A new history shows how exploited convicts provided unpaid labour to make modern New Zealand
New research in the 21st Century has revealed the role of slave labour in building New Zealand. We have been informed of the outrages in the Pacific, that thousands of Pacific Islanders were kidnapped or tricked from their homes and shipped to the plantations of Queensland and Fiji, while others were put to work in the flax fields and grand homes of New Zealand. And we have learned that Māori prisoners taken at Parihaka were made to work without pay on the roads of Dunedin. Now Wellington historian Jared Davidson has published a bold and carefully researched study of unpaid labour by a workforce that included many whites, as well as Māori and Pasifika people.
In Blood and Dirt Prison: Labour and the Making of New Zealand, Davidson tracks work gangs of prisoners across the faces of New Zealand towns, through the alps and pumice plains of our hinterlands, and into the islands of a tropical empire. Davidson's narrative begins in the very early days of Pākehā New Zealand, as he describes how those men of god Samuel Marsden and Thomas Kendall brought convicts across the Tasman to toil at their mission station in the Bay of Islands.
Marsden had no doubt that he was helping his captives by making them chop wood, build shelter, and cook for him. He believed that 'idleness' was evil, and that hard work led to moral 'improvement'. Unpaid labour was the way for convicts to win god's grace and society's forgiveness.
Davidson shows how colonists anthropomorphised the landscape of Aotearoa, and decided that it exhibited an unforgivable idleness. Like human prisoners, the captive land of Papatuanuku needed moral improvement. Swamps needed to be drained and farmed, forests ought to be cut and made into houses and ships, and pumice plains deserved to be planted with fast-growing, lucrative pinus radiata.
But both the prisoners and the land resisted every effort at improvement. Davidson shows how shirking, sabotage, mutiny, and escapes disturbed the peace of prisons and work camps and disrupted improvement. Papatuanuku was also recalcitrant. Rockslides buried roads, frost froze planting grounds, and floods washed away workers' huts.
Conservative New Zealanders tend to see prisoners of any era as evildoers serving a just punishment, while liberals like to regard them as the passive victims of socioeconomic forces
Davidson associates the ideology of work with the burgeoning British Empire. It's true that Marsden's view of idleness as evil and work as moral improvement found echoes across the empire, but not all British were comfortable with it. The empire's aristocratic elite often looked on work with contempt. Toil might be good for the lower classes, but a gentleman had better things to do.
While Marsden was preaching work and driving his convicts, London's private clubs were filled with dandies – young men of wealth who chose to dress extravagantly and talk wittily about trivialities. The famous dandy Beau Brummell was known for his indolence, his close-fitting suits and full-length trousers, and his corruption of the Prince of Wales. The ideology of work was associated with the rising industrialist class, and the non-conformist and low Anglican middle class. The contempt for work seems to have survived in some parts of the British elite to the present day. Boris Johnson and his Bullingdon Club of Oxford snobs looked down on 'swots', trashed restaurants, and happily took second-class degrees. Davidson is a little too one-sided, then, when he attaches the ideology of work to the British.
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Davidson is always aware of what the British historian EP Thompson called "the enormous condescension" that the present shows towards the past. He knows that we have a tendency to forget those who lived before us, and that when we remember them we do through stereotypes forged in our own age. Conservative New Zealanders tend to see prisoners of any era as evildoers serving a just punishment, while liberals like to regard them as the passive victims of socioeconomic forces.
In Blood and Dirt dozens of long-dead prisoners are turned into individuals with agency, and not as mere outcasts from or victims of society. Richard Bennett had the nickname Spanker. He came from Lyttelton, where he had lived by gambling and petty theft. Spanker was sent to Waiotapu, at the edge of Te Ika a Maui's cold central plateau, where prisoners were ordered to beautify a network of thermal springs and pools by planting pines.
A prison warden soon caught Spanker "wilfully mismanaging his work by destroying trees as he planted them". One of the screws reprimanded the inmate for his sabotage. Spanker threw a spade at him. The guard reported that, after he had ordered Spanker back to work, the prisoner "told me he would see me fucked first before he did it".
Spanker's defiance seems to have been contagious: 22 inmates at Waiotapu were soon on strike, complaining that they were expected to work late because severe frost had made digging impossible early in the morning. A screw named James Andrew attacked a prisoner called Samuel Appleby, knocking him down and kicking him four times in the head. The strike was a success: the prisoners got shorter working hours.
Davidson understands that stories like the one from Waiotapu are not irrelevant, not a distraction from or mere illustration of statistics and timelines. They are the very marrow of history. It is the task of the scholar to resurrect the dead, even if the dead can live for only a few sentences. And yet until the last decades of the 20th Century, the Pacific slave trade had been almost forgotten by New Zealanders, and had long been neglected by historians. Neither Keith Sinclair's Pelican History of New Zealand or WH Oliver's The Story of New Zealand dealt with unpaid labour at any length.
While missionaries like Kendall deployed convict labour in the Bay of Islands, Hongi Hika was making his captives work a short distance away
Davidson correctly says that prisoners were not part of pre-contact Māori life. In the early 1840s Governor Fitzroy recognised how alien and oppressive prison life was to Māori, and decreed that Māori held in gaols could be freed if their whānau or hapū paid a fine to the state. But mass imprisonment and unrenumerated labour did exist in some Māori societies for a few brief decades in the early 19th Century. The inter-iwi Musket Wars of that period can be compared to the Thirty Years War in 17th Century Europe. In both cases, firearms upset an old order. When Thomas Kendall took Hongi Hika abroad the Ngā Puhi rangatira acquired guns, which he soon used to raid and rout his old enemies.
Other iwi realised that they needed firearms to survive, and began to mass produce potatoes and other goods to sell to white traders, so that they could have money to spend on the precious pu. Iwi that already had guns wanted more. Captives taken in raids were put to work on the land. While missionaries like Kendall deployed convict labour in the Bay of Islands, Hongi Hika was making his captives work a short distance away.
In a chapter called "Empire", Davidson tours New Zealand's tropical colonies in the early decades of the 20th Century, and also visits the 'phosphate islands' of Banaba, Malden, and Nauru, which were controlled by Britain but produced fertiliser for the farms of New Zealand.
Davidson shows how colonial administrators put their indigenous political rivals in prison, where they had to work building walls and roads with coral. The era of 'improvement' came to the Cooks and Niue and Samoa, though it was ultimately defeated by indigenous resistance and independence. (Today it is organisations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation that seek to 'improve' the tropical Pacific. Their reports on Pacific economies are full of the same frustration at the refusal of islanders to 'improve' themselves and their lands as the letters of long-dead colonial administrators.)
Although New Zealand did not own Banaba Island, our government controlled a third of the British Phosphate Commission, which oversaw the conversion of a luxuriant tropical island into a lunar landscape of rock pillars and mined-out hollows. Even the Banabans' burial grounds were dug up; the crushed bones of their ancestors were crop-dusted on farms all over New Zealand.
Although the Chinese labourers brought to Banaba were not indentured, as Davidson claims, they received pitifully small wages, and lived in camps behind high razor wire. In 1925 the Chinese rebelled. After smuggling guns onto Banaba they stormed the buildings of the mine's administrators. New Zealand despatched a warship, HMS Laburnum, and troops shot their way ashore, killing one Chinese worker. The rebellion's leaders were sent to prison in Suva, where they could expect to do yet more hard labour. You'll never hear about the mission to Banaba on Anzac Day.
Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand by Jared Davidson (Bridget Williams Books, $49.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
