From Crew to the Chain Gang: Seamen, Prison Labour and ‘Improvement’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand

In this rare photograph taken in the late 1860s or early 1870s, the Lyttelton hard-labour gang are working at Officers Point. Lyttelton Museum

Lyttelton in 1865. At Officers Point, seven of the Tudor’s crew scratch at the cliff face, the dust and scree a constant companion, their tools a rudimentary set of pickaxes, carts and dynamite. The men had signed on in Liverpool, refused duty on board and were sentenced to hard labour in Lyttelton, where they found themselves improving a harbour.1 Two years earlier, a commission of inquiry had recommended the construction of a breakwater – increased shipping would bring prosperity to the province. So, for close to a decade, gangs of imprisoned men were marched out of gaol and put to work bludgeoning a headland. By September 1866, imprisoned workers had moved over 21,000 cubic metres of earth, used 2,000 kilograms of explosive powder and fired 877 shots into the hillside. The rubble became a breakwater, and the breakwater became Gladstone Pier in 1874. Today it services a major international port.

That imprisoned crew of the Tudor were part of the hard labour gang is unsurprising. In the maritime world that was nineteenth-century New Zealand, much of its Pākehā population were seamen. Around 1,500 overseas ships visited New Zealand ports in the 1840s, 3,000 in the 1850s, and over 8,000 in each decade of the 1860s and 1870s. That’s around half a million seamen.2 For the New Zealand state, this transient motley crew performed an additional service in the form of unfree labour. Barred from importing convicts by the British government and faced with an ‘idle’ environment that, from a colonial-capitalist viewpoint, demanded ‘improvement’, the state forced prisoners out of gaol and onto the colony’s nascent streets and public works.

In this paper I touch on how imprisoned seamen contributed to the making of nineteenth century New Zealand, from their class struggle on board to their unfree labour on land. The shift from crew to the chain gang (and back again) also shows how labour is a continuum of coercion rather than separate worlds of free and unfree. A key thread within this continuum is the capitalist imperative of improvement and its injunction against idleness.3

Improvement

As a social relation that is premised on (and reproduced through) a logic of separation, capital must turn all of life into work for its own reproduction, from care work to cheap nature to colonialism. Land, prison labour and the ideology of improvement is crucial to this reproduction.

Today, when we think of improvement we usually think of gradual betterment – of making something better. Its original meaning was very different, and points to the dialectical nature of capitalism and prisons. Both were deeply concerned with the inverse of improvement: idleness. Rooted in the Germanic word for worthless, to be idle is to squander something that could be turning a profit. In England during the sixteenth century ‘improvement’ meant to do something for profit, especially to make profit from land.4 According to one dictionary published in 1613, improve meant to raise rents and an improver made land productive and profitable.5 As Brenna Bhandar writes, improvement ‘produced and reflected new conceptions of value in relation to land, goods, commodities, and the value of human life.’6 This imperative to create and constantly improve property is evident in the birth of agrarian capitalism and in ongoing settler colonialism. Land and territory outside of capitalist social property relations were deemed to be waste, and in need of improving. So, too, was idle labour power.7

Hence the attack on idleness and waste. As Jessie Goldstein argues, waste ‘became a dual injunction against not working for a wage in the case of people, and not being worked upon by wage laborers – not being improved – in the case of land.’ In nineteenth-century New Zealand, so-called unimproved spaces were simultaneously landscapes of wasted potential and pregnant with the possibility of profit. At the same time, ‘idleness in prison meant waste’, and according to the criminologist John Pratt, ‘waste, in this early colonial society, was more criminal than crime itself.’8 The gendered use of unfree labour outside of the gaol – and the gendered work of women within it – addressed both.9

The use of prisoners for colonial improvement was also heightened by labour shortages, inadequate and overcrowded gaols, and a prohibition on importing convicts set by the Colonial Office. So, to meet the needs of New Zealand’s commodity frontier, incarcerated men shuffled out of gaol, were harried onto hulks or ferried by rail to a range of prison workscapes. ‘There was too much to be done on the frontier fringes to think of leaving untapped labour behind some hastily erected fences,’ wrote the historian Robert Burnett.10 In colonial New Zealand, the insatiable need for outdoor labour was the overriding imperative.11 And that included the labour of imprisoned seamen.

From crew to the chain gang

Seafarers were prominent among the state’s early prison population. Between 1841 – 1844, an average of 300 prisoners passed through New Zealand gaols each year.12 If they weren’t unpicking the oakum needed to plug the hulls of ships, then they were put to work outdoors. A Wellington gaol return for July 1842 recorded 18 hard-labour prisoners, nine of whom were seamen making and widening drains and forging roads from Lambton Quay to The Terrace.13 An 1844 return for Auckland Gaol showed eight seamen at work building stone jetties – an entire pirate crew, in fact. The Hannah was being fitted up for a whaling expedition in the Chatham Islands when it was seized in a blaze of gunfire. The pirated ship was eventually captured off the Coromandel coast and its crew imprisoned – including the carpenter John Bacon, a native of Kennebec County in Maine who claimed no part in the mutiny.14

The number of seamen in gaol remained steady as the volume of transnational shipping increased and the Merchant Shipping Act 1854 came into force. Seamen made up a fifth of the country’s prison population between 1860 and 1864 (2,810 of the 12,938 people committed to gaol, or 21.7 per cent).15 In the southern port of Dunedin between 1851 and 1861, 355 of the 677 prisoners were seamen.16 Lyttelton also experienced high numbers of detained deckhands. In August 1858, its prison was overrun with crew from two recently arrived ships. In a gaol designed for a maximum of 21 prisoners, the 18 seamen brought the number to 34.17

The unfree labour of seamen was extremely useful for the developing colony. They joined other prisoners making roads, levelling hills, draining swamps, diverting waterways, building bridges and retaining walls, creating foundations for schools and universities, forging harbour forts, planting trees and maintaining cemeteries, reserves and botanical gardens. In the soon-to-be capital of Wellington in April 1861, progress was attributed to ‘the wholesale criminality of the crew of the John Bunyan. They have been made very serviceable in forming and repairing much of the streets.’18 In 1863, over half of Lyttelton’s 335 inmates were seamen at work on its main roads, drains and retaining walls, while in Auckland, nine of the 30 hard labour prisoners recorded in October 1851 were sailors making roads.19 Two decades later, seamen from the Carisbrook Castle were quarrying at Auckland’s Mount Eden Stockade, where they were joined by crew of the John Rennie who’d refused to obey a lawful command.20 The stone they quarried was used for buildings, ballast for train tracks and rubble for roads, all sold to local councils, private contractors and government departments at reduced rates.

In Dunedin, gangs were based on prison hulks that could be moved about Otago Harbour. The hulk Sarah and Esther was declared a prison in December 1874 and fitted up especially for runaway seamen. Not only did they make roads on both sides of Otago Harbour that are still used today, they also formed the massive Aramoana Mole, protecting shipping and adding to the city’s commercial viability.21 From October 1867, imprisoned seamen also manned Dunedin’s dredge, whose work reclaimed a harbour and made way for a thriving portside city.22 As well their work at Officers Point, in Lyttelton imprisoned crew like those of the Westland, charged for desertion and embezzling cargo, made roads, reclaimed land and laboured on other harbour works in the 1870s and 1880s.

As late as the 1890s, seamen were forced to forge roads and the colony’s harbour forts. Irish seaman Edward Williamson laboured at Devonport’s North Head, digging gun emplacements and underground bunkers; an Italian seaman named Emanuel Silva and an African-American seaman named John Williams helped establish a track at Milford Sound, now the shopfront of New Zealand tourism and billed as the finest walk in the world; Nils Jacobsen, a red-bearded seaman from Finland, battled heavy seas and loose scree to build Rocks Road in Nelson.

Nineteenth century New Zealand was part of a global maritime world. Port Chalmers, Dunedin. Alexander Turnbull Library

A continuum of coercion

Improvement and the imposition of carceral spaces and carceral work regimes point to ‘unfree labour as a relational category’, one that forms a wider continuum of coercion. As Jairus Banaji put it in ‘The Fictions of Free Labour’, wage labour is also subject to coercion. This springs from the reproduction of capitalist social relations and a ‘set of legal rights, privileges and powers that place one person in a position to force another person to choose between labour and some more disagreeable alternative.’23 For Robert Steinfeld, free and forced labour don’t exist in separate worlds. ‘It is more accurate to think about labour relations in terms of degrees of coercive pressure that can be brought to bear to elicit labour.’24 A growing body of literature explores how all forms of capitalist labour – whether free, indentured or unfree, waged or unwaged – involve a set of disagreeable alternatives that are pervasively shaped by law, gender and racialized violence.

The working lives of seamen are a good example. As well as their onshore experience of class and crimping, many seamen were ex-convicts that had already rubbed up against the carceral state in Europe or its colonies. As David Haines and Jonathan West note, convicts and seamen in the Tasman world shared multiple overlapping identities. ‘All transported convicts knew something of the sea, and of ships and sailing. One in five early convicts was a seaman’, and ‘seafaring skills were in demand in Sydney, so former convicts possessing them rose to prominence.’25 Indigenous seafarers and crewmen of colour also brought their own experiences of coercion with them.26

This broader experience was compounded by the nature of maritime labour. Historians such as Marcus Rediker illustrate how seamen were not only subjected to the discipline of the wage – prefiguring the industrial factory – they also experienced legal and extra-legal punishment specific to their industry.27 Because of a ship’s articles, the fixed-term employment contracts that bound seamen to the ship’s master or owner, the enacting of workplace perks (otherwise known as theft), as well as assault, disobeying orders, withdrawing one’s labour through desertion, strikes and other forms of work refusal were all punishable by hard labour. As ‘the judicial dice was usually loaded against them’, resistance to drunken captains, dangerous working conditions or long, tedious hours were punished in the courts with vigour.28 Resistance also met swift retribution onboard, through violence, manacles and confinement. Class struggle contributed to the regular imprisonment of seamen, complicating tidy divisions of free and unfree.

Another blurring of the free/unfree binary was the use of prisons as labour clearing houses. Neill Atkinson shows how captains and local merchants, fearing their crew would jump ship, favoured imprisonment due to the difficulty of finding replacements and the potential for costly delays.29 A crew’s stint at hard labour matched the time needed for a ship to refit and make ready to sail: indeed, a rider added to the terms of a seaman’s sentence allowed captains to collect his imprisoned crew when required.30 Take the hands of the Indiana, whose work refusal in 1858 saw them landed in the Lyttelton gang until their ship was reprovisioned.31 Or the eight men of the Isabella Hercus who refused to leave port until their seriously undermanned vessel found more crew. Sent to Dunedin Gaol in February 1856, four of the prisoners went aboard a month later when the ship was ready to sail. However, four refused and served out their three-month sentence.32

These acts of working-class self-activity highlight the scope for agency within a world of coercion.33 For example, a crew’s dislike of a particular captain, the desire to seek better wages and conditions under a different master or article, or to migrate by jumping ship meant some took their chance with the temporary hardship of hard labour. In December 1852, the commander of the government brig Victoria complained that all but one of his crew had deserted in Auckland, ‘in consequence of the high wages given to seamen out of this port.’34 The colonial secretary fired off an urgent letter to the sheriff of Auckland Gaol: were there any imprisoned seamen willing to ship out? The two seamen in his charge preferred prison and declined, forcing the brig’s commander to raise his rates.35 Likewise, five imprisoned seamen in Wellington Gaol were offered the chance to return to their vessel and shave two months off their sentence. The men refused.36 In Napier, five crew of the Winchester chose forced labour over returning to their vessel; three months later, six of the Bebington’s crew also defied their captain and rebuffed the offer to reboard. ‘Napier seems to present wonderful attractions to English sailors’, quipped a reporter.37

Conclusion

Prisons were said to be run like a ship for good reason. Hierarchy, violence and coercion stalked the decks and shaped the seagoing experience of sailors. As Peter Methven notes, prisons like Wellington’s Terrace Gaol were managed as though they were ships, ‘with strict adherence to the regulations and heavy punishment for infractions.’38 The work refusal of prisoners were known as mutinies not strikes, and like seamen, prisoners were confined and flogged for insubordination.

Yet as I hope this paper has shown, such comparisons mask a deeper relationship embedded in the imperatives of improvement and a continuum of coercion. Prisons and their unfree work regimes were part of colonisation’s quest to bring unruly bodies and the land itself to order – to transform and ‘improve’ Indigenous space. As Clare Anderson, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan, and others note, ‘by appreciating the importance of convicts for expansion and colonization,’ the history of punishment ‘was not so much characterized by a developing immobilization of prisoners within the walls of jails but by their ongoing geographical mobilization as forced labour.’39 Faced with coercion on and off the ship, the example of seamen shows how this labour was fluid, not fixed.40

Despite its absence in New Zealand historiographies, the use of prison labour was crucial to colonisation, stamping an indelible mark on the social and material development of the colony and its infrastructure. Like the prisoners peeking out from the edge of an 1896 photograph of Napier's Marine Parade, it may be a hidden history, but prison labour is deeply connected with the flow of people and profit through the modern-day city or port, as well as the productive force of the sea itself.

This paper was presented at the 2023 Australian Historian's Association Conference and subsequently published in the LHP Bulletin 88, August 2023. Many thanks to Haureh Hussein, Felix Schürmann and the participants of the Maritime labour practices in colonial contexts workshop held in Trier in May 2023, whose feedback on an earlier version of this paper improved it considerably.

1. The men’s names were John King, George Smith, Robert Moore, James Henry, William McKenzie, William Stirlick [?] and Thomas Farley. They were sentenced to six weeks imprisonment with hard labour except for James Henry, who received 12 weeks. See the entry for 14 October 1865 in ‘Lyttelton Record of Proceedings’, CAHX 20591 CH132 Box 640/ 640, Archives New Zealand Christchurch Office.
2. James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, Auckland, 1996, p.428.
3. For more on these themes, see Jared Davidson, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2023. For more on seamen and coercion in a New Zealand context, see Conrad Bollinger, Against the Wind: The Story of the New Zealand Seamen's Union, Seamen’s Union of New Zealand, Wellington, 1968; Neill Atkinson, Crew Culture: New Zealand Seafarers Under Sail and Steam, Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2001; David Grant, Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seamen's Union, 1879-2003, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2012; Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2012, especially Chapter 6, ‘Sealers, Whalers and the Entanglements of Empire’; David Haines and Jonathan West, ‘Crew Cultures in the Tasman World’, in Frances Steel (ed.), New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2018. Not to mention an older historiography on whalers and sealers, such as work by Robert McNab and others. James Belich has also written about crew cultures and their work on the colonial frontier in Making Peoples. For women aboard whaling vessels in New Zealand waters, see Joan Druett, Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920, Collins New Zealand, Auckland, 1991.
4. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, New York: Verso, 2017), p.106; Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2015), p.4; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford University Press, 2015), p.114.
5. Slack, The Invention of Improvement, p.5; Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, p.106. Improvement, wrote cultural historian Raymond Williams, was a keyword in the development of agrarian capitalism and its market compulsions. Williams, Keywords, p.114.
6. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2018, p.72.
7. This radical upheaval in social property relations not only divorced people from their means but contributed to the rise of houses of corrections, prison hulks and penal transportation. Contrary to Foucault’s ‘Great Confinement’, houses of correction and the prisons that followed didn’t just confine the poor, they mobilised them to offer their labour power for sale on the market. As Marc Neocleous writes, their ‘mobilizing work was the mobilization of work.’ Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, p.20.
8. John Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society: The New Zealand Penal System, 1840–1939, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1997.
9. Much more could be said about the role of gender in this paper. For example, the public work of male prisoners was simply not possible without the domestic work of incarcerated women. Confined indoors and given the dreary work of washing, mending and making, cleaning, sweeping and scrubbing, women prisoners kept the place in order but, more importantly, saved gaolers from having to hire cleaners or hold male prisoners back for domestic chores. In other words, their work reproduced the labour power needed for outdoor labour.
10. Robert I.M. Burnett, Hard Labour, Hard Fare and a Hard Bed: New Zealand’s Search for Its Own Penal Philosophy, National Archives of New Zealand, Wellington, 1995, p.66.
11. Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society, p.85.
12. Nationally there were 309 prisoners in gaols in 1841, 385 in 1842, 305 in 1843 and 231 in 1844. Blue Books of Statistics, 1841 and 1842, ACGO 8344 Box 2 and 3, Archives New Zealand. For a vivid description of Auckland’s early gaols, see Mark Derby, Rock College: An Unofficial History of Mount Eden Prison, Massey University Press, Auckland, 2020.
13. Return of prisoners confined at the gaol in Wellington, 31 July 1842, enclosed in ACGO 8333 Box 15/ 1842/1537, Archives New Zealand.
14. ‘From: Percival Berry, Sheriff, Auckland Date: 30 June 1844 Subject: Petition from John Bacon 'Hannah' [Schooner] for release from gaol’, ACGO 8333 Box33/ 1844/1298, Archives New Zealand. Bacon claimed to be a Baptist by profession and that he left behind a wife and children in Adelaide.
15. Statistics of New Zealand for 1860-1864, available online at https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators-and-snapshots/digitised-collections/19th-century-statistical-publications#statistics-of-new (accessed March 2023)
16. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.102.
17. Sheriff to Provincial Secretary, 23 August 1858, CAAR 19936 Box CP6/ ICPS 939/1855, Archives New Zealand Christchurch Office.
18. Wellington Independent, 9 April 1861. Said to have launched a mutiny near the New Zealand coast that ended in violence, eight of the crew were imprisoned with hard labour for six months while two of them received a further eighteen months’ imprisonment for piracy. Yet their captain, who was charged but never convicted for manslaughter, got away with shooting crewman Daniel McDonald in the forehead and killing him. Addressing the discharged captain, the judge proclaimed: ‘I think that the owners of your ship, as well as your passengers have every reason to be grateful for the manner in which you have acted.' Wellington Independent, 5 March 1861.
19. Weekly gaol return, 6 October 1851, ACGO 8333 Box 98/ 1851/1964, Archives New Zealand.
20. Thames Advertiser, 14 September 1875.
21. Mutiny aboard the prison hulk in April 1885 brought an end to this floating prison. See Davidson, Blood and Dirt, 77-78.
22. For more on the development of the harbour, see Heritage New Zealand, ‘Dunedin Harbourside Historic Area’, The New Zealand Heritage List Rārangi Kōrero, https://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/7767 (accessed May 2021).
23. Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p.19
24. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century, p.8
25. Haines and West, ‘Crew Cultures in the Tasman World’.
26. See, for example, Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870, SUNY Press, 2021. For more on Māori involvement in the maritime industry, see Michael J. Stevens, ‘Māori History as Maritime History: A View from the Bluff’, in Steel (ed.), New Zealand and the Sea; Rachel Standfield and Michael J. Stevens, ‘New Histories But Old Patterns: Kāi Tahu in Australia’, in Victoria Stead and Jon Altman (eds), Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019.
27. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, Canto/Cambridge University Press, 1993, p.83.
28. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.105.
29. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.102.
30. Atkinson, Crew Culture, pp.102–3.
31. Lyttelton Times, 11 December 1858.
32. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.104.
33. As Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan note, ‘the question of agency and resistance is not just something to be added to the narrative of unfree labour, its nature and extent can shape fundamental understandings of labour history, if not history more generally’. Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2022, p.12.
34. Commander of “Victoria”, Auckland to Colonial Secretary, 15 December 1852, enclosed with ACGO 8333 Box 111/ 1852/2821, Archives New Zealand.
35. Sheriff, Auckland to Colonial Secretary, 15 December 1852, enclosed with ACGO 8333 Box 111/ 1852/2821, Archives New Zealand.; Commander of “Victoria”, Auckland to Colonial Secretary, 15 December 1852, enclosed with ACGO 8333 Box 111/ 1852/2821, Archives New Zealand.
36. Letter from the Wellington Gaoler, 6 January 1870, ACGS 16211 Box 93/ 1870/38, Archives New Zealand.
37. Hawkes Bay Times, 1 September 1874; Hawkes Bay Times, 25 December 1874.
38. Peter Methven, The Terrace Gaol: A Short History of Wellington's Prisons, 1840-1927, Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2010, p.33.
39. Clare Anderson, ‘Introduction: A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies' in Clare Anderson (ed.), A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.9.
40. Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan, Unfree Workers, p.12.

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/

Interview with Tia Ebert for 'Some Archives'

Recently I was lucky enough to be interviewed for Some Archives, an artist book designed, printed and edited by Tia Ebert. Some Archives features four interviews exploring the social and creative potential of archives in Aotearoa New Zealand. A PDF of the publication will be made available in July; in the meantime, here's my section (reproduced with permission).

T: I’m really interested in your trajectory from graphic design and screen-printing posters for bands to working in an archive, could you briefly explain that journey?

JD: Moving from graphic design to archives wasn’t planned in any way, but I’ve come to realise they have a lot in common – especially if we think about archives and design as storytelling or the production of narratives. Growing up I’d always wanted to be a graphic designer, and went straight to Ilam School of Fine Arts after finishing high school. Discovering punk music and anarchism, and working a number of jobs (including night shift in an electronics factory) opened my eyes to social movements, and after leaving Fine Arts I set up a screenprinting studio called Garage Collective. For two years I worked fulltime designing and printing gig posters, artworks for bands and not-for-profits, and great work by other designers. It was great! Especially as I’d been told by a designer in my fourth year that such work would only ever amount to being a hobby.

And then the archive bug bit me. In 2008 I designed and screenprinted a poster celebrating the centennial of the 1908 Blackball Strike. Arriving in Blackball for the event, I was thrust into a working-class world of work refusal, solidarity and radicalism I never knew existed in New Zealand. I thought I’d try and learn more about it. So I visited the archives. Before long I was studying to be an archivist and eventually landed a job in Wellington, where I worked helping people access the holdings at Archives New Zealand. That was 2012 and I’m still working in the area today.

Your love for 80s hardcore records relates quite specifically to the act of collecting, which one of your non-users mentioned in relation to the Enlightenment - “the weird idea of collecting as a thing in of itself: a noble pursuit to collect stuff”… Is there some kind of connection to be made from here to your position today?

Archives and the work of archivists are varied. In a small organisation, a single archivist might do a bit of everything – collection management, appraisal, description, preservation, access and digitisation, for example. My work has mostly focused on access, rather than collecting. I think that idea of being able to collect everything, to own and harness knowledge, is inherently colonial – the need to possess entails a certain aspect of dispossession and exclusion, especially when we think about institutions in their classic sense (the traditional museum or archive, for example). What I love about 80s hardcore is the Do-It-Yourself, participatory nature of the music and its ephemera – gig posters, set lists, flyers, shitty recordings, blurry footage. I feel like that upends so many ways of being in the world, and what’s interesting is that it has spilled into the creation and care of its archives. I’m thinking here about the full catalogue of live shows Fugazi has made online. I feel archival institutions are finally catching up to the idea of decentralised access points and participatory ownership and creation of records, especially thanks to post-custodial thinking and praxis – the idea that an institution doesn’t actually collect, but provides skills and resources so that communities can do it themselves. That’s exciting, and it’s the kind of thinking that has been embedded in hardcore from the beginning.

As someone with a background in graphic design, do you think “research through design” (or any other creative practice) is supported in current archival structures? Is the validity of this research comparable to academic research in archival spaces?

I’m limited to what I’ve experienced myself, and the type of research I do. Probably the closest thing in the institutions I’ve worked in is the current craze of Agile. Government departments love Agile methodology, which is billed as a design methodology used in project management – especially digital projects. For all its buzzwords it is actually refreshing to work in such a way, which does remind me of sitting in on a design critique. There’s also been projects in collaboration with designers and artists. Whether structures across archival institutions allow for research through design probably depends, like all structures, on the relationships between its people and issues of power – time and money, especially. Archives are often time-poor and literally poor: underfunded and understaffed. Which might also lend itself well to research through design.

What was the motivating factor for you to undertake research into non-user understandings of archives? Was there anything which surfaced through this research that was surprising to you?

I was lucky enough to study under the Canadian archivist Wendy Duff, and she taught a paper on archives, advocacy and outreach. I was hooked. But it also fit my design background and the practice of communicating visually. So when it came to choose a thesis topic in my final year, I wanted to look at something understudied that related to access. There were (and are) very little studies on people who don’t use archives, ie non-users. So that became my topic. I was surprised that, for all its grandiose statements of public memory and keeping government to account, public archives in New Zealand hadn’t really thought about why someone might not use archives, let alone if people knew about them and what they held. Finding that people only really make use of institutions they know about seems pretty obvious, but nonetheless, the paper has been useful for a number of archives engaging with the public.

In reference to Sue McKemmish (from Colonial Continuum), “the very form of the archive provides evidence of the power relationships and social values of the society that produced it”, what do you personally see as the benefit in making these structures and values visible?

To paraphrase Robin D.G. Kelley, writing about white supremacy and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, holding a mirror to something isn’t that dangerous because it only reflects the surface. What’s needed is an X-Ray. In all of my work I've tried to get to the root of something, which is the original meaning of the word ‘radical’. Making hierarchies and uneven power relations visible means we can see them, name them, and then hopefully dismantle them. Marx wrote that capital, first and foremost, is a social relation. That’s a round-about way to say that how we act and interact with each other determines structures of power. Especially if we understand structures as ways of relating to each other that have solidified over time. Understanding this means we can start to relate to each other in less destructive and more humane ways.

Who do you see archives being in service to in our current time?

If structures are ways of relating to each other that have formed over time, then archives and the stories they provide can either prop up those structures, or help wear them down. Archives don’t exist in a vacuum, however, so if archives are to do more than just provide an information need for people, they need to be seen as being part of a bigger picture – as sites for the production of narratives. What narratives we choose to tell or remember become important to that bigger picture. Hence the huge interest in the new Histories in Schools curriculum at the moment, and the role archives will play in that.

The fact that archives can’t tell every story is a worthwhile idea to explore when thinking about the archive as subject. What do you think is the benefit of understanding the decision processes surrounding the acquisition and care of materials as well as the facilitation of access? (The theory of the archive vs the labour of the archive)

The benefit is knowing how silences are produced and reproduced in the stories we tell – stories that affect our past, present and futures. I wrote something for Overland Literary Journal about silences and the activity of remembering and forgetting, which was an ode to Haitian writer Michel-Rolph Trouillot. For Trouillot, silence is ‘an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active.’ He emphasises that history is constantly produced, that what we understand as ‘history’ changes with time and place, and that what is said to have happened as the recall of facts is indeed a process filled with silences. He goes on to show at least four moments where these silences are created: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance). I’m sharing this in full because it’s been such a useful way for me to think about archives, stories and narrative in so many aspects of my work.

Historically, many archival records have been created and preserved by colonial settlers about indigenous subjects - how might institutional archives better support documentation and history preserving efforts lead by indigenous people?

This is a massive (and heavy) topic that is evolving as we write, ranging from adding intuitive metadata that reflects indigenous ways of being, through to repatriation of archives, data sovereignty and basically getting out of the way. As I mentioned earlier, archives don’t exist in a vacuum. Institutions can either support or prevent what Moana Jackson calls re-Māorification, the promise of indigenous people determining the space, content and practice of institutions according to indigenous autonomy and independence. I’m not sure colonial institutions can be made or moulded into anything different than a less harmful colonial institution, but that doesn’t mean Pākehā working in such spaces shouldn’t try. As Tangata Tiriti with a huge amount of power, the onus is on us to change or get out of the way.

Review: The History of a Riot

Review by Greg Fleming of The History of a Riot for Kete Books.

BWB Texts specialise in publishing “short books on big subjects.” That includes everything from a book on antibiotic resistance by Covid-star Siouxsie Wiles to one entitled Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook.

The celebrated imprint has been around for decades under the leadership of publishing veteran Bridget Williams and has a strong focus on New Zealand and Māori history, women’s issues and contemporary political and social topics.

BWB’s latest release is by historian and archivist Jared Davidson who has a reputation for exploring and questioning history through a focus on the lives of ordinary people, ones often overlooked by historians.

Here he zeroes in on an uprising that occurred at Nelson’s port in 1843, when 80 armed labourers stormed the New Zealand Company store, protesting their poor working conditions and low pay.

Davidson’s contention is that the incident reveals the presence of a strong, politically adept working class who were not afraid to take their demands to their overbearing employers. While this is an academic text some of the events it describes between settlers and labourers read like an episode of the visceral TV show Deadwood. These guys were the colonial version of punk rockers.

“In 1843,” Davidson writes, “it was not the gang-men’s hard work that won them access to land, but idleness, work refusal and rioting."

In a way it wasn’t a surprising turn of events; the men and their families were lured here with promises of employment and a weekly parcel of rations. When the harsh reality of life in a new country hit them and those promises weren’t fully kept, the men organised among themselves and fought back the only way they knew how - through petitions, strikes and violence. Many had experienced or seen or taken part in labour struggles and political unrest in England and replicated that collective action here.

Further, Davidson shows how The New Zealand Company, responsible for luring the workers across oceans, underestimated the workers’ resolve and ultimately paid the price. It’s a fascinating micro-study of a little known corner of our colonial history and one that questions what Davidson calls “the myth of New Zealand exceptionalism.”

Davidson wrote in a piece promoting the book on Stuff that the accepted understanding that our colonial history is somehow “unique” is both erroneous and damaging. “From it stems other myths,” he wrote — “from ‘the best race relations in the world’ to New Zealand as ‘a worker’s paradise’.”

His thesis is that the struggle of the workers and their wives — Davidson makes an effort to tell their stories too — proves that this sort of violence and protest was evident early, a view that challenges the familiar image of the pioneering men and women who toiled away and “made good.”

With the new Aotearoa history curriculum scheduled to start in all schools next year, the publication of this lively, immaculately researched, pocket-sized primer on our early class struggles will intrigue a new generation of readers.

A list of New Zealand gluten-free, gluten-reduced and low gluten craft beers

One of my own home-brews - perhaps the cause of my gluten-intolerance?

[Updated January 2024] Developing a gluten intolerance in the midst of a flourishing craft brew world was bad timing to say the least. Headaches. Tiredness. Sore guts. General grumpiness. All because of gluten! Alas, it seemed my days of IPAs and stalking the aisles of New World had come to a sorry, sorghum-filled end. 

A bit of research and trial and error, however, has meant there are a few craft beers available in New Zealand that are still ok for me to drink. I say research, because it's actually quite hard to find out which craft beers are low gluten or gluten-reduced. Which is totally understandable. Part of the reason some beers are not labelled as gluten-reduced or gluten free, despite containing next-to-no gluten content, is because of the importance of proper testing and labelling for those that actually are coeliac. 

Here's a disclaimer: I'm not coeliac, and people experience discomfort from gluten differently and at different levels. As Coeliac New Zealand suggest, if you're not sure how how you'll go with one of these beers it's probably best to contact the brewer directly or avoid it.

As the team at BGFB write, "beer that is 100% gluten free is brewed with 100% gluten free ingredients." Beers that are 'gluten reduced' or 'crafted to remove gluten' have used a process to strip or reduce the gluten content out of gluten ingredients (using Brewers Clarex, for example). This process can land a beer's gluten content close to the gluten free mark of under 3ppm (parts per million). But they're not gluten free. Unless it has been brewed using gluten-free ingredients, a beer that has less than 3ppm or 20mg of gluten is technically 'gluten-reduced'.

With that in mind, here's my list of New Zealand gluten-reduced, low gluten and gluten free craft beers.

Gluten-reduced or low gluten

Eddyline Brewery (entire range!)

For a great-tasting range of gluten-reduced beers, you needn't go much further than Eddyline. Every single brew in their line-up has been brewed with DSM Brewer's Clarex that reduces gluten content to below 5ppm, and their beers are labelled as such. Plus they come in nice, tall 440ml cans. My favourtites include the go-to Trail Carver Pale Ale (5.1%) and CrankYanker IPA (6.3%), a "bold West-Coast style IPA featuring El Dorado and Mosaic hops with a complex malt profile. Emphasis is on aroma over bitterness. Tropical and pine flavours with a hint of citrus-pineapple aroma." Yum.

Garage Project BEER (Pale Lager, 4.8%)

My despair at being gluten intolerant was knowing I'd have to stop drinking Garage Project (namely Pernicious Weed - sad face). Luckily, the crisp, single-malt BEER has a naturally-low gluten count. There's no claims to being gluten free or gluten-reduced here, and its effect on people will differ, but Pete at GP notes that batch tests have shown a low gluten count of under 20ppm. Works for me.

Garage Project Good Shout (Hoppy Ultra Low Carb Lager, 4.0%)

Released in 2023, Good Shout is a low carb and low gluten brew (and explicitly billed as such, containing less than 20ppm gluten). It's light in terms of alcohol and body, but it's a refreshing drop and has no lingering discomfort, for me anyway. 

 

Stoke (entire range!)

When I first wrote this post the Stoke Nelson Pale Ale was the main gluten-reduced beer in the Stoke lineup. So it's nice to know the core Stoke range, including Wakachangi and First Light, are all low gluten beers that contain less than 10ppm gluten. This was confirmed in an email to the team at Stoke/McCashins. Rad! You can check them out on the McCashins website.

Hallertau (Numbers range 1-9)

A 2016 Stuff article made much of Hallertau's use of an "additive enzyme which breaks down gluten components leaving less than three parts per million (ppm) – enough to meet New Zealand's strict gluten-free legal requirements." While they don't batch test for gluten content anymore, the team confirmed in 2024 that their Numbers range (1-9) is brewed using Brewers Clarex and can therefore be considered gluten-reduced.

 

Gluten Free

Kereru 

One of the few New Zealand craft beers that are actually gluten free - ie. they are brewed with 100% gluten free ingredients. Kereru are leading the (admittedly-small) pack with at least five gluten free brews, including a hazy ale and a rice lager. My favourite is the Apex Hoppy APA with its mix of US and NZ hops. You can tell from the body and head its gluten free, but it is not lacking in taste. The Auro Ale is a little light for my taste buds but still a nice drop. Yet to try the others.

Scotts Brewing Co. - Pale Ale (4.5%)

For a long time Scott's Pale Ale was the only gluten free beer available, so for that reason alone they deserve credit. It's also easy to find in most stores. It's a shame I don't like it. Have no idea if their other beers are gluten free or not.

Garage Project Dirty Water (Seltzer, 4.5%)

Garage Project's Dirty Water Seltzer is "brewed not blended - with gluten free grain, real fruit and natural flavours. This delivers a sparkling clean, alcoholic seltzer." Comes in three flavours, plus "10% of profits go to supporting clean water initiatives in our own backyard." Let's hope this is the start of more brewers crafting gluten free options.

One more thing...

If you're still reading this then you'll probably like the website Low Gluten in Beer. This site includes the test results of a heap of international beer, including brews accessible in New Zealand supermarkets (a handy bookmark on your mobile phone). Apparently Steinlarger had less than 20ppm; so did Corona, Tiger and others.

You can see whether a beer has gluten or not on their alphabetical test results page: https://www.lowgluten.org/gluten-test-results/. 

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Archive Stories, Archive Realities

Below is my chapter for Public Knowledge, first published by Freerange Press in December 2019. You can purchase the book from the Freerange Press website. It was subsequently re-published in Archifacts. Download the PDF version from Academia.

In May 1840, a furious William Hobson learned from a passing ship’s captain that the New Zealand Company in Wellington had set up its own form of government. Stinging from the usurped authority and high treason of the colonists, Lieutenant-Governor Hobson issued two proclamations. In the name of Her Majesty, Hobson claimed sovereignty over Aotearoa New Zealand. The North Island was claimed by cession via Te Tiriti o Waitangi (despite the fact that hui with rangatira were still being held across the country, and despite having only two signed sheets in his possession). The South Island was claimed based on Captain James Cook’s ‘discovery’.

Having asserted sovereignty with the stroke of a pen and the stamp of a Paihia printing press, Hobson hastily despatched Colonial Secretary Willoughby Shortland to Wellington. With him were troops from the 80th Regiment, mounted police and orders to dismantle any New Zealand Company council, flags or insignia he found. They arrived on the evening of 2 June and sent copies of Hobson’s proclamations ashore, but Wellington weather prevented an official landing. Shortland and four members of the police force finally landed near Pipitea Pā on the afternoon of 4 June, where they were met by Colonel Wakefield and others of the New Zealand Company. Here, Shortland read Hobson’s proclamations, and the legal fiction of crown sovereignty was officially enacted.

The proclamations of sovereignty were indeed a legal fiction, for they ignored some crucial caveats: those who signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi signed a Māori-language document that never ceded sovereignty, and in tikanga Māori, or Māori law, ceding sovereignty was impossible.1

Hobson’s claim of discovery stretched legal fiction into pure fantasy. ‘There is a certain strange magic in the belief that waving a piece of coloured cloth could transfer indigenous lands to someone else,’ notes Moana Jackson, ‘but it was a theatre that had long been established in the law of all European colonisers. The fact that it would have had no legitimacy in the law of the Indigenous Peoples being “discovered” was never deemed to be relevant.’2

This magical realism – ‘legal and political gymnastics performed behind a veil of apparently reasoned justification’ – was, and is, made possible by the stories, symbols and statecraft that are public archives.3 Te Tiriti o Waitangi is an obvious example. As legal documents and ‘Talmudic symbols of imagined imperial symbiosis’, writes Adele Perry, treaties, like flags, have served colonial projects the world over.4 Others include the 1839 appointment of Hobson as Lieutenant-Governor, the letters patent that made Aotearoa New Zealand a colony of New South Wales, the pre-Tiriti proclamations of 30 January 1840 that assumed a power not yet granted and the May proclamations themselves, as bungled and back-dated as they were (the South Island proclamation had to be reissued because Hobson left off the grounds for sovereignty on the copy he sent to London, and the North Island proclamation was incorrectly back-dated to 5 February instead of 6 February).

Together these documents formed the earliest holdings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s public archive, Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand.5 They joined the larger imperial archive, ‘a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire’.6 In this fantasy, world mastery was possible through documentation and the public knowledge stored within the ‘total-archive’.7

Fiction, magic and fantasy are not words most people would associate with public archives. As the official guardian of government records, Archives New Zealand is tasked with ensuring confidence in the integrity of public and local authority archives. Enabling trusted government information is its mantra. Weaving in and out of public discourse and supplementing the many sources of public knowledge, public archives often act as uncontested stand-ins for ‘the facts’ or ‘the Truth’. As written documents of evidential value, they sit at the ‘authentic’ end of the knowledge continuum, where they are contrasted with less-trustworthy sources of public knowledge such as oral testimony and fake news.

Yet at their most basic, archives are stories. All peoples use archives as stories, whether transmitted through speech, written in text, woven within tāniko patterns or embodied in tā moko, performed as ritual or shared in everyday practices, or displayed in objects or in the land itself. Using Te Tiriti o Waitangi to weave a story of sovereignty was not limited to the colony’s fledgling civil service. Many Māori descendants of those who signed, especially Ngāpuhi-nui-tonu, have pointed to the Māori-language document and the sacred covenant of its terms as a way of acknowledging both their tino rangatiratanga and their centrality to the event.

When brought together as a public archive in the form of a state institution, archives are amplified into a grandiose narrative of nationhood—a metanarrative. Indeed, some theorists go so far as to claim there is no state without archives.8 This is because archives have power. And in turn, archives are created and shaped by ever-contested power relations. Public archives are not ‘passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed.’9 Their holdings ‘wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies’.10 Archives allow people to marshal stories and to make meaning. Archives are the very possibility of politics.11

As Hobson’s actions and subsequent governments show, Aotearoa New Zealand’s public archive has always been about power. Stradling the intersection of past, present and future, it has its origin in capitalism’s vampire-like need to turn all of life into work for its own reproduction.12 Many of the seven million plus archives held in the repositories of Archives New Zealand reflect, and serve as justification for, the gendered, racialised class relations that created them. Because of this, certain voices in the archive have been privileged over others. Silences abound.

Archival power is, in part, the power to allow voices to be heard. It consists of highlighting certain narratives and of including certain types of records created by certain groups. The power of the archive is witnessed in the act of inclusion, but this is only one of its components. The power to exclude is a fundamental aspect of the archive. Inevitably, there are distortions, omissions, erasures, and silences in the archive. Not every story is told.13

Despite this, public archives are also potential sites for resistance, counter-narratives and enriching the public knowledge commons. In today’s cybernetic vortex of class power and commodification, archives and their emphasis on context are more relevant than ever.14

*** 

There is a huge body of work on the relationship between memory and stories, archives and power. It weaves through many disciplines and in and out of academia. We might think of the novels of George Orwell, such as 1984, or the importance of archives in Star Wars, from the plans of the Death Star to the location of the last Jedi. In the final season of Game of Thrones, Bran Stark reveals the archival motive of the Night King: ‘He wants to erase this world and I am its memory.’ As an archive, Bran becomes a target for erasure.

Those of the nascent labour force in Europe – whose activities were recorded and controlled by the state to become more legible to the state (hence the creation of parish registers, birth certificates and censuses) – certainly knew of their power. It is telling how many peasant rebellions began with the destruction of official archives. Writing of the introduction of the capitalist wage relation and the violent enclosure of the commons, Silvia Federici notes how people organised themselves into bands, raided manors and land registries and destroyed the archives ‘where the written marks of their servitude were kept’.15

The state knew too. Countless examples of the state destroying archives litter history—the recent Mau Mau and Windrush scandals in Britain are prime examples.16 In New Zealand, there was no public archive institution until 1956. Government agencies could pretty much do what they liked with their archives. As a result, only 3 to 4 per cent of everything ever created by government has survived. The New Zealand Police Force archives, for example, are woefully patchy for the years between 1900–1950 due to an in-house purge of records – only a sample of high-profile murder cases were kept. Police record books note detailed files on labour movement leaders and others deemed threatening to the state, but the files themselves no longer exist.17

The state also launched successive waves of attack on the archives of te ao Māori, for these represented te māramatanga o ngā tikanga, the philosophy of law deeply interwoven throughout Māori life, and were therefore incompatible with colonial authority.18 Pākehā governments supressed tā moko, punished the practice of tohunga, sanctioned the beating of Māori-language speakers in school and paved highways over wāhi tapu, violently divorcing Māori from their philosophical base. In doing so, the colonial archive not only dismissed the Māori word and replaced it with the Pākehā word, it made colonised ‘others’ available to the extractive enterprises of colonial capital.19

Despite this acknowledgement of archival power by the state, throughout the twentieth century, public archives were seen as passive, objective and neutral. The public archivist was an impartial custodian – interpretation was the job of those using archives and not that of the archivist. ‘The good Archivist’, wrote Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the grandfather of the Western archival canon, was ‘perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.’20 Archives were the evidence from which Truth (with a capital ‘T’) could be found.

More recently, the post-custodial turn has challenged this view. A questioning of the profession’s objectivity has reframed or refigured archives and archival institutions. There has been a move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject.21 Archives are increasingly viewed as social constructs – they don’t simply ‘arrive or emerge fully formed, nor are they innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications . . . all archives come into being in and as history as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures.’22 Feminist and indigenous scholarship has exposed the gendered, colonial nature of archives, while ethnographic approaches denaturalise the archive to show how people encounter, interpret and make use of them as living and dynamic spaces.23 The evidential nature of their contents have also been questioned: no longer can we think of archives as the simple bearers of fact or truth. Just as much as oral testimony, a written document reflects the biases and needs of its creator.

What does this mean for public knowledge? It means that public archives should be viewed not as mere sites of knowledge retrieval, but as sites of knowledge production in both the past and the present.24 And this is a good thing. For it is as a site of knowledge production that public archives become important for counter-narratives. It allows us to read its holdings against and along the grain, to notice the gaps, to hear the silences and to tell the stories that have not been told.25 Archives read this way can challenge state power or hold that power to account. And, ideally, it can help the circulation of struggles and create possibilities that go beyond hierarchical, statist forms of power. If in one reading there is no state without archives, another reading suggests that ‘the very existence of the archive constitutes a threat to the state’.26

*** 

The value of public archives for those challenging power or creating counter-power depends on its use. Free and open access to public archives is therefore an important issue. Like Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the metanarrative of the public archive is ever vulnerable to changing governments and changing priorities. Or, in plain speak, the public archive is a political football – where it lands depends on who is kicking it.

In the archival profession access often comes second to the acquisition or preservation of records. Faced with unwieldy paper-finding aids or online search engines with outdated, incorrect or zero metadata, users not only have to deal with organising principles totally different from those of a library, such as provenance and original order, but often have no meaningful way to find and access what they need. This is even more telling in our colonial context. Māori users of the public archive must also grapple with the privileging of Pākehā terms over te reo Māori (many of which are misspelt), non-indigenous systems of knowledge, monocultural spaces and institutional anxiety, and the historical trauma of dispossession and deprivation. 27 As one Māori participant in a study of non-users noted:

there are all sorts of ways that people are disenfranchised from accessing information [at archives] – whether that’s various kinds of literacy i.e. the most basic literacy, or literacy on the level of being able to filter and understand the particular languages that are used by officialdom. And also that emotional reality of being disenfranchised – what’s your motivation to access information and know about the particulars of your disenfranchisement if you don’t have hope for things being different?28

The post-custodial turn has thankfully placed a greater importance on access within public archives. As well as culturally appropriate spatial design and the increasing use of Māori-intuitive metadata, there has been a steady investment in digitisation. Digitisation is not the cure-all solution many think it is, but it has undeniably changed the nature of archival access.29 Digital divides and digital literacies aside, the digitisation of archives has made them more accessible than ever before, allowing users to shape public discourse and dissent within the information age. Online search engines, global databases and crowdsourcing platforms have made millions of digital surrogates available to view or download from one’s personal device. Where before a researcher had no choice but to visit the archive, they can now access, use and re-use digital archives anywhere, any time – unless, of course, they are locked behind a paywall. More and more digital archives are finding their way into educational resources, policy documents, family and local histories and mainstream media, while machine-reading technology allows the automated transcription of digitised handwritten documents, making them discoverable to Google and other web crawlers.

However, we need to remind ourselves that today’s knowledge economy rests on very material relations of domination and exploitation; automation and immiseration; colonisation and incarceration. It is no coincidence that internet fibre optic cables trace the trade routes of former empires, or that the cloud – which the New Zealand government has directed its agencies to privilege over other digital storage systems – has its data warehouses in disputed post-colonial territories in order to exploit their ambiguous status, raising the issue of Māori data sovereignty.30 The extraction of raw materials needed for the information age destroys both land and labour across the globe, while the computer industry’s use of toxic substances makes places like Silicon Valley – the bastion of cybernetic capital – home to some of the highest concentrations of hazardous waste sites in the United States.31 The gap between the rich and poor there is particularly stark, as the work of elite, highly paid programmers (the cognitariat) is made possible by low-paid and gendered labour.32 For Marxist author Nick Dyer-Witheford, ‘the conjunction of automation and globalization enabled by information technology raises to a new intensity a fundamental dynamic of capitalism – its drive to simultaneously draw people into waged labour and expel them as superfluous un- or underemployed.’33 Like the service workers of Silicon Valley, these are often women, indigenous peoples or people of colour. They are the same people who fill prison cells and whose labour is then used to continue the circulation of capital. FamilySearch, one the world’s biggest genealogical sites and the host of digitised archives from Archives New Zealand, uses prison labour to digitise and index its holdings.34

Archives do not exist in a vacuum. It would be wrong to believe the power of archives is present outside of concrete relations between people, and that archives in themselves possess all the powers attributed to them. Archives, like information, must be made and used.35 It is also naïve to believe that discourse informed by public knowledge is enough to undo these relations.

Which brings us all the way back to archives as stories and public archives as sites of knowledge production. Despite what this chapter might seem to suggest, understanding archives as social constructs shaped by material social relations is a strength. If ‘the task is less to distinguish fiction from fact than to track the production and consumption of those facticities themselves’, then context is everything.36 After all, the most cherished organising principle of the archival profession is context. It is context that allows us to make sense of an archive and its content, and to place it in relation to others. It is context that can unveil the legal fictions and metanarratives both inside and outside of the public archive. It is in this sense that an understanding of context is radical, in the original meaning of the term (of relating to a root, to get to the root of something). Because if we truly want to get at the root of the social and ecological disaster that is capitalism, knowledge in itself is not enough. Knowledge must be used, and in ways that radically rupture and reorient our current modes of relationship – including our relationship to knowledge itself.


1. Moana Jackson, “The Treaty and the Word: the Colonization of Māori Philosophy” in Justice, Ethics, and New Zealand Society, eds. Graham Oddie and Roy W. Perrett (Australia and New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–10. This was confirmed by the Waitangi Tribunal’s 2014 finding that by signing Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Ngāpuhi – and by extension other signatories – never ceded sovereignty. Waitangi Tribunal, He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti/The Declaration and the Treaty: The Report on Stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry (Wai 1040, 2014).
2. Moana Jackson, “James Cook and our monuments to colonisation,” E-Tangata, accessed June 3, 2019, https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/james-cook-and-our-monuments-to-colonisation/.
3. Jackson, “The Treaty and the Word.”
4. Adele Perry, “The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 325.
5. Incidentally, the largest repository of Archives New Zealand sits on the former lands of Pipitea Pā in Wellington.
6. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 6.
7. Tony Ballantyne, “Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South Asian Historiography,” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 3, no. 1 (2001): 90.
8. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2002), 23.
9. Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” in Archival Science, no. 2 (2002): 1–2.
10. Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power,” 2.
11. Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 2007), 345. See also Randall Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009).
12. For an indigenous understanding of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation and capitalist modes of production as ‘modes’ or ‘forms of life’ see Glenn Coulthard, “The Colonialism of the Present,” Jacobin, accessed May 30, 2019, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/indigenous-left-glen-coulthard-interview/ and Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
13. Rodney Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” in Archivaria, no. 61 (2016): 216.
14. For more on the cybernetic vortex, see Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015) and his earlier work, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-technology Capitalism (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1999), which draw upon autonomist Marxist traditions. For Dyer-Witheford, ‘contemporary capital increasingly subordinates the reproduction of variable capital (humans) to that of the fixed capital (machines) of which the capitalist class is the personified representative. This is an accelerating movement that proceeds by intermediate cyborg or symbiant stages towards even higher levels of automation. In this process, the creation of surplus populations, appearing in various forms of precarity, informal work, unemployment and destitution in differentiated global zones becomes the characteristic form of proletarianization,’ Cyber-Proletariat, 196.
15. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 45.
16. In 2012 it was discovered that thousands of documents detailing crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed or secretly withheld from the public. The discovery came after a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government, and access previously hidden files. More recently, in 2018, it was discovered that the British Home Office had destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the United Kingdom, an important source of residency status for older Caribbean-born residents. For a useful introduction to state destruction of archives, see Eric Ketelaar, “Recordkeeping and Societal Power,” in Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, eds. Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (Wagga-Wagga: Charles Sturt University, 2005), 277–298.
17. For more on this topic, see Jared Davidson, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2019).
18. Jackson, “The Treaty and the Word.”
19. Tony Ballantyne, “Littoral Literacy: Sealers, Whalers, and the Entanglements of Empire,” in Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below, eds. Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid (New York: Routledge, 2014), 160. See also Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012).
20. Hilary Jenkinson, “British Archives and The War,” in The American Archivist 7, no. 1 (1944): 1–17.
21. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’ in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2002), 86.
22. Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 6.

23. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley, “Introduction,” in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, eds. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley (New York: Routledge, 2017), 5. See also Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 

24. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 85.
25. For more on reading archives along the archival grain, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For a summary of ‘history from below’ see Jared Davidson, “History from Below: A Reading List with Marcus Rediker,” History Workshop Journal, accessed June 10, 2019, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/history-from-below-a-reading-list-with-marcus-rediker/.
26. Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 23.
27. See Jared Davidson, “Colonial Continuum: Archives, Access and Power,” in Archifacts (April 2015): 17–24.
28. Jared Davidson, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Non-user Understandings of Archives in Aotearoa New Zealand” (Master’s Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2014), 23.
29. Issues of labour time and the cost of both digitisation equipment and ongoing digital storage costs often gets lost in the demand to ‘digitise everything and put it online’, as do questions of data sovereignty and cultural and intellectual property rights.
30. See James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018).
31. Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 235.
32. On the cognitariat and the role of knowledge and knowledge commons in cognitive capitalism, see Carlo Vercellone, “From the Mass-Worker to Cognitive Labour: Historical and Theoretical Considerations” in Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century, eds. Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2014), 440.
33. Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat, 15. On the phenomenon of capital’s creation of surplus populations and resistance to it, see Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2016).
34. Shane Bauer, “Your Family’s Genealogical Records May Have Been Digitized by a Prisoner,” Mother Jones, accessed June 4, 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/mormon-church-prison-geneology-family-search/. See also Archives and the Old Mole, “Ancestry, Ancestry, White Power, and Corpsefucking,” accessed June 4, 2019, https://archivesoldmole.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/ancestry-ancestry-white-power-and-corpsefucking/.
35. To paraphrase Richards, The Imperial Archive, 73.
36. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 85.

‘Dead Letters’ wins the 2020 Bert Roth Award

From the LHP website: Jared Davidson is the winner of the 2020 Bert Roth Award for Labour History for his book, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920, published by Otago University Press.

The award was announced at the Labour History Project AGM on Tuesday 11 August.

Named for the late historian Herbert Roth, the award is presented annually to the work that best depicts the history of work and resistance in New Zealand published in the previous calendar year.

The award was judged this year by Paul Maunder, Cybele Locke, Claire-Louise, Ross Webb, and Mark Derby.

‘In his excellent book, Dead Letters, archivist and historian Jared Davidson introduces us to a range of extraordinary characters whose stories and struggles challenge the nationalist narratives of the war’, the judges found.

‘These historical characters, as introduced in the blurb of the book, include “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”’.

‘What connects this cast of characters is that their activities, their letters, and in some cases their activism against the war, was of interest to the New Zealand state. The letters they wrote, to loved ones, friends, and comrades, were never delivered, but were intercepted by the state. They are now held at Archives New Zealand, in the Special Registry File, where Davidson discovered them 100 years later’.

‘In telling their stories, Davidson not only provides a compelling historical narrative, he also contributes to our understanding of the First World War home front, to the early history of surveillance, to the history of political and industrial activism and dissent (often in the most surprising places!), and more broadly to New Zealand social history and the history of the modern state’.

2020 Runner Up

Tony Sutorius, Director, Helen Kelly – Together, 2019.

2020 Shortlist

Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns, Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance, Te Papa Press, 2019.

Barbara Brookes, Jane McCabe and Angela Wanhalla. eds., Past Caring? Women, Work and Emotion, Otago University Press, 2019.

Hilary Stace, JB Munro: Community Citizen, Wellington, 2019.

Caitlin Lynch, Director, Harriet Morrison – Fighting for Fairness, 2019.

Max Nichol, An ‘Organ of Student Opinion’? Alternative Print, Protest, and the Politics of Education in Salient, 1973-1989, MA Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2019.

Rachel Standfield and Michael J. Stevens, ‘New Histories but Old Patterns: Kāi Tahu in Australia’ in Victoria Stead and Jon Altman, ed., Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia, Canberra, 2019.

Toby Boraman, ‘Indigeneity, Dissent, and Solidarity: Māori and Strikes in the Meat Industry in Aotearoa New Zealand During the Long 1970s’, International Review of Social History, 64, 1, 2019, pp.1-35.

Past Winners of the Bert Roth Award

2019 Winner: David Haines and Jonathan West, ‘Crew Cultures in the Tasman World’ in Francis Steele, ed., New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives, Bridget Williams Books.

2019 Runner-up: Caren Wilton, My Body My Business: NZ Sex Workers in an Era of Change, Otago University Press

2018 Winner: Helen McNeil, A Striking Truth, Cloud Ink Press.

2018 Runner-up: Renée, These Two Hands: a memoir

2017 Winner: Tearepa Kahi, Director, Poi E: The Story of our Song

2016 Winner: Melissa Williams, Panguru and the city: Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua: An urban migration history, Bridget Williams Books

2015 Winner: Nicholas Hoare ‘Imperial Dissenters: Anti-Colonial Voices in New Zealand, 1883-1945’, MA, Victoria University of Wellington.

2014 Winner: Rebecca Macfie, Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and why 29 Men died, Awa Press.

Silencing the past: reflections on remembering and forgetting

Issues of public history continue to raise important questions on both sides of the Tasman. From the attacks on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Invasion day protests in Australia, to the ongoing effects of the New Zealand Wars and the compulsory teaching of history in Aotearoa New Zealand’s schools, more and more people are grappling with narratives about the past. Social media feeds are flooded with programmes such as the civics series The Citizen’s Handbook and live, COVID-clouded discussions on colonisation and constitutional transformation. Debates on remembering and forgetting are more and more common, helped along by the tweets and press conferences of an embattled President Trump. As an archivist and labour historian, it’s exciting to see such a public engagement with history.

For me, it’s also timely. This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of a book that profoundly changed the way I understand the production of history. I’m only now realising that it also influenced my working trajectory as an archivist and my own practice as a historian. More importantly, the book continues to offer insights into why some stories are remembered and others are not, and how historical narratives are produced and reproduced.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Haitian writer Michel-Rolph Trouillot was first published in 1995. Twenty-five years on, its weaving of personal narrative with stories of slave rebellion, black Jacobins in the Haitian Revolution and the ‘discovery’ of the Americas still resonate. As I write, filmmaker Raoul Peck is using it as one of the key sources for Exterminate All the Brutes, a four-part docuseries about the exploitative and genocidal aspects of European colonialism. Written with a nod to postmodernism and a critique of structuralism, Silencing the Past nonetheless blends such an approach with the best aspects of social history and its analysis of power relations.

This, however, is not intended as a review (of which there are plenty online, and I’d encourage you to read them). Instead, I want to pull out the bits that speak directly to discussions of remembering and forgetting; the bits that remind us that history is more than just individual or collective memory recall.

There are several insights in Silencing the Past that now seem like common sense but were relatively novel at the time: ‘The past – or, more accurately, pastness – is a position’; power ‘does not enter the story once and for all, but at different times and from different angles. It precedes the narrative proper, contributes to its creation and to its interpretation … in history, power begins at the source.’ As an archivist, I geek out at statements like ‘historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power’ and ‘archives are the institutions that organise facts and sources and condition the possibility of existence of historical statements.’

Silence and the act of silencing have become buzzwords in historical scholarship, used as markers or tropes without further explanation. In response, some historians have pointed to the wealth of archival sources available to us, from oral histories to nineteenth century documents. Yet it’s Trouillot’s treatment of silences in the production of history that are especially important.

For Trouillot, silence is ‘an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active.’ He emphasises that history is constantly produced, that what we understand as ‘history’ changes with time and place, and that what is said to have happened as the recall of facts is indeed a process filled with silences. For Trouillot, it is not just a matter of what is remembered or forgotten. Silences are produced and reproduced throughout any telling of a story.

Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).

And further: these moments ‘are not meant to provide a realistic description of the making of any individual narrative. Rather, they help us understand why not all silences are equal and why they cannot be addressed – or redressed – in the same manner.’ In other words, ‘any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.’

I’ve written about the last three moments for Overland before, reflecting on the WW100 commemorations or the hidden history of prison labour. The writing of history from below is a partial attempt to amplify the voices of the silenced. However, questioning the moment of fact creation is just as crucial.

As Trouillot notes, ‘silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded.’ Take the Imperial officer reporting on an engagement with Māori during the Waikato War, or the Tasmanian colonist recording hints of a frontier massacre in his diary; the ‘facts’ they choose to put down on paper come with their own ‘inborn absences, specific to its production.’ Historical facts are not created equal, nor are they neutral. The mentions or silences engaged in by the person creating a story ‘reflect differential control of the means of historical production’ from ‘the very first engraving that transforms an event into a fact.’

Even if we are blessed with a wealth of sources, they are still shaped by silences. In my day job as an archivist I work with documents from German Sāmoa, during the period before New Zealand invaded the country with its own imperial ambitions. At that time, indentured Chinese labourers (or ‘coolies’) were shipped in by boatload to work the various Sāmoan plantations mostly owned by German or British nationals. Thousands of Chinese men flushed through these capitalist ventures, by choice or by circumstance. In some cases, they challenged their poor conditions and treatment through riots, strikes and absenteeism. Yet, while we hold container after container of German Sāmoan records, the names of Chinese labourers are nearly never recorded. They exist in the documents as Kuli. No.323, or simply Kuli (the German word for coolie). Only by painstakingly cross-referencing scattered fragments (or mentions) can the names and human agency of some Chinese labourers be rescued from the produced silences of German clerks.

Hence the mention of ‘power’ in the by-line of Silencing the Past. ‘Power is constitutive of the story’ writes Trouillot. ‘Tracking power through various moments helps emphasise the fundamentally processual character of historical production, to insist that what history is matters less that how history works.’ This not only includes power from above, but power from below. As Vincent Brown notes in his masterful history of ‘Tacky’s revolt’, the Jamaican slave war that influenced the Haitian revolution: ‘as surely as wind and water change the contours of stone, slavery’s archival sources have been shaped by the black people they rarely describe.’

An understanding of context is radical, in the original meaning of the term (of relating to a root, to get to the root of something). It is context that allows us to make sense of a source and its creation, and to place it in relation to others. It is context that can unveil the legal fictions of state or white supremacist narratives. As we continue to discuss the past and its impact on our present, as we question what stories are remembered and what stories are forgotten, I look to Trouillot and the scores of critical writers since as a reminder of how power relations continue to shape history; how context matters; and how, sometimes, remembering alone is not enough.

First published by Overland Literary Journal, 28 May 2020