoners with dependants. And the work was hard. To produce perfection, prisoners were forced to pit the ground every four feet to exact instructions. Bent over steel spades, their hands calloused and blackened from dirt or stinging from fern cuts, they were expected to dig around 500 of these pits a day each. It was painstaking work, repeated millions of times across acres and acres of plains. Winters were especially difficult. A forestry worker in the 1930s remembered how, ‘as the long line of men stumbled across the plain, blinded by wind, the pumice squeaking under their feet, each with his hessian bag filled with infant pines around his waist, he’d often hear the men next to him crying with cold’. Injuries were common. Fingers and thumbs were severed cutting firewood or pruning older trees, while ferns scratched at eyeballs. Some prisoners died of pneumonia or drowned in swollen rivers.

In other words, prisons and forced labour were not going away. They just changed shape and moved inland. The state’s motto for its prisons at this time made this clear – nothing without labour.

On the vast prison plantations of Waiotapu, Whakarewarewa, Waipā and Kāingaroa in the North Island and Hanmer and Dumgree in the South, this motto was made a reality. Between 1901 and 1920, prisoners planted 15,932 acres of so-called wasteland with over 40 million trees. When they were thinned and harvested years later, those trees were turned into valuable firewood for homes and businesses, pulp for the country’s newspapers, or industrial items like butter boxes, door cores and frames, plywood, telegraph poles and props for mineshafts. The plantations themselves and the sawmills that spun from them were also extremely valuable and remained so when they were sold off in the 1990s. Their privatisation was dubbed “the Sale of the Century.” To this day, New Zealand forestry is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Unfree labour cultivated valuable commercial assets.

The country’s first prison forest – and perhaps the first in the world – was located at Waiotapu in the North Island’s Central Plateau. Crown land taken from Māori under various scenic and geothermal legislation was made available for the prison. As a result, their workscape was utterly unique: a workscape that was created from volcanic ash, complete with earthquakes, geysers and boiling mud. A reporter named Constant Barnicoat visited Waiotapu Prison in January 1903 and left a vivid description of the environment: ‘In the vast expanse of scrub- covered land, white as snow in spring with the blossoms of the aromatic manuka, and in which steam is constantly rising in all directions from the numberless hot springs, one cluster of plain, unadorned, white buildings at once strikes the eye.’ These were the huts of the prison, arranged in a U-shape and designed to be moved as the land was planted out. Indeed, the prison moved from its original site to a second location in April 1908, where it continued to alter the make-up of the Central Plateau.

An early photograph by Thomas Pringle held in the Alexander Turnbull Library – perhaps of Barnicoat’s visit – shows a group of men and women standing outside of the prison huts. Except for some windswept toetoe and the beginnings of a garden, the surrounding landscape is completely empty of trees. Today, the area is covered in pine, as if the trees has always been there.

Other photographs in the Turnbull capture this development in prison work regimes and their environmental impact. Government reports issued by the Lands and Surveys Department feature the photography of Grace Matthews, the talented wife of Chief Forester Henry Matthews. Together they visited the various plantations, and it is her images that bring the reports to life – documenting the life cycle of trees, the work of Māori women in the propagation stages, and the prisoners and their white huts. In a way she was a predecessor of the well-known nature photographer John Johns, although it’s unclear if and where her negatives have survived (I suspect there’s some in the cool stores at Archives New Zealand, but that’s another matter).

Also in the Turnbull is a ceremonial trowel used to lay the first block at Waikeria Prison Farm; a printing specimen book from Lyttleton Prison, where prisoners mass-produced reams of government forms, registers and other documents; accounts of prison life collected and published by Blanche Baughan in 1936 as People in Prison; and letters from prisoners to Edwin Arnold, a Justice of the Peace who visited the incarcerated in order to hear their complaints. Such letters are rare, for even though prisoners were constantly measured, managed, surveilled and recorded by the state, they have left very few accounts of their working experience. Included in Arnold’s papers are accounts of Point Halswell Prison on the Miramar peninsula, where prisoners were set to work covering the wind-swept hills with pine. The trees are still there today.

Prison labour was used to plant trees across Miramar because, although detractors argued prisoners were having a merry old time off in the great outdoors, in 1903 the state had expanded the tree-planting experiment. In April of that year, fifteen prisoners were ferried to Matiu/Somes Island in the middle of Wellington Harbour, where they dug more than 28,000 pits for saplings, and planted a mix of trees and scrub. In June 1903, Dumgree prison plantation was opened near Seddon in Marlborough. Hanmer, in Canterbury, followed three months later, as did Waipā, which opened near Rotorua in 1904 before shifting to the northern shore of Lake Rotokākahi (Green Lake) in July 1909. Whakarewarewa Prison opened in 1916, and Kāingaroa extended and then replaced Waiotapu in 1913. By 1921, these three prisons alone stretched to nearly 25,000 acres, or 64 per cent of the total area of state plantings.

The environmental change at the camps were startling. At Hanmer, a forest emerged from the wind-swept tussock, giving rise to an alpine village complete with trails, birdsong and exotic trees. The prison forest is a hiker’s and biker’s paradise. At Kāingaroa, native orchids, beetles, frogs, birds and even fish have made the plantation home. By the 1960s, Kāingaroa had the highest density of native birds recorded on the New Zealand mainland.

As indigenous landscapes were replaced with unfree forestry, prison plantations and their inmates experienced the full range of extra-human forces. Fire, frost, water, wind, sun, deer, rabbits, birds, seeds, soil and yes, manure, all shaped the actions of the incarcerated and the state. Sometimes the extra-human environment fostered success. Sometimes it sowed discord and failure. When it came to felons among the firs, the extra-human environment was as much of a protagonist as people.

For example, working rhythms were intimately shaped by water. Local waterways at the plantations were used for cleaning men, food, clothes and equipment. On Saturdays, a washday, rows of heavy pants hung across fence wire like a string of half- finished scarecrows. Planting, too, was fully determined by rain. The planting season would start around May or June and continue until late spring, when prisoners reverted to digging pits, fencing and other work. What was good for trees, however, wasn’t always good for human relationships. Rain could seep through the tin roof of a hut or the crease of a collar, fray tempers or dampen them, sow doubts or seed action. Rain also complicated the plantation’s productivity. At Waiotapu in October 1905, a full nineteen days were lost to rain; at Waipā the year before, it rained for almost 35 per cent of the planting season. Too much rain could undo months of hard work, prevent planting, upset routine and shift power dynamics within the prisons. Did rain benefit prisoners? Power seems to have swung either way as prisoners were momentarily freed of planting but then forced to make up for lost time or perform different types of jobs. Hydrology raised the human stakes.

An example from Waipā prison illustrates this point. Over a 200 day period in 1909, there were ninety- six days that noted at least one prisoner sick, sixty- two days that mentioned an accident of some kind, thirty- four days that were too wet for planting, and thirty days plagued by prisoners refusing to work. There were strikes at Waiotapu, too. In August 1904, twenty- two prisoners went on strike over their hours of work – severe frost had meant their working day had started an hour late and they were expected to make up for lost time in the evening. After refusing to work for two days, they won a change in hours. Here was a strike in a period of New Zealand history said to be free of strikes, and a winning one at that.

Conflict between the Prisons Branch and the Lands and Surveys Department, who controlled the foresters, was also rife at a number of plantations. And as the state’s prison farms began to reap significant financial returns, the Prisons Branch was less willing to send prisoners into the forests. ‘Our farming properties now provide a better and more satisfactory outlet for the labour of our physically fit prisoners’, argued the Branch. It was now the view that planting trees did little to prepare prison workers for wage labour, unlike farming, which was ‘a far better proposition both for the State and for the individual prisoner’.

One by one, the prison plantations closed or were converted to tree-planting camps for paid workers. The drought-plagued prison at Dumgree closed in 1908 and was eventually replaced by awarding-winning vineyards, including Yealands and Villa Maria. Hanmer Prison converted to employing free labour in 1913, as did Kaingaroa in 1920. By the scheme’s end, prisoners are estimated to have planted over 40.7 million trees at a labour-saving value of 65,435 pounds – close to five million dollars in today’s money.

Although the bulk of the tree-planting prisons existed for less than two decades, it is impossible to ignore the contribution prison labour has made to New Zealand’s billion- dollar forest industry. As the newly formed State Forest Service declared in 1921, ‘a lasting monument of achievement has been established by the prison tree-planters in the wonderful forest plantations of the Rotorua region and those of the South Island.’ According to Michael Roche, prison plantations were ‘a valuable and very large- scale trial which proved the qualities of some exotic trees and indicated that extensive afforestation was technically feasible’. They were like the opening act at a concert, setting the stage for the forestry boom that followed – both in the public and private sector. Indeed, the company afforestation of the 1920s and 1930s, which is well documented in the papers of the Turnbull and something I wrote about in the latest Turnbull Record, would not have been possible without the example set by prisoners. And the state forests at Kāingaroa, Hanmer and elsewhere all reaped the benefits of unfree labour – and continue to do.

Although at a smaller scale, unfree forestry also remained a feature of prison labour beyond 1920. At Hautū and Rangipō prisons near Turangi, forestry was (and is) an important part of the prison’s work regimes. In 1923, almost 8,000 trees were planted; in 1925, a further 20,000 Pinus radiata were lined out, and 13,000 more were planted a year later. Here, unfree forestry has continued into modern times. Tongariro- Rangipō Prison still includes forestry among its list of work schemes, and its products feed local sawmills and planting initiatives. At Waikune Prison near National Park, forestry was also key throughout the twentieth century. And as recently as 2019, the Department of Corrections used Northland prisoners to plant seedlings as part of the One Billion Trees programme.

So, to return to our opening question about the more-than-human world. It’s now clear to me that while social historians are known for digging deep into the nitty- gritty of human relationships, many of us seem to shelve our shovels when it comes to the land itself. The extra- human environment is often used as an interesting setting but little more, a stage prop rolled in to give colour to the real – human – drama. People have agency, environments do not. Humans alone are the motor of history.

Yet prison plantations upend this false divide between ‘Society’ and ‘Nature’. As dynamic workscapes, prison forests show how capitalism is not just an economic system, not just a social system, but a way of organising nature. It is an ecological regime. Relations between people ‘are always bundled with the rest of nature, flowing inside, outside, and through human bodies and histories’, argues Jason W. Moore. ‘Nature is an active participant in every labour process: the web of life, both visible and invisible to humans, is always at work.’ As the state channelled seed, soil and forced labour into a national asset, prison plantations both altered the extra- human environment and were profoundly shaped by it. Entire landscapes were forever changed by trees, while the trees themselves shaped prison policy, labour regimes and statecraft on a national and international scale. Besides spurring similar prisons across Australia, unfree forestry helped to transform ‘a remote and undeveloped south seas colony’ into a sophisticated economy with commercial interests across the Pacific Rim. Today, China alone consumes more logs in five days than the South Island exports in a single month.

Significant parts of New Zealand’s exotic forests were birthed and raised by prisoners, in response to, and continuously shaped by, the extra-human environment. It’s in this way that I’ve come to understand state forests, incarceration and the more-than-human world – including manure – in a whole new light.

'Blood and Dirt' recognised by the International Labor History Association

Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand has received an International Labor History Association Honorable Mention Award!

On Blood and Dirt, the judges (who included Dave Roediger) wrote: 'In this unique account of prison labor and the development of New Zealand from the 1790s to the recent past, Davidson has unearthed a history of forced labor and how it shaped the landscape, development, and building of a country. Thoroughly illustrated with historical photographs and drawings, this work brings to light the work of many generations of prisoners who created roads, infrastructure, housing, public works, and lands for farming. This book’s definitive contribution to prison-labor history, underscores the need for historians to give greater future attention to the topic of prison labor. '

Blood and Dirt is one of three international books to receive this recognition. You can learn more about the Award here.