Announcing 'Blood and Dirt'!

Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand.

Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand’s urban centres and rural landscapes and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely unknown: a hidden history in plain sight.

Blood and Dirt explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. In this forthcoming book I ask us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand.

The publication date for Blood and Dirt is 1 August 2023. More information, endorsements and pre-orders are available on the BWB website: https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/blood-and-dirt/

'Dead Letters' longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Last week I was happy to have finally finished my article on the 1843 Nelson labourers' revolt. To learn that Dead Letters had made the long list of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards was mind-blowing! The category of general non-fiction is a field packed with some amazing titles, and I'm so happy to be one of the ten writers in the running for the shortlist: http://www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealand-book-awards/2020-awards/longlist/

Thanks to the team at Otago University Press and everyone who made Dead Letters possible, including the descendants of those whose stories feature in the book. 

Joshua Clover on the commune

Joshua Clover on the commune: “When I say commune, I really don’t mean what the common associations of that. I don’t mean the Paris Commune of 1871, although that seems amazing. Nor do I mean other historical communes – there’s the really interesting commune in Mexico, in Morelos in 1910-11, the Shanghai Commune, and many other examples – I don’t really mean that. And nor do I mean this thing I associate with my parent’s generation, of sort of ‘back to the land’ movements of the 70s, where a bunch of people who could moved to a cheap place in upstate New York an start growing their own zucchini. I don’t mean either of those things.

I mean a specific kind of struggle which is neither a riot or a strike. So if I can lay out the scheme briefly. Riots are struggles in circulation, and they’re for people who are market-dependent but not necessarily wage-dependent – so that’s by definition the sphere of circulation and they’re struggling in that area. Strikes are for people, are struggles in the sphere of production, so they are wage dependent and can struggle there. This seems to describe all of capitalism right, production and circulation? But there’s this whole third sphere we forget all the time, which is the sphere of reproduction – where you and I and everyone else who is not a capitalist has to figure out how to stay alive each day, and keep their family alive. So sexual reproduction is the obvious example, but also buying food and finding shelter and caring for each other and all that.

Struggles that launch themselves from that sphere are what I’m calling the commune. The limit of the strike is that it’s inclined to ask for more and better labour, wages, work conditions, and so ends up affirming the wage relation – certainly in this day and age when it doesn’t have a revolutionary horizon to speak of. And the limit of the riot is that it ends up affirming the market – even if it gets down to looting, which is the clearest, truest and best part of the riot still it’s affirming this idea that there’s stores, they have commodities and we’re not going to pay this time – but still affirms that existence.

So the question for me is: what kind of struggle doesn’t affirm either the wage or the market? That kind of struggle I name the commune. So the commune is a kind of struggle that is not demanding a wage and is not demanding better access to consumer goods. It’s not fighting for either of those things, but it’s fighting to figure out how to reproduce itself socially without reference to those things.

But – there’s a huge but – that’s not going to be allowed to happen peacefully… I want to be able to think about that category which is the category of struggling from the space of social reproduction, entirely aware that it’s going to mean direct conflict with capital and the state. That is the horizon of revolutionary politics for me. The particulars of what it looks like? I don’t know: Road Warrior? Game of Thrones? Walking Dead? All these shows are trying to figure it out, right? This is the question. In this apocalyptic scene, where the organising forces of our world, state and capital, can no longer provide a good life for people, what does the attempt to survive look like? We need to have a better imagination than the Walking Dead, which is a Nietzschean version of that question. And we need to have a better answer, and that’s why we’re here, right? It’s not because we know the answer but because we’re committed to getting to that answer.”

From: https://itsgoingdown.org/make-world-stop-joshua-clover-capital-riots-yet-bloom/ 

Some new reviews of 'Dead Letters'

Dead Letters has been out in the world for a number of months now, so it's been great to read some new reviews in the last few weeks. A full list can be found on my website, but here's some of the more recent reviews:

Review by Jonathan West for RNZ Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan

Looking for treasure in the censor’s archive review by Jeff Sparrow for Overland Journal

Watching the watchers review by Ian F. Grant in New Zealand Review of Books

The Mail Coach: Journal of the Postal History Society of New Zealand - click to enlarge

Review by Miles Dillon in The Mail Coach: Journal of the Postal History Society of New Zealand

State surveillance in Great War New Zealand review by John McLeod for Honest History

It's been an interesting process comparing reviews and learning what has struck a chord with readers, and also how reviewers approach the book. I'm very happy with the response to date, which gives me hope I've done the letter-writers in the book justice.

Dead Letters on the Educating for Social Change podcast

It was neat to be interviewed for Wellington Access Radio's Educating for Social Change podcast last week, covering Dead Letters, labour history, and more. You can listen in here.

My other interviews on air can found on the Dead Letters page of my website here.

Looking for treasure in the censor’s archive: Jared Davidson’s 'Dead Letters' - review by Jeff Sparrow

This review of Dead Letters by Jeff Sparrow was originally published by Overland. Jeff Sparrow is a writer, broadcaster and editor. His recent books include Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right and No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson.

In the official celebrations, they tell us that ANZAC Day commemorates a fight for freedom. In reality, the First World War meant an extraordinary crack down on liberties in both Australia and New Zealand, the implications of which are still being felt.

As Jared Davidson explains in his new book Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920, many European countries no longer required passports before the war. They were brought back into use under the security regime mandated by the conflict. ‘The First World War,’ he says,

was therefore a turning point in the history of mobility and citizenship, where the aspiration to control finally coincided with the actual ability to control, and once these were institutionalized they were not dismantled.

Davidson’s project centres on a particular institution of control – the censorship of mail, which was embarked on with considerable enthusiasm by the New Zealand authorities.

As in Australia, the state justified its wartime regime by invoking the threat of espionage and the necessity to protect battlefield operations. As in Australia, the censors concentrated less on military secrets than on policing dissidence. Davidson notes that, in twenty-four pages of quarterly reports by the Deputy Chief Postal Censor Walter Tanner, only twelve lines mention naval or military information of value to the enemy.

In proportional terms, New Zealand charged or jailed far more people for seditious or disloyal remarks than Britain did, a quite remarkable statistic given the country’s distance from the frontlines.

Then again, the war came immediately after the 1913 Great Strike, one of the most intense industrial disputes in New Zealand history. Not without reason, the state worried about its ability to maintain control.

For his epigraph, Davidson cites Ha Jin’s observation that war ‘reduces human beings to abstract numbers’. However, that abstraction – the transformation of candid communications into evidence – gives the historian access to intimacies that wouldn’t have survived in other circumstances.

In a card dated 7 April 1918, for instance, a miner by the name Frank Burns expresses surprise in learning of a friend’s marriage. He asks:

Say, Doll, what kind of bloke is he. I hope he is not a bloody policeman, if he is, don’t answer this letter, and let me forget you forever, for Christ’s sake, leave the buggar, separate get a divorce or do anything rather than marry one of those useless, good for nothing mongrels.

Burns had evaded conscription by hiding in the bush, and was then been sentenced to two months with hard labour in Westport jail. Having reached the bottom of the paper, he jokes, ‘half time, turn over’, and launches cheerily into another anecdote with, ‘well my lovely bunch of sun-drops, I have got a little experience … to relate.’

The letter conveys as much through style as substance, providing a glimpse of the everyday working-class humour rarely registered in official documents.

Davidson takes Burns letter to his ‘Doll’ from the magnificently titled Army Department’s Secret Registry. Only a fraction of the letters surveilled by the authorities remain intact but they’re still sufficient to offer a window into the vanished world of pre-communist radicalism.

Take the letter addressed from ‘J Sweeny’ on 3 November 1915, which includes the following passage:

I have been in the back country for the last 10 weeks had 4 inches of snow in two days in camp had to clear a track from the tents to cook house had very rotten Has mouse dung in the flour and sugar.

The text reads like an apolitical account of rural deprivation – but then it concludes, ‘I am yours for Direct Action No Political Dope.’ That complimentary close identifies J Sweeney as a supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World, the revolutionaries who blended European syndicalism with American hoboism.

In Auckland, Davidson tells us, the IWW established ‘The Workers’ University Direct Action Group’, which they advertised – with typical elan – as required to ‘educate the mentally lazy and those who, by over-work, are shamefully robbed of that nerve force or energy so necessary for educational advancement.’

‘Spittoon philosophers and gasbags anchor outside,’ the Workers University flyer continued. ‘We want no wet blankets’.

In Australia, the IWW was banned and its leading cadre imprisoned. In New Zealand, the group remained legal but its members were often deported.

We know very little of J Sweeney, not even his first name. But even that brief letter gives a sense of how IWWism shaped the lives of militants. With his ‘No Political Dope’ valediction, he reaffirmed both his opposition to parliamentarianism and his commitment to the distinctive Wobbly lexicon.

The potted biographies Davidson constructs from the registry present wartime dissidence in all its diversity.

‘They tell us to fight for king and country,’ declared Māori leader Te Kirihaehae Te Puea Herangi. ‘We’ve got a King. But we haven’t got a country. That’s been taken off us. Let them give us back our land and then maybe we’ll think about it again.’

The rhetoric of Timothy Brosnan, an Irish Catholic road labourer court-martialled for resisting conscription, sounded remarkably similar. In a letter, he explained the answer he gave to the court that asked him to put on a uniform: ‘I said I was an Irishman, a Sinn Feiner … that I would never fight for John Bull but always fight against him.’

The registry also contains a 1916 letter from a certain Marie Weitzel to her brother in Germany that presents the hostility to John Bull from a different direction:

The English and their greed, are the roots of all misery that prevails in the world. … It is awfully lonely to be in this country, the only Germans among the worms, the only ones with a heart.

The anti-German sentiment in New Zealand pre-dated the war, with the colonies reflecting and intensifying hysteria emanating from the imperial centre. In 1909, with Britain engaged in naval arms race with Germany (and readers thrilling to HG Wells’ recent The War in the Air), a wave of Zeppelin sighting swept across New Zealand. At the town of Kelso in West Otago, a teacher and two dozen students swore that they’d witnessed a German airship swooping over the town, sending police scurrying to investigate.

The outbreak of hostilities intensified the terror of outsiders. Yet Weitzel came to the censor’s attention, not merely as a German but as a socialist.

In 1912, after losing court cases resulting from squabbles with her neighbours, she asked a local minister why she had been robbed of justice. He replied that socialists and anarchists had no right to justice.

The Women’s Anti-German League declared Weitzel ‘a dangerous person’ on the basis of the (actual) presence of visiting radicals in her family home. ‘Meetings are held there by the Socialists and the IWW,’ they declared.

As a result of the persecution she faced, Weitzel requested, at the end of the war, to be repatriated to Germany, only to be told that she wasn’t eligible … because of her British citizenship. The official who refused her request concluded:

the letter is couched in such an impertinent typically German manner that I think the applicant condemns her case at once.

But you didn’t have to share the nationality of the enemy to face racial persecution combined with bureaucratic obduracy. Another letter comes from a man called Arthur Muravleff, desperately seeking release from the Somes Island Internment Camp. Muravleff was Russian, and although the Russians were allies, they were considered foreign enough to be suspicious. In his correspondence, he sought, unsuccessfully, to find precisely what he’d done to warrant incarceration.

‘Please inform this Prisoner of War,’ wrote an officer in response, ‘that the Defence Department does not feel disposed to furnish him with full particulars for which he was interned.’

Muravleff was instructed to write to Peter Simonov, the Russian consul in Melbourne. But Simonov had also been imprisoned (by the Australian government, for his Bolshevik agitation) – and so Muravleff remained imprisoned until he escaped in 1920.

Dead Letters contains a striking photograph of a further Somes Island detainee – a woman by the name of Dr Hjelmer Dannevill, under suspicion of being a German spy but investigated mostly for her sexuality.

In the image, she wears a long skirt but also male boots, jacket and tie, with close-cropped hair. The authorities could determine neither her nationality nor her gender. They interrogated her about the first – and medically examined her to decide the second.

The registry holds letters confiscated from Dr Dannevill, in which other women shower her with endearments.

‘Oh my Hjelmar I do want you so,’ writes one. ‘I must let my heart’s love flow out to you in writing it will relieve me.’

The slim documentation surviving about her case includes an article from the Wellington Evening Star reporting that ‘the voice of gossip has insisted for a long time past that this lady, who claimed to be of Danish nationality, would find more congenial company on Somes Island’, and a letter from a Mr JA Fothergill of Dunedin expressing his gratitude for Dr Dannevill’s medical skills and defending her ‘masculine style of dress’ as ‘merely a proof that her mind had risen superior to and emancipated from the tyranny and vanity of fashion.’

The First World War ushered in new modes for thinking about sexuality and politics. Dead Letters captures a moment of transition, an instant in which ideas we now take for granted still contended against ideas now forgotten.

Take the 1919 correspondence from Laura Anderson in Auckland to her cousin Sara in Denmark, in which Laura discusses the enthusiasm she and her husband Carl feel for the Russian revolution. She writes:

We are both very much interested in the Bolshevik movement in Europe, but there are so many contradictory reports in our newspapers that it is hard to know what to believe. No doubt you get more reliable news on account of living in a neutral and democratic country, and I would very much like to hear your opinion of the Bolshevik Governments. My husband … has written a poem about “Bolshevism” and we would like to send it to Lenin or Trotsky, but on account of the strict censorship we are unable to do so from here. If I sent the poem on to you; would you be able to address and send it on to either of them at Moscow.

We don’t tend to think of New Zealand as less democratic than Denmark but – less than a fortnight after Anderson posted her letter – it was being read by the Deputy Chief Postal Censor.

‘I should judge that the husband is a Bolshevik sympathizer,’ he, rather redundantly, concluded.

In fact, Carl Anderson was more than that. He and Laura farmed dairy on a remote property west of Auckland but Carl was also a visionary known as the ‘Mystic of the Waitakeres’, who believed he channeled cosmic forces with his poetry.

As for Laura, she was the daughter of a spiritualist, whose nephews founded the ‘Beeville’ commune in 1927, where pacifists, nudists and vegetarians forged an alternative lifestyle long before the sixties counterculture.

The intercepted letter of 1919 marks a time when the meaning of Bolshevism was still perceived as sufficiently in flux that Lenin and Trotsky, though embroiled in the Russian Civil War, might welcome some verses composed by a mystical farmer-poet at the other end of the world.

In places, the chronological jumps in Dead Letters make for challenging reading for those unfamiliar with New Zealand labour history. Yet, if you push through the difficulties what emerges – as Charlotte MacDonald says in her introduction – is ‘a map of radical New Zealand c1914-1920 and its connections with the wider world.’ The stories we hear might be framed by repression, but they speak about forgotten yearnings for political change.

The war that never ended: public history for the present

A success. That’s the verdict passed by New Zealand’s official First World War commemoration programme (WW100) on their own commemoration programme, released as a final report last month. The stats are indeed impressive: 93 percent of New Zealanders aged 15 years+ engaged in the programme in some way, thanks to the $65 million spent on the centennial. The futility of war was the most-cited emotional response, which is interesting when put alongside the programme’s objective to strengthen ‘national identity’ (read: the nation state) and an ‘enduring commitment to peace, global security and international cooperation (read: current and future wars).

Others have already analysed the report in more detail. Yet I can’t help but think more broadly about the gaps in WW100. What stories did those 93 percent engage with? Whose voices were heard, and whose were not? What did the programme have to say on the deeper themes of the conflict and its causes?

I believe that by not explicitly engaging with the root causes of the First World War—especially capitalism and white supremacy— the WW100 programme missed or muted histories that would otherwise have been available to tell. This not only includes the experiences or events chosen to study, but also how those events are portrayed.

It also affects periodisation. The Final Report was released in May 2019. But when did the First World War end? With the Armistice of November 1918? With the return of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force? Or somewhere else?

A selection of wartime experiences from my book Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920 illustrates how the analysis of capitalism and white supremacy points us towards stories that don't end comfortably in late 1918, or fit within the scope of WW100. These are just two of many possible frames of reference. While it may seem like I am distinguishing capitalism and white supremacy from each other and from other social relations, in reality, they form a unity of social experience, and were lived and felt as such.

The struggle for Irish independence, both in New Zealand and abroad, is an obvious example of a narrative that ran through and beyond the official war years. Molly and Timothy Brosnan were immigrants from Ireland, arriving in the decade before the war. Both were staunch Sinn Fein supporters and when Tim was conscripted for military service in March 1917, he quit his job as a navvy and went on the run. In similar terms to many indigenous Māori from the Waikato area, Tim refused to serve who he believed to be the colonizer and oppressor of his native homeland.

Arrested in August 1917 and incarcerated at Rotoaira Prison, as Armistice came and went Tim remained in jail and separated from his wife Molly. When the Religious Advisory Board came around in February 1919 to establish which objectors still in prison were considered genuine and who were not, Tim and 12 others refused to see them. He was classified as a defiant objector and lost all civil rights until 1927. Because of this, Tim’s time after his release was never truly free. He died at Taihape Hospital of pneumonia on 1 October 1929, aged 47, leaving a hole in both the family and the family story.

Feelings against working-class or republican Irish, ‘foreigners’, and fear of the ‘other’ had its roots in the interests and identities of New Zealand’s white settler society. Like a weathervane, the measure of Britishness, whiteness—and therefore acceptance—shifted with economic, cultural and global events. This not only affected how Germany and Germans in New Zealand were perceived before and after August 1914, but also those born in allied or neutral countries.

Arthur Muravleff was a labourer and an aspiring Maxim Gorky from Russia whose writing on working conditions in New Zealand was cut short by the state. Racialised by anonymous informants from 1914 and finally arrested as a suspected spy in December 1917, Arthur was interned and refused release after Armistice despite Russia being an ally during the war. This was partly because of a policy on internees remaining in jail until the return of frontline New Zealand troops, but also because of official attitudes towards the Bolshevik government, the paranoia of the Red Scare, and an ever-present Russophobia.

By March 1920, after more than two years of internment, he’d had enough. In the early morning hours of 17 March, Arthur pried open the floorboards of his Featherston prison cell and escaped.

Even Christensen was a watersider and labourer based in the South Island city of Dunedin. As a watersider Even occupied the frontline of port economies and felt keenly the charge and retreat of capitalism. As a watersider born in Norway, he bore the added weight of wartime hysteria despite his naturalisation, his 35-year residence in Dunedin and the neutral stance of his country of birth. The social construction of race and the enemy within, intensified by wartime conditions, extended to Scandinavians like Even. Hounded by the press and the state, he was among the many naturalized subjects forced to register as an alien (as non-British subjects were called) in 1917.

Upset at his treatment, in June 1919 Even wrote a bitter letter to a friend. That letter was stopped by a postal censor and, as a result, Even’s naturalization was revoked. Unlike the wealth his labour created, he could no longer cross borders freely or obtain a passport; all legal and political rights were forfeited: he could not vote, access any kind of state aid or purchase rural land, and any land he owned became first in line to be taken for public works. He was barred from working in certain jobs or in certain industries, and if he committed any crime there was a much higher chance of his being deported. Despite the petitions of his son, Even died stateless in 1930.

Berthold Matzke was a watersider and member of the Direct Action Group, an anti-capitalist and anti-war collective of Wobblies (members of the Industrial Workers of the World) based in New Zealand’s vibrant city of Auckland. Prominent during the Great Strike of 1913 that saw class war erupt across many New Zealand ports and cities, Berthold was active on the waterfront despite being blacklisted from the pro-employer unions. His vocal opposition to militarism and his German heritage made him a favourite target of the police, who regarded him as a highly successful agitator.

For his anti-capitalist politics Berthold was interned, denied his freedom despite being dangerously unwell, and died of pneumonia at Featherston Camp on 16 June 1919. His wife Florence, who remained in Auckland during his jail time, was ‘lucky’ enough to make it to the funeral. She eventually commissioned a headstone for him. But the couple had no offspring to maintain it, and so it took some time for my family and I to find it when we searched last April. Once we found it, we cleaned it up and left flowers—a small gesture acknowledging his wartime experience.

As I explore more thoroughly in Dead Letters, structures and powers of state surveillance, coupled with extended wartime legislation, continued to impact on the lives of many well beyond 1918 and 1919. Sedition and firearm laws, and the introduction of the passport, are just two examples.

The WW100 programme covered aspects of this in a feature on censorship and an online entry called ‘Policing the war effort’. However, in these and other features, I felt the WW100 programme only ever scratched the surface.

In exploring the April 1916 police raid on Māori prophet Rua Kēnana and his community at Maungapōhatu, where was the analysis of colonization and white supremacy? In highlighting anti-German hysteria, where was the analysis of whiteness and the construction of race? In writing about war weariness and the cost of living, where was the analysis of class and gender relations?

Where, in short, was capitalism?

Indeed, throughout the long years of the centennial programme, I kept waiting for the official narratives to go deeper—to ask why.

The programme’s treatment of Armistice and the class struggles that erupted across Europe throughout 1918 is a prime example. As I wrote for Overland, I searched the programme resources in vain for any reference to how and why Armistice came about. There was a notable silence on the strikes, mutinies and class struggles of the masses of working men and women who contributed to the war’s end.

There was also nothing on the riotous NZEF troops of 14 November 1918, whose direct action in France forced the hand of their ‘superiors’, or the mutinous troops at Featherson Camp two weeks later. The WW100 feature on the Sling Camp riots of March 1919—the most serious breakdown of discipline in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the European theatre—dedicated a single paragraph to the actual riot and, with little analysis, repeated the typical causal narrative of demobilisation.

Yes, frustration around demobilisation was a major factor, but not the only one. Class was ever present. As Dave Lamb notes, the widespread mutinies across the Allied forces broke out too soon after armistice for delay in demobilisation to be the sole cause. ‘Antagonism towards officers, hatred of arbitrary discipline, and a revolt against bad conditions and uncertainty about the prospect of being sent to Russia all combined with the delay, confusion and uncertainty about demobilisation.’

The militant self-activity of working people—whether they were soldiers, industrial workers, or both—was a deeply entrenched concern for the New Zealand government throughout the war. Yet this fact is absent from both the Armistice and Sling Camp riot accounts.

The Surafend Massacre of December 1918 is the other timely example. How might the WW100 feature on Surafend have differed if the event had been analysed within the framework of white supremacy? Considering it was a highly racialized act of terror that saw New Zealand and other Allied troops kill at least 40 Palestinian Arabs, there is no mention of racism or white supremacy in the feature. It notes ‘long-standing grievances against the Arabs’ and then seemingly blames the previous actions of the victims themselves: ‘soldiers had been required to treat all Arabs with sensitivity so as to maintain their allegiance in the war’ and only post-armistice could the ANZACs show their true colours. Despite recent research on the massacre, we also learn nothing about the victims. They remain the nameless collateral of our ANZAC’s ‘dark thoughts.’

Perhaps I’m being far too critical of the WW100 programme and the small pool of public historians who worked on WW100-related events. As Douglas Hay reminds us, the writing of history ‘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.’ And also, I would add, where we work.

I feel the silences described above stem from a wider issue for official public history. That is the idea of neutrality and the political choice of ‘not being political’, of taking ‘the middle ground’, or not taking any ground at all. As a result, like the colourful lights flickering across the surface of Wellington’s Carillion, we catch glimpses and shadows, but never full illumination.

Perhaps official histories by and for the state are complicated by the capitalist and white supremacist nature of the state itself. However, I believe official public historians have a role to play. And in these times and in this place, I think we should question whether neutrality and the middle ground is tenable. Because the middle ground is being swept away by the flash floods and wild fires of climate change; or occupied by racist and ill-informed rhetoric.

Sadly, as the 15 March 2019 terror attack on Muslims in Christchurch shows, the same horrific causes of the First World War continue to harm in the present. It’s a sober reminder that we’re not talking in the abstract.

Whatever comes our way next, whether it is the New Zealand Wars or this year’s commemoration of Māori encounters with Captain Cook and the Endeavour, I ask that we strive towards a bold and brave public history—histories that can grapple with all the complexities and uncomfortableness of the past. Histories that gets at the root of an issue, in the original meaning of the word ‘radical.’ In short, I want us to ask why.

Because my biggest fear, more than just producing bad or incomplete histories, is that despite our best intentions, we end up normalising the harm caused by capitalism and white supremacy both in the past, and in the present.

Jared Davidson is a labour historian and archivist based in Wellington, New Zealand. He’s the author of three books, including his latest, Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920. This paper was first presented at the PHANZA Conference in April 2019: many thanks to Ross Webb for his feedback. jared-davidson.com

Dead Letters reviewed by the Otago Daily Times

"A fascinating insight into a time and way of thinking which may seem far distant but is much closer to today than we may have supposed or hoped." A wee review of Dead Letters by the Otago Daily Times (click to enlarge).

New Zealand's 'dead' letters brought to life

Click to enlarge

In late April and early May 2019, nine NZME regional newspapers ran an interview with me about Dead Letters. Click on the image above to read the interview in full.

Dead Letters, Great War Stories

Image by Glenn Humphries

On 24 April 2019 I gave a talk with Anna Cottrell at the National Library's Wellington auditorium. The event was called 'Dead Letters, Great War Stories' and included a screening of eight films from the Great War Stories project. Here's my talk from the event. Many thanks to Anna, and the National Library and Alexander Turnbull Library team for making the event happen.

Today being 24 April is an auspicious date for my talk. It is of course the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, but closer to home, 24 April is when the Prince of Wales arrived in New Zealand for his 1920 Royal Tour. For anyone who has read Dead Letters, the Prince of Wales is the thread that ties together the beginning and end letters of the book. It was also a research topic close to David Colquhoun’s heart. David passed away last year, so I’d like to acknowledge David and his long association with the Alexander Turnbull Library.

I want to begin with a letter written by Robert Gould. As I read it, I’d like you to think back on the four-plus years of the WW100 centennial. Hold on to any images or memories that come to you…

R Gould, 4 Tinakori Rd, Wellington. 28/8/18

I was elected to go and fight for our “Glorious Empire” but the trouble is I don’t feel any of that patriotic spirit running down my backbone. I am not going unless of course they wind and gag me and they are not past doing that in this splendid little bit of our Empire. I did not go before the Medical Board and I did not appeal but you will see by the papers that about 40 wharfies appealed and only eleven were turned down and have to go to camp, unless they are prepared to go to one of Bill’s Boarding Houses.

I suppose you heard about the treatment of the C.O.’s at Wanganui Prison, it was pretty hot, some of the chaps were just about driven insane. When you hear about Huns just refer them to N.Z. and a little place called Wanganui, and it is not stretched at all by the accounts I have got, of course the warders etc. were shifted from there to other places, but the Head Officer there, up to the present is still in charge. I got a letter from a chap up there today, it was smuggled out and he said that when he went there the C.O. in charge told him he would like to shoot him, so you can see the respectable gentleman they have in charge there.

They may arrest me any time now, it is seven weeks since I should have visited the doctor, anyhow I don’t intend to go, they can do what they like, they have the power because the slaves in uniform do all their dirty work for them and the organisations are really assisting them by their rotten attitude, it makes a man disgusted with his fellows…  

I saw Charlie Johnstone he is out of his little spot and quite well. The military arrested Jones last week and sent him to Wanganui for 28 days and then he will get a C.M. and 2 years when he comes back to Trentham. However there are too many to mention names going for the two years and that is the only ray of hope that shines out in the whole damned business.

I received your letter alright—did you get mine?

Remember me to any friends with hope for the revolution some day at any rate.

Yours in revolt, R Gould

PS Things are only middling with the miners and they are either going out or going slow and there is no coal in the country worth speaking about. Just got word Jones is pretty bad at Wanganui gaol and the Officer in Charge there is a dog.

In the space of four paragraphs, the four years of official WW100 commemoration are confronted with a very different story – one of resistance, defiance, and objection. We learn of the anti-militarist movement and its members, of whom over 650 had been imprisoned by the state. We learn of the Wanganui Detention Barracks scandal, when an official enquiry found overwhelming evidence of mistreatment and brutality that led to the prison camp being shut down. We learn of the strikes and go-slows the government worked so quickly to stop, believing, in the words of Defence Minister James Allen, that the nation was doomed. Thanks to the letter of Robert Gould, we gain an insight into the views of an ordinary, working-class writer during an extraordinary time.

It is the experiences of Robert and others on the margins of wartime society that are the focus of my book, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914 -1920. In fact, Robert is not a main protagonist in the book and makes but a brief appearance (on p.110 if anyone is looking). But his letter is an excellent entry into the confiscated letters of the Army Department’s ‘Secret Registry’, personal experiences of the First World War, and the Great War Stories that will be screening shortly.

*** 

So who was Robert Gould? Born in England and late of Timaru, Robert was a 36-year old watersider, socialist, husband, and father of two who was known as a boxer in his youth. 5’5” with greying hair and brown eyes, Robert had scars on his arms and neck from his waterfront work and a tattoo of a woman’s head on his right forearm. Skilled with a winch and crane, Robert was also an avid reader and largely self-educated. When asked about his views, he would quip that socialism would bring a little more butter on the bread, and a little more light in the home and work.

A month after writing his letter, Robert was arrested and sent to camp, where he refused all military orders. He was sentenced to 23 months hard labour and imprisoned at Waikeria, near Te Awamutu. In April 1919, as he languished in a cell alongside other resistors, Robert learned that his wife was seriously ill. He asked to be transferred to Wellington to be near her. His request was denied. So Robert went on hunger strike, refused all work, and was placed in solitary confinement. Others soon followed in protest, and Robert was quickly removed to Mt. Eden prison.

But the hunger strike did not end with Robert’s transfer. Within 3 days, 36 military prisoners had joined the hunger strike, partly in sympathy with Robert and partly through frustration at being jailed despite Armistice having come and gone. 15 days later, a hardcore group were still refusing all food, drink and work. The authorities were stumped, and with no real answers, were extremely relieved when the strike was called off by the prisoners themselves.

Meanwhile, Robert had been transferred to Wellington and was eventually released on 20 October 1919. He would go on to join the Communist Party of New Zealand, where he gave lectures on the Russian Revolution and continued his love of reading. He later fell foul of the censors for importing banned literature, and later, of the Party as well. He was expelled from the Party in 1922

*** 

Robert’s letter was just one of the 1.2 million letters stopped and examined by military postal censors during the First World War. As Charlotte Macdonald writes in the Foreword to Dead Letters, ‘mail was connection, vital to keeping relationships, political ideas, and social movements alive. And in that force lay its danger.’

By November 1920, when the censorship of domestic mail officially came to an end, writers critical of the government had had their mail detained, were put under close surveillance, or had their homes or offices raided. Some were jailed. Others were deported. In an era when post was paramount, the wartime censorship of domestic correspondence heralded the largest state intrusion into Pākehā private life in New Zealand history.

It is hard to know exactly how many of these letters were withheld or destroyed, because it was policy after the war simply to destroy any letters and packets that had been confiscated. Despite this, some letters ended up in the Army Department’s Secret Registry. A writer whose correspondence went into this exclusive set of records would have a constable following their every move, enquiries made with their employer or a raid of their home. It meant censors in New Zealand and Australia were talking about them, as were the chief of general staff, the commissioner of police, the upper echelons of parliament and, in some cases, the prime minister. It put a halt to the intended trajectories of the letters. And if they made it through the haphazard recordkeeping of the twentieth century, the letters found a home in the long metal stacks of the modern archive.

The Secret Registry appears to have been set up before 1912 as a way for the military to store confidential material too sensitive for their main filing system. The incomplete nature of the records suggests the Secret Registry was far larger in the past. Yet among the 500 surviving records in the registry are more than 50 complete letters, and extracts from many others.

As objects they are a real treat. Close to half remain in their original, handwritten form; the rest have been meticulously transcribed on a typewriter. The archival experience of viewing and handling these artefacts is near-impossible to convey – the joy of each discovery, the smell, the texture, grappling with their hundred-year-old folds. Some contain treasure within treasure: a clipping of a West Coast fern, perfectly dried and preserved; money order receipts from a Te Aro post office; pocket-sized pamphlets printed on a rebel press. Others feature elaborate letterheads, patterns of splattered ink and loose scribbles designed to convey order.

*** 

My book is about postal censorship, but really, I was drawn to the writers behind the words. The letters provide us with a personalised snapshot of life from the bottom up. Indeed, because the writers describe their day-to-day lives and the issues that concerned them, the letters allow us to undertake an exercise in biography and identity formation from below. As the historian Marcus Rediker wrote, ‘we do not, for once, have to ask repression to recount the history of what it was repressing’.

In their own words and often in intimate detail, the writers describe the social forces that shaped opinion and the lenses used to make sense of war. Even the language they use is one way these fragments of everyday life steer us towards a larger and more complex story. Because of this the letters are a useful companion to generalisations about the impact of the war on New Zealand society and culture.

As a unique record of working-class experience, the letters also allow us to hear voices often silenced by traditional histories. Most working-class women and men like Robert Gould did not keep diaries, publish their thoughts or fill the shelves of manuscript libraries with their personal archives. Miles Fairburn, writing about the remarkable exception of Wairarapa labourer James Cox, notes how illiteracy, work-related fatigue, the stress of economic insecurity and lack of spare time deprived many workers of the opportunity to keep a diary. Letter-writing was far more common, yet even these snippets of working-class life are wholly dependent on whether they were kept or – in the case of this book, detained.

Indeed, by intercepting, confiscating and archiving these letters, the state has preserved their resistance far better than if the letters had been allowed to reach their intended destinations. The unintended consequence – and a satisfying form of poetic justice – is that the letters are now available to a far larger audience.

*** 

Charlotte Macdonald noted that these letters remind us ‘that WW1 was fought in conditions of political turbulence. It is an important reminder, as the historical discourse of 1914-18 has come to be strongly characterised by rather too neatly drawn themes of consensual patriotism, duty and sacrifice.’ According to Charlotte, the people whose letters were confiscated — the agitators, non-conformists, socialists, anarchists, Irish nationalists, and questioners of authority asking stirring questions of the ethics of war — show us ‘a New Zealand beyond the pieties of the war memorial.’

I hope my talk today has given you a glimpse into a wartime New Zealand that remains largely hidden, but is slowly revealing itself. The confiscated letters are one avenue. The other is film. So it gives me great pleasure to now hand over to Anna Cottrell and her Great War Stories. Kia ora koutou.

'Dead Letters' out now!

Image by Dani Henki

I'm very happy to note that my latest book, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914 - 1920, is out now with by Otago University Press. 

We launched it into the world with great cheer at Unity Books, which you can read about from the Unity Books website. As Dani Henki of Unity Books writes, "laughter and applause rippled through the crowd numerous times while Jared spoke about the journey that led to the creation of Dead Letters, acknowledging the families of letter writers included in the book, descendants of anti-war farmers, socialists, lovers, and people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an incredible turnout, some folks came from as far north as Auckland and as far south as Christchurch."

I want to thank everyone who made it to the launch (including descendants of the letter writers), as well as Rachel Scott and Charlotte Macdonald, who spoke on the night. It was great to be surrounded by so many friends, family, and colleagues. 

As the reviews and things slowly roll in, I'm keeping track of them on my personal website, which you can follow here: https://jared-davidson.com/deadletters/info/

Finally, you can order your copy at Nationwide Books (free shipping within NZ), or get your local library to request a copy.

'Dead Letters' out 7 March 2019

I'm very happy to say that my latest book, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920 published by Otago University Press, will be launched in Wellington on 7 March 2019.

In 1918, from deep within the West Coast bush, a miner on the run from the military wrote a letter to his sweetheart. Two months later he was in jail. Like millions of others, his letter had been steamed open by a team of censors shrouded in secrecy. Using their confiscated mail as a starting point, Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 reveals the remarkable stories of people caught in the web of wartime surveillance. 

Among them was a feisty German-born socialist, a Norwegian watersider, an affectionate Irish nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, a cross-dressing doctor, a nameless rural labourer, an avid letter writer with a hatred of war, and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent. Military censorship within New Zealand meant that their letters were stopped, confiscated and filed away, sealed and unread for over 100 years. Until now. 

Intimate and engaging, this dramatic narrative weaves together the personal and political, bringing to light the reality of wartime censorship. 

In an age of growing state power, new forms of surveillance and control, and fragility of the right to privacy, Dead Letters is a startling reminder that we have been here before.

More information about the book itself can be found on my author website: https://jared-davidson.com/deadletters/info/

Update on my book, Dead Letters

This is a quick update on my forthcoming book, Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920, to be published by Otago University Press:

In 1918, from deep within the West Coast bush, a miner on the run from the military wrote a letter to his sweetheart. Two months later he was in jail. Like millions of others, his letter had been steamed open by a team of censors shrouded in secrecy. Using their confiscated mail as a starting point, Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 reveals the remarkable stories of people caught in the web of wartime surveillance. 

Among them was a feisty German-born socialist, a Norwegian watersider, an affectionate Irish nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, a cross-dressing doctor, a nameless rural labourer, an avid letter writer with a hatred of war, and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent. Military censorship within New Zealand meant that their letters were stopped, confiscated and filed away, sealed and unread for over 100 years. Until now. 

Intimate and engaging, this dramatic narrative weaves together the personal and political, bringing to light the reality of wartime censorship. 

In an age of growing state power, new forms of surveillance and control, and fragility of the right to privacy, Dead Letters is a startling reminder that we have been here before.

Firstly, thank you to everyone who has helped me throughout my research on this work. I could not have done it without your input, so again, thank you very much.

The typesetting of Dead Letters has been completed by the capable team at OUP, and will be going to print in December. The Index is the final piece of work, which is being done now. The book will then be launched in March 2019, initially in Wellington

Here is a link to the new title info sheet from Otago University Press (PDF): https://www.otago.ac.nz/press/otago698253.pdf

You can find it on their website: https://www.otago.ac.nz/press/books/comingsoon/index.html.

I'm very excited we're so close to publishing this work. If you'd like more info an updates you can follow my tweets or posts on Instagram:

Twitter (me): https://twitter.com/anrchivist and for OUP: https://twitter.com/OtagoUniPress

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anrchivist/

And there's more about the book on my website: https://jared-davidson.com/

The house John Doe built: the hidden history of prison labour in New Zealand

Below is my article reproduced from Overland Literary Journal, May 2018.

In a first for the inmates of Rimutaka Prison – one of New Zealand’s largest carceral sites located about thirty kilometres north of Wellington – a three-bedroom house constructed with prison labour was recently added to the much-needed stock of Housing New Zealand. The house was lifted over the razor wire and out of the prison compound by crane, and politicians and prison officials were on hand to make the most of the moment. ‘It’s a good example of how we can connect things up to get a really good outcome for New Zealanders’, quipped the Minister of Education.

The Minister might not have intended his words to highlight the connections between colonisation and incarceration, enclosure and capitalism, the housing crisis and the state. Nor would he have wanted the house to be viewed as the outcome of unfree labour. Instead, it was an educational outcome and a housing outcome, and one that happily shifted attention away from the earlier news that inmates on similar incentives schemes were being paid as little as twenty cents an hour.

Ignoring for a moment that people should not have to be locked up to receive training, a house made with unfree labour and dressed up as self-improvement is not the first of its kind. In fact, if we lift the floorboards and peer a little deeper, the house that John Doe built reveals a long and hidden history of prison labour in New Zealand.

Although its use was never Imperial policy, as in Australia, prison labour weaves its way through almost every major urban centre and is entwined with many significant events in New Zealand’s past. Yet it is a history that is relatively unknown. An invisible history hidden in plain sight.

In August 1839, when discussing instructions from Lord Normanby on the annexation of New Zealand, Captain William Hobson asked for a supply of convicts from Sydney for use on roads and other public works. The Colonial Office turned down his request. But less than two years after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840, prisoners were hard at work building the infrastructure of settler capitalism.

As Ben Schrader writes in The Big Smoke, the British had a long tradition of founding towns to impose control over new territories and Indigenous peoples. But the labour needed to build such towns was in short supply. Luckily, Hobson and his agents of empire were less interested in the use of hard labour within the confines of gaol than in the fact that they needed workers. There was far too much to be done on the ‘frontier’ to leave untapped labour within the hastily erected raupo huts that passed for New Zealand’s first prisons. With the formation of the Public Works Department still thirty years away, using forced labour on public works became the norm.

In Wellington in 1843, prisoners constructed Hill Street (alongside current-day Parliament Grounds), a waterfront road between the high water mark and neighbouring shops (in the area of Woodward Street). They laid drains in Manners Street and cut a road to Karori. Prison labour levelled the site of Terrace Gaol in 1851, built Cuba Street in 1856, and drained the Basin Reserve in the 1860s. From 1853, prison labour was used continuously on street works and public grounds around the burgeoning city. When they weren’t slogging through a ten-hour shift on roads, the incarcerated cut firewood to heat the buildings of government officials or crushed rock for more roads.

Like in Wellington, the spectacle of prison gangs being led daily through the streets of Auckland was a common occurrence in the early 1840s. Prison labour built Queen Street, Fort Street, High Street, Chancery Street and Victoria Street. Prisoners cleared land and built jetties on the shoreline. They were the main source of public works labour in Auckland until 1853, when outdoor work by prisoners was temporarily stopped.

Some of the hard-labour gangs were made up of the Parkhurst Boys, a group of 128 youths aged between twelve and twenty that had been transported from Britain to Auckland in 1842 and 1843. Gentleman settlers protested against ‘the inhuman attempt to convert our adopted colony into a pestilential convict colony’ and believed Auckland was becoming ‘the refuge for the juvenile delinquents of Great Britain.’ For the sympathetic, the sight of youngsters barely able to push a barrow load of metal was more worrying. The Sydney Morning Herald was aghast that boy labourers were ‘employed to break stones for little more than their food.’

Prison labour, including that of Māori prisoners of war, was essential to the development of Dunedin. Prisoners drained swamps, reclaimed harbours, deepened the berth alongside the Rattray Street jetty, built roads such as Cumberland and Castle Streets and roads on both sides of the harbour, and levelled entire hills. Rather than conforming to nature, settlers preferred to stick to the imposed grid of the surveyors. Bell Hill, which formed the Octagon in Dunedin’s city centre, was levelled by prisoners. One of them was the convicted arsonist Cyrus Hayley, who was shot dead while attempting to flee a Bell Hill work gang.

Bell Hill, Dunedin. (1986/69/1, Otago Settlers Museum)

In Lyttelton too, prisoners levelled, cleared, dug, stacked, packed, and poured the city’s streets, walls, drains, school sites and harbours. They helped build the iconic Timeball Station. They even constructed their Warder’s gothic-inspired home.

All of this forced labour was cheap and convenient. But its use was as much about ideology as it was pragmatic. ‘Habits of industry’, industriousness and the work ethic were (and are) essential to the maintenance of capitalist social relations. Forced labour was a way to instil labour-discipline, just as prison training incentives today try to instil labour-discipline and readiness for the labour market upon release.

The idle and disorderly threatened such values, and whether inside a prison or not, had to be contained. Between 1868 and 1878 the number of people imprisoned rose from 3,292 to 4,924. In a time of increased mobility and unemployment, this itinerant prison force was overwhelmingly made up of people charged with vagrancy and other crimes of social control.

To make space for the growing prison population, some of the worst offenders were drafted out of jails and into great prison ships – called hulks – so they could be sent wherever work ‘of great public utility’ was needed. The practice of providing casual forced labour from mobile hulks was eventually abolished in 1891 (today, a not-dissimilar practice is known as ‘labour hire’).

By the 1880s, when prisons came under centralised administration, the state met the challenge of inadequate space by forcing prisoners to build the very walls around them. Prison labour was used to construct new prisons in Wellington, Christchurch, New Plymouth, Auckland, Dunedin, Greymouth, Whanganui, Napier, Invercargill, Gisborne, and various places in between. Many of these prisons were situated on land taken or questionably ‘purchased’ from Māori (the connection between public works and Māori dispossession needs no explanation).

By the late nineteenth century, the focus of building prisons meant there was often little prison labour to spare for other work. Despite this, working hours of 7.30am to 6pm in summer and 8am to 5pm in winter saw forced labour used on roads in Dunedin, Wellington, Hokitika and Nelson. Prisoners were put to work for local corporations and harbour boards at Invercargill, Timaru and Whanganui. In 1881, unfree labour built the breakwater at Ngamotu – the work gangs of prisoners transferred to New Plymouth for the job were marched to work under armed guard, and waited out the tides and bad weather locked behind bars in a cave at the base of one of the Sugarloaf Islands.

In this period, prisoners built the New Plymouth Hospital, the Addington Water Tower, the Hokitika Racecourse, a seawall in Nelson, Marine Parade in Napier, and attempted to forge a road through Milford Sound. Prison labour was also used for militarist and defence purposes, such as Dunedin’s Fort Taiaroa, Kau Point and Point Halswell in Wellington, and Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour.

Prison labour on the Milford Track (1/2-066563-F, Alexander Turnbull Library)

Prison labour and war have always been strongly connected. In 1846, during the military campaign against Hōne Heke, Kawiti, and other Ngāpuhi rangatira, a handful of convicts from New South Wales were shipped across the Tasman and used as bullock drivers, carting weapons and material for the Imperial troops. In 1869, seventy-four Māori prisoners of war – known as the Pakakohe group – were sent to Dunedin, where they were put to work on the city’s infrastructure, including the foundations of the University of Otago building, parts of Andersons Bay causeway, city roads, and the Botanic Garden’s stone walls. Locked in cold and filthy conditions, eighteen prisoners died. Ten years later, 137 Māori prisoners from Parihaka were again sent south and put to work.

During the First World War, resisters and conscientious objectors were herded into labour camps across the country and forced to build roads and bridges, or confined to state farms such as Weraroa, where generations of farmers before and since were taught the agricultural skills essential to the settler economy. Germans and other enemy aliens interned on Matiu Somes Island were forced to labour, violating the Hague Convention, while in Northland over 600 Dalmatians were forced into swamp drainage, railway construction and road-building, despite their willingness to serve in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.

The Second World War re-established the use of objectors’ labour for the state, while at Featherston military camp, Japanese prisoners were put to work on state house chimneys and other tasks. On 25 February 1943, a group of about 240 staged a sit-down strike and refused to work. In the melee that followed, thirty-one Japanese were killed instantly, seventeen died later, and about seventy-four were wounded.

Japanese prisoner of war making chimneys for state houses. (1/4-000779-F, Alexander Turnbull Library)

The state house, for which the Japanese prisoners of Featherston paid dearly, is ubiquitous with New Zealand and the welfare state. Less known is that some of the timber they used, felled from the great forests owned by the state, were planted and maintained by prison labour. Between 1901 and 1920, close to 16,000 acres or forty million trees were planted by prisoners in Waikato, Rotorua, Taupō, Marlborough, and Canterbury. Unfree labour created valuable state assets.

Even the cherished dairy industry was tainted by prison labour. From 1909, prisoners were used to clear, break-in, and cultivate ‘waste’ land before it was subdivided into smaller holdings and sold to dairy farmers. By the 1930s, close to 27,000 acres of land had been cleared in the central North Island alone.

Underpinning it all was a gendered division of labour. It was women who did the invisible work that made the public work possible. Women made and mended clothes, washed laundry, sewed mattresses, repaired boots, scrubbed floors, baked bread, and completed a vast array of domestic duties. When they weren’t reproducing the labour power needed for public works, they picked oakum – the unravelling of old rope – for no other reason than to keep them working.

Prisoners planting trees on the Hanmer Plains. (Christchurch City Libraries, PhotoCD 1, IMG0090)

Such widespread use of prison labour disrupts the narrative of New Zealand exceptionalism, of the classless, hard-working settler escaping the drudgery of industrialism. Disruptive, too, were some of the incarcerated workers forced to labour for the state.

Officials in the 1840s and 1850s were dismayed by the number of prisoners in irons or solitary confinement for refusing to work. Seafarers and soldiers were especially unruly. Lieutenant Colonel C.E. Gold, commander of the 65th Regiment, complained in 1848 that many of his men preferred to be in gaol, where their subversion of discipline was more appealing than having to serve in the military.

In 1865, one woman inmate refused to work and threw her oakum ‘down the privy.’ After being punished for her ‘violent and insolent language,’ she was forced to retrieve the filth-covered rope and continue with her day’s quota.

In Kaingaroa, Paparua and Waikeria, First World War inmates went on hunger strike, refused to work or initiated go-slows to improve their plight. (At the time of writing, Waikeria was again in the spotlight for its disturbing conditions and confinement of inmates to their cells for up to twenty-two hours a day). Dalmatians downed tools at the Waihou River works, launched strikes on the Okahukura railway works, and refused to work the swamps near Kaitāia-Awanui. The man charged with their ‘care’, former Police Commissioner John Cullen, was upset at this work-refusal. Because Dalmatians had worked in wet and difficult conditions as gumdiggers, Cullen believed they would be happy to do forced labour on behalf of the state. He was wrong.

It has been said that the essence of imprisonment is organised compulsory work. It has also been said that capitalism is the subordination of all aspects of life to waged work. The connection between these two sides of the same coin – unfree and ‘free’ labour – is enclosure.

Enclosure is the ongoing process of divorcing people from their relationship with the land, from the commons, and from independent means of sustaining life. Enclosing bodies between prison walls is the ultimate expression of that process.

Even the rhetoric of prison rehabilitation cannot escape the connection, for the word ‘improve’, in its original sense, not only meant to make better but to do something for monetary profit. In particular, it meant to make land productive and profitable by enclosing it.

Enclosure and the violence of forced labour permeates the streets we walk every day and the public spaces we take for granted. It is a violence inseparable from colonisation and the dispossession that makes prisons and prison labour in New Zealand possible. For prisons were a Pākehā institution brought to these shores from without. And the use of unfree prison labour was there from the beginning.

First published by Overland Literary Journal, May 2018.

'My Dear Doctor': Hjelmar von Dannevill

Hjelmar Dannevill. From the file 'Dr von Dannevill, October 1914 - June 1917' [Archives Reference: AD 10 Box 9 17/26] Archives New Zealand The Department of Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua

Below is a draft excerpt from a chapter in my forthcoming book on the remarkable Wellington figure of Hjelmar Dannevill. During the First World War her private letters were confiscated and Hjelmar was eventually interned on Matiu Somes Island for a brief period - one of the few women to be interned during the war. Her sexuality and disruption of gender norms was a major factor.

A Visit to Miramar

On 21 May 1917, Police Matron Beck and Detectives Boddam and Cox left the tram and made their way towards the Lahmann Home’s impressive entrance. Built in 1907 by the director of a short-lived amusement park called Wonderland, the grand wooden building had been purchased in 1911 by Dr Edith Huntley, a well-known advocate of women’s health and the first woman councillor of Miramar. But it was Hjelmar Dannevill who answered the door. She was dressed in her distinctive style—collar, shirt and waistcoat, an immaculately tailored jacket adorned with a pocket watch, and a long skirt that reached to her leather boots. Hjelmar was known to have smoked from a pipe, but not on this occasion.

Once inside the detectives found a picturesque foyer of dark red walls and stained wooden panels. Great bowls of scarlet gladioli and vases of feathery-looking ixia dotted the space, and Boddam noted the staircase that led to the Home’s second floor and its exterior balconies. ‘After informing her who we were in the usual way’ wrote Boddam, ‘I requested her to accompany us at once to the office of the Commissioner of Police, who desired to interview her.’[i] After confiscating a bag of letters, books and other papers, Hjelmar went quietly, saving Boddam the task of using the warrant for her arrest.

As Hjelmar boarded the tram surrounded by Police she must have pondered her sudden change in fortune. Five years earlier she and Dr Huntley had been the hosts to over two hundred women of high society. The December 1912 opening of the Lahmann Home was a grand affair. Guests toured the grounds with cups of high tea accompanied by the music of the Miramar Band, while those inside were treated to performances on the grand piano.

It was also a chance to rub shoulders with Wellington’s elite, including the Prime Minister himself. Earlier that afternoon Massey had announced his pleasure at opening the Home, one he believed was ‘the first of its type in the British Dominion and the first in all the world to be entirely conducted by women.’ It was a place where those ‘suffering from chronic disease or permanent weakness might be afforded all the relief possible’, a place where ‘business men, professional men, or even politicians, if they happened to be overworked, could be given an opportunity of recuperating.’ ‘Someday’, joked Massey, ‘it might be necessary for me to come to the home, but, as you can all gather from appearances, that time was not yet. (Laughter and “hear, hear!”).’[ii]

If Massey had ever checked in to the Home he would have experienced the relatively novel treatment of naturopathy, an alternative medicine on the rise. Modelled on the teachings of German physician Heinrich Lahmann, the Miramar retreat offered a natural care system of massage, hydrotherapy, a vegetarian diet, and plenty of fresh air. Lahmann himself was a staunch advocate of animal rights, refusing to use them in laboratory experiments. The Home was probably equipped with air baths as per Lahmann’s teachings, but it also provided less natural cures: electrical therapy (which some brave guests were ‘treated’ to on open days). A central-city office on Willis Street also offered electrical treatment for those pressed for time.

Hjelmar and the Lahamnn Home seem to have been an accepted part of the Wellington community. She was the host of a number of talks, known as an ‘At Home’, where women gathered at the retreat for music and more tea. ‘Dr Edith Huntley wore a dress of shot violet and green velvet with trimming to match. Dr von Dannevill was in navy blue’ reported one gossip column.[iii] Well into 1915 she spoke publically at women’s events, such as the Moral and Physical Health Society’s annual lecture or to the Pioneer Club, whose upper-class audience included Anne Salmond, the wife of Solicitor General Salmond. At ease on stage or behind the grand piano, no one cared, or cared to mention, Hjelmar’s masculine attire.

But by 1917 attitudes against difference had hardened, and spurred by Edward Bond’s complaints, not even Hjelmar’s high-society friends could save her. She now found herself at the Lampton Quay Police Station and face-to-face with the Commissioner of Police.

O’Donovan interrogated her at length about her past, her nationality, and her gender, hoping to find holes in a story that even today seems impossible to corroborate. The transcript—neatly typed and amended with question marks and notes such as ‘long pause’—fills most of the Army Department file. It reads like Bruce Chatwin story, dancing across European cities to New York, then south to Brazil, Argentina and Chile before sidestepping over to the African continent. India, Russia, China, Canada—almost every major country featured in Hjelmar’s travels.

‘What were you doing in all these places?’ asked O’Donovan.

‘Teaching anything I could, music, languages, first-aid, anatomy’ she replied, adding that she had trained as a musician in Leipzig before attending Zurich University to study medicine. ‘I got recommendations from one place to another. I also began doing journalistic work for various papers.’[iv] O’Donovan questioned her over what papers, which newspaper agents, and in what languages, before eventually discovering the nature of her later work—the study of venereal disease.

Hjelmar said that around 1890, she had made the acquaintance of a man named Hugo Fischer:

He was very wealthy and had lost his only son by syphilis. I had heard that he was keen, by this disastrous loss, to make investigations all over the world to find out the present state of venereal diseases amongst civilised nations as well as the more primitive races and savages even. He intended these investigations to equip about 7 or 8 people to travel over the globe to make investigations into these diseases. After I met him he began to give instructions in what he wanted carried out. He gave credit to draw on his finances to a very high extent and made a written appointment about the matter we had to send in to him. We had also to promise not to make any copies of any notes, as it naturally concerned a great many intimate affairs of people and the discover of gambling places etc.[v]

Using assumed names, Hjelmar mingled with hospital orderlies, clergymen, Police officers and women across the globe, gathering information on the taboo subject. Employing false names ‘was part of the instructions we had from Mr Fischer… he was afraid the leading power in Austria, the Order of Jesuits, would get hold of [their work].’[vi] This was also one of the reasons she wore men’s clothing—entering into seedy dens and asking questions as a woman was not an option, she argued.

O’Donovan was clearly thrown by her gender variance as much as Ellison and Salmond and repeatedly dwelled on it during the interrogation. ‘Were you dressed as you are now?’ asked O’Donovan.

‘I was not dressed in the same clothing.’

‘You were wearing a man’s hat and coat and an ordinary vest and collar of a man?’

‘Yes I think so, and a skirt.’

‘Did any question arise between you and Mr Ellison as regards whether you were a man or a woman?’

‘He said there was no objections to my wearing men’s clothing so long as he knew I was a woman.’[vii]

And later: ‘Did you ask Mr Ellison to certify that you were a woman?’

‘You mean in writing? No.’

‘If Mr Ellison said you were anxious to get a written document from him to say you were a woman would you say that was incorrect?’

‘I did not ask him for a document. I simply asked him for his advice. Dr Huntley thought perhaps it would be best to have a paper in order to identify myself when I came into touch with a rude crowd or investigating policemen and so on, as I had before, to be protected.’[viii]

As a result O’Donovan asked Hjelmer if she would submit to a medical examination, which she did. ‘I hereby certify that I have this day examined Dr H.W. Dannevill, and that the anatomical configuration shows that she is of the female sex’ reads the impassionate medical note.

Hjelmar’s sex was now recorded but O’Donovan was still not convinced of her nationality. Although she claimed to have been born somewhere near Copenhagen in 1862, she could not recall the name of the town nor produce any documentation.

However she did possess documents of a different kind—the confiscated letters shared at the start of this chapter. The file contains no further information on the letters or their writers. They were found amongst Hjelmar’s papers, which were eventually returned to her except for the four letters (including the two above). Three are from women, and in a possible explanation for why they were detained, hint at sexual activity between women.

‘I never wanted you so much as now’

Applying a contested, historically specific category such as ‘lesbian’ to an earlier period is problematic. Lesbian identity is a late twentieth-century concept, and the historical past was a very different sexual place. Women who loved and/or had sex with women, cross-dressed, or resisted heterosexuality did not necessarily have a language to describe themselves as lovers of women. They understood their desires, behaviour and experiences within the social context of their own time.[ix]

Yet these letters, and their wider context centred on Hjelmar and the Lahmann Home, point strongly to lesbian sexuality. Besides some of the leading prose, Katherine’s letter suggests that like Mary Bond she abhorred the thought of her husband visiting her (‘I dread the man intensely’). Could it be that her sexual desire was non-heterosexual? Was she one of many women whose sexuality had been suppressed by Victorian social mores?[x]

Affection is also there in another letter from Helene of Timaru. Its cramped script matches the letter shared at the start of this chapter, but as it is undated and on different paper it was probably written at a different time. Remarkably, it contains a dictated letter from a toddler in the care of Helene named William Stewart—who was none other than the son of Mary Bond.

In the letter written on behalf of William, Helene notes how much he is like his mother and recounts how he calls Dannevill ‘Docket’:

What about the boat Docket? On Wednesday carried the boat down + cleaned it out, and put it in the water. I did get in the boat Docket see!! Mrs Peuko put me on the boat. What shall I tell Docket? Kisses the paper (I kiss Docket!)… when are you coming down mummy + Docket to Peuko’s house? I good boy + do a lot every day.

He then signed off, in his own writing, with ‘William Stewart. I love you Docket.’[xi]

In her second letter Helene longs for the company of Hjelmar. ‘It always comforts me to read your dear loving words and to recall their sweet accompaniments’ she wrote. ‘I wish you were here now, how I long to lay my head against your shoulder and feel the thrill of spirit answering spirit. I do call you at night and early in the morning. I can sometimes feel that I am in your arms.’ In what could be suggestive prose or code, Helen recalls how she liked ‘to think of the iris buds opening… Think of me as they do, my most precious one.’[xii] Her letter also highlights the kinship felt between these women, when she asks,

Do you feel bound to spend your Christmas at Miramar, or could you not bring Molly and well as Mary Stewart and come here for a fortnight? Or as long as you like. Molly could have a tent and a verandah bed. Do answer this question Dear one! Will you! Sit down at the cocoa interval and send me a line. And I hope it will be yes if not, as soon after as possible. You must have a holiday and I do want you so! And we could make you comfortable and happy. My love to Mary Stewart.[xiii]

Are these letters evidence of sexual relationships between women or simply an example of romantic friendships? Late nineteenth and early twentieth century letters between women could be used to convey loving feelings or to discuss plans and fantasies, without necessarily meaning a sexual relationship. The power and intensity of love between women can be portrayed strongly in words, which sometimes included expressions of sensual and physical affection.[xiv]

Feminist historian Lelia Rupp suggests there are three behavioural features or characteristics that relate to lesbian historical evidence: romantic love between women, transgender identities, and sexual acts.[xv] Hjelmar’s letters and her non-binary gender seem to lean towards such evidence, but there is little consistency in historians’ understandings of women’s cross-dressing and its links with lesbian sexuality.[xvi]

Regardless of what we call her lived reality, there were many ways in which gender bending and same-sex relationships were policed before, during and after the First World War. The New Zealand government did not criminalise lesbian sex acts, writes Historian Alison Laurie, but outlawed lesbians through a complex web of regulations and strategies. The state could punish women who transgressed against gender-codes by cross-dressing or with unacceptable sexual behaviours through connecting lesbianism with promiscuity and prostitution. In doing so, ‘the law contained and controlled women’s access to public spaces and to self-determined sexual expression… where these methods proved inadequate on their own, lesbianism was contained by the medical profession who from the earliest times classified it as a disorder.[xvii]

Wartime simply added fuel to the flames. ‘Imperialism, while extolling the self-sacrificing single man who gave his life to tame some remote part of the empire, called for women to return to their traditional roles… independent women were accused of sex hatred and pilloried for preferring their own sex to men.’[xviii]

Not long after Hjelmar’s arrest, such a stance was taken to the extreme in Britain when MP Noel Billing claimed that Germany possessed a ‘Black Book’ of ‘forty-seven-thousand English men and women’ involved in lesbianism and other so-called deviant acts. According to Billing, the British Empire was about to collapse from within—one blackmail at a time. Billing argued that ‘in lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of State were threatened.’[xix]

This was the socio-legal setting in which Hjelmar’s letters were detained, and what she challenged with every collar or waistcoat she wore. Indeed, clothing itself was crucial to how gender was read by others. Victorianism expected women to demonstrate a meticulous personal daintiness. Their gestures were to be free of any sign of masculinity and their clothes and hair were to have ‘a precarious fragility.’[xx] From the late nineteenth century the plainer, more masculine style worn by ‘new women’, such as students, teachers, and office workers, had begun to challenge this view. But when gender variance intersected with male-defined ideas of sexuality, it was seen as a potential enemy of heterosexuality, gender order, and the nation itself.[xxi] In a patriarchal society, such cases had to be controlled.

The war had facilitated a deep intrusion into Hjelmar’s personal relationships by the state, and what it found unsettled Salmond. ‘Although the question of sex has now been settled by medical examination, the further information received and now submitted to me in no way alters the opinion which I formerly expressed, but rather confirms it’. After speaking with Gibbon, he ordered the immediate internment of Hjelmar. She was formerly arrested as an enemy alien on 26 May 1917 and escorted under guard to Matiu Somes Island. She was one of the few women to be interned in New Zealand during the First World War.

A number of newspapers carried the mild sensation of her arrest and usually finished with a comment on her attire. ‘The internment of Dr Hjelmar von Dannevill, which was effected yesterday, did not surprise the Wellington people’ reported the Evening Star. ‘The voice of gossip has insisted for a long time past that this lady, who claimed to be of Danish nationality, would find more congenial company on Somes Island.’[xxii] Her ‘eccentricities’ included wearing ‘her hair short’, a ‘hat, coat, vest, collar’, and ‘boots of a masculine pattern with a woman’s skirt.’[xxiii] The Northern Advocate quipped that the ‘quaint little figure’ who ‘would have passed for a boy easily were it not that she announced her sex by wearing one of the most characteristic garments of woman—a skirt’, would be missed.[xxiv]

Mr JA Fothergill of Dunedin felt compelled to write in support of Hjelmar, noting with regret that the reports on her internment ‘hardly does the citizens of Wellington justice… there must be hundreds of grateful patients (of whom I am one) throughout New Zealand who owe the doctor thanks for unwearied skilled attention and deep sympathy.’ That she wore ‘a masculine style of dress is merely a proof that her mind had risen superior to and emancipated from, the tyranny and vanity of fashion.’[xxv]

Although she was interviewed again—this time by the military—no personal file of her time on Matiu Somes Island has survived. This may be due to her short amount of time in the camp. Two months into her internment, Hjelmar is said to have suffered a severe nervous breakdown. Ironically, with the permission of Defence Minister James Allen she was transferred to the Lahmann Home to recuperate. NZ Truth was bemused and ridiculed the government for interning her in the first place. Rumour had it that her arrest was due to her losing a handbag ‘alleged to have contained incriminating correspondence with Europe,’ read the story.[xxvi] In the end, the rumour was not too far from the truth.


[i] Report of Constable Bodamm, date, Dr Von Dannevill, AD10 Box 9/ 17/26, ANZ, Wellington Office.
[ii]  Dominion, 16 December 1912.
[iii] Freelance, 3 May 1913
[iv] Interview between Dannevill and O’Donovan, 21 May 1917, Dr Von Dannevill, AD10 Box 9/ 17/26, ANZ, Wellington Office.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid. 
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] “Women who loved” Oram and Turnbull, The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970, Routledge: London & New York, 2001,.p.1. I am also aware that my own reading of the sources as a heterosexual, cis-male outsider is just as problematic.
[x] See Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850-1920, Virago: 1985, p. 17
[xi] Helene to Dannevill, undated, Dr Von Dannevill, AD10 Box 9/ 17/26, ANZ, Wellington Office. William Paul Bond was born on 7 August 1913, which made him three in 1916. He died in The US in 1973.
[xii] Helene to Dannevill, undated, Dr Von Dannevill, AD10 Box 9/ 17/26, ANZ, Wellington Office.
[xiii] Helene to Dannevill, undated, Dr Von Dannevill, AD10 Box 9/ 17/26, ANZ, Wellington Office.
[xiv]Oram and Turnbull, The Lesbian History Sourcebook, p.51. Hjelmar’s masculinity and her blurring of binary genders adds a further complexity. Judith Halberstam argues that ‘many other models existed beyond the either-or proposition of an asexual friendship or a butch-femme sexual dynamic.’ She suggests that theorising a range of multiple genders and sexual desires would better explain female masculinity than the term lesbian. 
[xv] Leila Rupp, as cited by Julie Glamuzina.
[xvi] Oram and Turnbull, The Lesbian History Sourcebook, p.12.
[xvii] Alison J Laurie, Lady-Husbands and Kamp Ladies, Thesis, p. 57-58
[xviii] Vicinus, Independent Women, p.285
[xix] Noel Billing, January 1918, as cited by Alison J Laurie, Lady-Husbands and Kamp Ladies, p.64
[xx] Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1993, p.155
[xxi] Oram and Turnbull, The Lesbian History Sourcebook, p.14.
[xxii] Evening Star, 29 May 1917
[xxiii] Dominion, 29 May 1917
[xxiv] Northern Advocate, 2 June 1917
[xxv] Evening Post, 5 June 1917
[xxvi] NZ Truth, 21 July 1917