Robert McLean
Blood and Dirt: Prison labour and the making of New Zealand by Jared Davidson (Bridget Williams Books, 2023), 304pp, $49.99
Jared Davidson’s Blood and Dirt begins with a vignette about Harry Brown’s death. It is 1925 and prisoners, including the ‘returned-soldier-cum-vagrant’ Harry, are demolishing Wellington’s Terrace Gaol, which their antecedents had built in 1853. They have been tasked to take it apart ‘brick by brick’: an early but excessive version of recycling under the sign of economising. Naturally, their task is gothic-tinted-to-ghoulish, a tone that becomes familiar as the book unfolds: it includes digging up executed predecessors to clear the ground for future development. As the reader will have guessed, this job does not end well for Harry. His incarceration for being idle and disorderly—which I suppose means public drunkenness or perhaps the appearance of it, or possibly high spirits without sufficient excuse, or recalcitrant lolling about—turns out to be a death sentence. He is killed when struck by a falling section of clay. We are told Te Aro School, which is sited above the fatal slopes, is an ‘unintentional monument to his death’. This is clumsy writing: in any meaningful sense, all monuments are intentional.
Davidson’s book ambitiously proclaims its intention to memorialise the ‘story of the making of Aotearoa New Zealand and its Pacific empire … through the prism of prison labour’. Through a prism, not a lens; not directly, not magnified, but refracted, reflected, angulated. It is, for Davidson, ‘a history hidden in plain sight’ and, according to him, so pervasive as to be ubiquitous. Why is it not spoken of? Davidson offers five possible options; all prefaced with ‘perhaps’. One, the prisoners’ labour is ‘congealed in the clay’ (at best an enigmatic charge); two, ‘rural mythology’, in which New Zealand was made by hardy law-abiding country folk, not criminal city-slickers; three, our mythos of exceptionalism, in that we are kinder, gentler, and such like than our Australian neighbours and British forebears; four, their work was simply ‘taken for granted’. The fifth option is deliberate omission: ‘Perhaps the stigma of prisons and the modern practice of hiding them out of sight have carried through to our history books, their work regimes unseen by those who have the privilege not to see.’ Four times the ‘secret knowledge’ is marked for indictment (hiding / out of sight / unseen / not to see); this accusation is present throughout the book, sometimes sounding hectoring as it wavers between indignation and self-righteousness, but at least always deeply invested in the human reality of suffering and servitude.
The book never fails to ridicule and jeer at these pretensions or failings, but unfortunately, Davidson does not concertedly essay the five possibilities. My question is: does it tell the story it sets out to tell? Certainly, it is not a simple tale. And to relate it, Davidson uses a somewhat contentious apparatus, one that sometimes takes him down cul-de-sacs of inevitability by invoking ‘radical history’, which ‘asks us to examine the exercise of power and its root causes.’ The spectre of Foucault lours above Bentham’s panopticon. It is a totalising perspective: everything is a manifestation of power; everything is evidence for the prosecution, whether Davidson’s unabated broadsides or the apparatus of state that serves as his target. He can be funny. In a description reminiscent of the 15 minutes in the middle of Ruben Ostlund’s film Triangle of Sadness, in which the ultra-privileged one-per-centers of a doomed cruise yacht are sluiced in a flood of seasickness, we have a peek at Thomas Kendall as he ‘spewed over the side of the Active’, and Samuel Marsden, known as ‘the flogging parson of Parramatta, [who] fell prey to convulsive retching’—not so pious now, Thomas; not so handy with that whip of yours now, Samuel. They are categorically unlike the thief Henry Shaffery—whose person is lingeringly itemised as ‘5 feet 7 inches, of dark sallow complexion, black hair, hazel eyes’ as if in a personals ad—who is ‘unfazed by the bile … swishing across the deck.’ Authority figures are bad guys, rendered in caricature, while prisoners and their stock are fallible but fully human, with bodies to boot. This simplistic division is an undoubted weakness.
The bulk of the book is ultimately a litany of achingly grievous abuses of power. The story begins with prison labour at the Christian mission at Hohi, and it more or less ends with the clearance of 3000 acres at Rangipō and Hautū near Tūrangi in the Waikato. I live in Lyttelton, the carceral inheritance of which is discussed in the book, presenting the book’s arguments in microcosm. I am glad Davidson mentions the Buster Keatonesque story about the imprisoned seamen who attempted escape by punching holes through the floor of their jail, sticking their legs through them, and walking the whole kit-and-caboodle towards the docks in a comically doomed fashion. He mentions, too, the Warder’s House—‘a two-storeyed, six-bedroom rustic gothic home’—on Oxford Street, which nowadays my father-in-law owns and lives in. He notes prisoners played a crucial part in fighting a fire that engulfed much of the town in the 1870s, saving many significant buildings. Sumner Road, a vital link to Christchurch, was made by prison labour, as were any number of other streets, roads, and quays along which I walk almost every day, many of which are flanked by familiar red volcanic stone retaining walls. At least amongst the ones I know, Lytteltonites are familiar with this history of penal building; generally, they are grateful for it but not guilty. It certainly is not ‘hidden’. And the prison-labour works have proven themselves durable. My father-in-law’s house remained proud after the Christchurch earthquakes. It is well-made; it was made with care.
Reading this history, I was often reminded of the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where we are exhorted to remember that ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’. In what these shackled men made, do we see—and live within—the best of them, despite the duress that directed their craft and the privations put upon their days?
Perhaps. Of course, that Biblical pean to ripeness comes during a warning about false prophets. How perverse it seems to have made these men build the very prisons whose walls so firmly, cruelly and crudely abnegated their essential humanity, whatever adroitness of stone craft might have set them up straight and true around them. These are lasting testaments to wrongheadedness and they want for pity. They are evidence of inflexibility and desiccated spirit sucking dry the letter of the law. But lasting, nonetheless. What was corrected by such punishment? I would hazard it was less the prisoners’ souls and consciences than the balancing of Victorian probity, which anachronistically endures in the guise of ‘sensible sentencing’ and a similar institutionalised shrillness of response routinely applied to crimes that undoubtedly require some kind of ‘strong signal’. Davidson seems to believe punishment of any kind is never the answer. But what is? Not giving an answer is the most obvious of his missed opportunities. He notes: ‘Māori, too, had long used captive labour. But comparing Indigenous modes of punishment and war captivity with European institutions such as prison labour would be a mistake, for each was culturally specific.’ This seems trite and self-defeating, a deference to dated anthropological modalities and an avoidance of sociological and political spadework. And, indeed, it is disingenuous: he goes on to say, ‘Māori law—through violence and other means—provided for the balancing of wrongs, and laid down clear procedures for settling disputes within a world of kinship and collective responsibilities. None of these included prisons.’ If this is not a comparison, I don’t know what is, but it is one that is stated axiomatically when its implications ought to be examined.
Could Pākehā judicial and corrective institutions learn from Māori ones? It is a shame Davidson foreclosed this opportunity, especially since he does much to situate the relationship between Māori and the New Zealand prison system and its industry of ‘unfree and unpaid’ labour, a pressing matter given Māori are imprisoned in an egregiously higher proportion than the rest of the population. Would this be the case if alternatives were explored? If the state exercised sufficient humility to learn from its Treaty partner? If what Davidson characterises as ‘unfree and unpaid labour’ were directed to restorative justice, would he maintain his absolute disavowal of it?
The book is competently written, although one encounters redundancy where intensification might have been intended (‘Hiding them out of sight’) and cliché, especially when it is most condemnatory. Occasionally, sweeping statements get in the way of thinking: ‘Ships were the engines of capitalism’ sounds like it means something, but it says little of substance, though somewhat more than ‘seamen were its grease’. He largely resists the blithe assertion that wage labour is different only in slight degree from prison labour; that all labour is unfree. But to reiterate, his core thesis is that the power that incarcerates and exploits bodies for gain is ubiquitous and self-replicating. It is the same power that colonises, polices, consumes, economises, wages war, medicalises and otherwise regulates bodies, creates subsistence dependence, denies agency. In social histories of this kind, the subject at hand—say, war memorials, prison labour, clothing, rugby league—is contextualised by wider societal trends and shifts as well as being symptomatic of them. This can be a tricky thing to pull off successfully. Although Davidson overstates the wider explanatory appositeness of reading New Zealand history through the ‘prism’ of prison labour, there is an undoubted richness of suggestive detail and effectiveness of cognitive reframing: even though I am familiar with my town’s history, the book did wobble my transom enough for me to see it with fresh eyes and an opened mind.
I am also faced with the usual New Zealand book reviewer’s dilemma, namely that I am not an expert in the relevant fields, and the book is the only accessible one on its subject. Is it factually correct? It seems to be, by which I mean it makes no outlandish claims, it is internally consistent, it is replete with references, and it carries evidence that it has been thoroughly researched. It is generously, if a little atmospherically, illustrated, straying at times uncomfortably into ground mapped by W.G. Sebald’s meditations on trauma. The author occasionally unnecessarily intrudes with impressionistic editorial interpolations, sometimes mistakenly identifying his personal incredulity and disconsolation as symptomatic of society as a whole, and bemusedly wondering why his deep investment in this fascinating but esoteric area of knowledge isn’t commonly held. He asks: ‘If much of our landscape is an archive of forced work, why isn’t the history of prison labour and its carceral spaces more widely known? And why should we care?’ I cannot speak on behalf of all New Zealanders, but I would guess that not many of us would see the built-up landscape as a Benjaminian archive, revealing a tradition of the oppressed. But caring, even if oddly, and paying attention to what’s in front of us, and seeking the makers’ marks, can surely only help with the nation’s sense of self-definition.
ROBERT McLEAN is a poet, critic, editor, and doctoral student at Massey University. His collected poems were published in 2020 by Cold Hub Press. He lives in Lyttelton and works in Wellington for the New Zealand government.
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