Back on the chain gang: Our paradise was built on the back of prisoners

Saturday, 5 August 2023

How many of the thousands of people who drive from Christchurch up to Hanmer Springs for a school holiday break at the hot pools know there was once a prison camp there, where a man died of cold?

In the first two decades of the 20th century, prisoners planted more than 40 million trees across New Zealand in areas that were once deemed to be wastelands. Two birds were killed with one stone: prisoners were put to work and a country that was seriously worried about running out of timber was rapidly reforested.

Prisoners were improved and the country was improved.

The small settlement at Hanmer started using prison labour in 1903. When a prison camp near Seddon in Marlborough closed in 1908, the new arrivals boosted Hanmer’s tree planting population to 60.

“Their unfree labour turned a holiday town with few trees into a wonderland of birch, larch and Douglas fir,” archivist and researcher Jared Davidson writes in his book Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand.

As he says, the pretty alpine resort town we now see, with its walking tracks, cycling trails and birdsong, owes much to the tough work of unknown men more than a century ago.

Summers were hot and winters were brutal. Prisoners petitioned about not having stoves in their huts: “Not only are we suffering great hardships from the cold but we find it impossible to keep our huts free from dampness.”

Even after a prisoner died of pneumonia, the men were told they couldn’t have stoves in their huts, but must rely on one in the shared mess hall.

The Hanmer prison camp is just one example out of many. If you are in Wellington, look towards Miramar Peninsula, past Evans Bay, or the slopes of Tinakori Hill. Trees planted there were grown in a nursery in Wellington’s Mt Crawford Prison.

If you are in Auckland, look across to Rangitoto, where prisoners built roads, tracks, tennis courts and a swimming pool.

Davidson became interested in this subject four years ago, initially after researching vagrancy. Men sent to prison for vagrancy would be put to work, but what would they do? He slowly uncovered the history of how New Zealand was literally built by prison labour.

Dunedin, Wellington and Lyttelton were the three urban centres that benefited the most. Then there were the forests planted by prisoners and the farms broken in by prisoners. They drained swamps, they built roads, they reshaped entire landscapes.

Davidson grew up in Lyttelton and now lives in Wellington, where he works at the Alexander Turnbull Library. Once he dug into the history, he began to see the signs he had missed in places he had taken for granted.

How many times had he driven Sumner Rd? Thousands? But when he went back to Lyttelton “with this new lens”, it was an afternoon in the middle of winter. “I realised that if you were working on that road, on this particular day, you’re going to be cold, your hands are going to be numb, you’ll be in the shade.”

The seawall, esplanade, jetty and playground area at nearby Corsair Bay were built by prisoners. The breakwater at Officers Point was made by a gang of prisoners “blasting and bludgeoning a headland into rubble”. The explosives nearly killed two of them.

Lyttelton’s prisoners were useful in other ways. They were let out to fight a fire that nearly destroyed the port town one night in 1870, saving the Magistrate’s Court and other important buildings.

As he looked more closely, Davidson noticed small details. He saw the marks of prisoners’ pickaxes are still visible in gutters along Oxford St in Lyttelton. Even the Bridle Path, that heroic symbol of settler Christchurch, had prisoners working on it.

Escapes and escapism

Did Davidson risk becoming obsessed with his subject? He notes that he even began to keep a database of all New Zealand roads built by prisoners, before quickly realising there were just too many. His kids grew used to accompanying him on research trips to the remote sites of long-abandoned prison farms.

“People could call it an obsession,” he agrees. “I wouldn’t say it’s a hobby but it’s on top of my day to day work. I think research for me is part-escapism but it’s also just that thrill of discovery and pulling at threads and seeing where they take you.”

There were plenty of surprises and some good stories. Even the Milford Track was partially built by prison labour. The rainy weather at Milford Sound made the Hanmer prison camp look like a picnic.

Inevitably, there were daring escapes. Two prisoners digging the Sumner Rd in 1857 escaped one lunchtime, held up a blacksmith and stole his gun, then robbed two groups of travellers. One of the men was wounded in the police chase, and the other was eventually found shivering in a cave in Redcliffs.

There was a dramatic escape in 1859 by eight men from the Terrace Gaol in Wellington, which stood where Te Aro School is now. One of them made it as far as Kaikōura.

In 1866, Māori prisoners made a daring escape from the prison hulk (floating prison) Manukau in Wellington Harbour. Six of the escapees drowned, one died of cold, “roving gangs of Pākehā” killed one near Tawa and injured two more. But some were never caught.

In the same year, the terrible conditions endured by Māori prisoners on the Chatham Islands produced the rebel leader Te Kooti.

When ordinary people looked at gangs of men working on the streets, some were scared and others were sympathetic. There are stories of people stashing tobacco for the prisoners building Rocks Rd in Nelson.

The line between prisoner and worker could seem tenuous in those times. It was easy for people to slip between categories.

“One of the biggest crimes in the 19th century in New Zealand was drunkenness,” Davidson says. “You had these porous borders between the prison and everyday life.”

There was women’s work in women’s prisons as well. Addington in Christchurch became a government laundry.

Davidson found picture research presented its own challenges. Few photographs exist of the early era of prison labour. That meant every picture felt like a major discovery, even if prisoners were just minor details.

He spent hours looking at old photos of Marine Pde in Napier before he struck gold. A dramatic photo of the parade from 1895 had two unidentified men from a prison gang toiling in the corner. Similarly, a painting of First Church in Dunedin happens to show a group of prisoners digging nearby.

Do these tiny figures say something about the overlooked history of prison labour?

“I definitely think it’s been overlooked,” he says. “It’s a hidden history, hidden in plain sight.”

It fits with his ongoing interests in areas like class, work and state power. His previous book, Dead Letters, was about state censorship during World War I. It was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, won a prize for labour history and was shortlisted for a history book prize.

An earlier book was about the birth of Kiwi anarchism.

He agrees the new book is really about much bigger subjects than it seems. It’s about a society that prioritises work over idleness and useful land over waste. It tells a parallel story of city-building, land-clearing and agricultural growth. It is also about how the use of prison labour even spread into the Pacific, and gave us what he calls “empire on the cheap”.

Something else happens when this story is brought into the light. New Zealanders think of themselves as egalitarian, fair and tolerant. We see Australia as the prison state, not us.

Yet our incarceration rates are above the OECD average, and this book suggests our paradise was also built on the back of prisoners. It is a contradiction that seems telling.

“I’ve always been interested in this idea of New Zealand exceptionalism, that we’re somehow exceptional to other places, because I think that’s a myth,” Davidson says. “My work’s been focused on that. Realising how embedded the prison is, outside of the barbed wire fences, and its reach right into our wider society.

“It opened my eyes to crime and punishment and its link to the past, how that past keeps playing out in terms of generations of trauma for indigenous peoples, and how some of those structures and power relationships are still present.”

Once the lenses are put on, they cannot come off.

“I can’t look at prisons the same way any more, or even the landscape,” he says. “Now I drive around and I see prison labour everywhere.”

Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, by Jared Davidson. Published by Bridget Williams Books, $49.99.