Crime and punishment, capital and labour. Mixed together, they serve up, in Jared Davidson’s Blood & Dirt, a reappraisal of incarceration since colonial settlement. All four ingredients arrived in the South Pacific as early as the 18th century with Christian missionaries and traders eager to expand their activities.
The Protestant Reformation in Europe broke down feudal and tribal kinship systems, ushering in the Industrial Revolution and prosperity based on property and individual human rights. But with it came poverty, fears of overpopulation and crime. Part of the solution was to convert far-off Australia and New Caledonia into penal colonies. New Zealand narrowly escaped that fate, but gaols – as Davidson refers to them – were essential. The broken-windows approach of the time dictated that even petty crimes such as drunkenness should be punished with penal servitude.
Chain gangs of prisoners making gravel streets were a common sight in most settler towns up to the 1870s. But gentrification and changing social attitudes forced the gaols out of public view along with their inmates.
At times of high unemployment, prison workers were seen as “taking jobs from ‘honest, industrious’ men”, Alexander Turnbull Library archivist Davidson notes in this densely researched and illustrated history.
The contribution of prison labour to colonial development included seafronts, breakwalls and defence fortifications from Auckland to Dunedin, including Napier, New Plymouth, Whanganui, Wellington, Nelson and Lyttelton. In some places, ships became floating prisons. Invercargill’s estuary, now the site of its airport, was drained by prison labour.
In the 1890s, attention turned from settled areas around the coast to remote areas that had tourism and other economic potential. One of the first outdoor prisons was established at Milford Sound, but it failed because of bad weather and poor working conditions. Prison labour was cheap but less efficient than a paid workforce.
After the Fiordland flop, the Prisons Branch found more success in forestry, which thrived from the late 19th century as a wood shortage loomed. The central North Island produced some of the world’s largest pine plantations, thanks to prisoners sent to Waiotapu near Rotorua.
In the South Island from 1903, Hanmer became a major prison forestry operation, with experimental planting of 4.5 million trees over 600ha that provided a “crazy quilt of differing trees at different times”.
An earlier attempt at Dumgree, near Seddon in Marlborough, had failed because of drought and prisoners’ sabotage of tools and plants. In 1913, paid labour replaced the prisoners at Hanmer. Forests and a gaol at Pt Halswell on the Miramar Peninsula in Wellington still exist today.
In 1910, the Prisons Branch made its first moves into farming, also on an industrial scale. Many of the innovations that created New Zealand’s staggering increase in agricultural production during the so-called grasslands revolution came from Hautū, Waikeria, Waikune and Rangipō prisons. In 1930, revenue from farming operations at Hautū and Rangipō reached a record £83,806 ($7.4 million in today’s money).
In urban centres, prisons engaged in diverse industrial activities such as printing, brickmaking and quarrying, most of which were phased out under pressure from private enterprise. But some remain as a means of rehabilitation. Christchurch prisoners recently turned out their 150th house build.
Davidson’s lively account also covers New Zealand’s use of incarcerated labour in its Pacific Islands colonies, where prisons didn’t exist until well into the 20th century. The general reader will find much of historic interest, though the narrative is framed by Marxist dialectics of the criminal as a class victim of coercion and dispossession rather than a person with individual agency. Davidson outlines how Māori incarceration rates rose from about 10-20% of the prison population in the 1930s and 1940s to 53% in 2023. His explanation may be challenged, but the facts cannot.
New Zealand society as a whole remains divided between those who would prefer no or at least fewer prisons and those who think protection from violent criminals in particular is necessary.
Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, by Jared Davidson (Bridget Williams Books, $50)
