Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand by Jared Davidson looks at how prison labour shaped our country throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A combination of ideas of making people ‘useful’ and ‘improvement’, and the need for labour in the new colony meant that significant parts of the older parts of our cities and country were constructed by prisoners. Yet this story is one hidden in our history and the physical makeup of New Zealand, despite being an important part of it.
Jared Davidson sets out from the start to bring to light “a history hidden in plain sight”, and he succeeds admirably. Even if New Zealand was never a penal colony like most of those on the West Island, prisons and prison labour were always with us.
Blood and Dirt shows that from the very earliest days of permanent settlement, prisoners and prison labour were a fundamental part of European colonisation. They reshaped the landscapes of our cities (I was struck by how physically different the early colonial cities are from what we know today, and how much work it took to make them this way), and many of the oldest parts of our cities and towns involved prisoners. Lyttelton is especially marked by their presence. Prisoners were also an important part of early industry in the colony, and constructed many a road, port, and other pieces of vital infrastructure. They built the military capability of early New Zealand (like the fortifications on Rīpapa Island) and this included the use of Māori prisoners of war from the New Zealand Wars and the settlement of Parihaka). The significant forestry sector in New Zealand got its start from prisoners’ toil, and other parts of New Zealand were ‘tamed’ for agriculture by their efforts. The prison labour system was even extended in New Zealand’s own colonialism – the control of societies and labour in our Pacific colonies in Samoa, Niue, the Cook Islands, and Tokelau.
I liked especially how Davidson links the ideas around prisons and control of prisoners’ bodies and labour into the broader ideas of settler colonialism and capitalism — that ‘unimproved’ (in the eyes of settlers) land needed to be ‘improved’, and that using prisoners would ‘improve’ them as people and make them proper productive people for the colony and nation. Prison labour was an answer to many problems, practical and philosophical and as Jared Davidson shows, a fundamental part of our history and spaces.
This book is also a very readable history – in the WORD Christchurch 2024 session, Writing Power Jared said that his aim for his writing was the kind of book that his Dad would read, something easily readable and with a gripping narrative. He does a fine job here.
Read more by Jared Davidson
Read more about New Zealand's economic history
The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa
Read more about prison labour
CCL Staff Lists
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"The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are the country’s premier literary honours for books written by New Zealanders. First established in 1968 as the Wattie Book Awards (later the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards), they have also been known as the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Ockham Residential became the principal sponsor in 2015."
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