An archivist and historian has revealed New Zealand’s “hidden history” of forced colonial-era prison labour, that built some of the country’s major landmarks.
Author Jared Davidson, who wrote the new book Blood and Dirt, took Q+A’s Whena Owen on a tour of Wellington's historic landmarks that had been built by forced labour.
“There’s no way I can see the landscape of New Zealand the way I used to,” Davidson said.
“When I look out at the city today I see all the unfree public work that was done by prisoners to build modern infrastructure, to build the roads and the spaces, and the environments that we take for granted today.”
Davidson said much of the colonial prison labour was men who were locked up for relatively petty crimes — like drunkenness or vagrancy.
The road around the Miramar Peninsula is one such example – started by Pākeha prisoners in the 1880s and completed by Māori prisoners in the 1890s.
The works included military forts aimed to deter invasion from the sea, particularly during Russian scares.
The Basin Reserve is another example of a forced labour project. Once a swamp, it was drained by prisoners and has since become the country’s most iconic cricket ground.
It sits on Adelaide Road, which itself was also built by prisoners.
A major task prisoners were forced to do was brickmaking — many of which are still holding up buildings today.
Some of the bricks even have visible finger-and-thumb prints of the 19th-century convicts who made them, along with the arrow markings which symbolise that the bricks are the property of the Crown.
While Parliament itself wasn’t built by prisoners, it does include their work in the form of those bricks.
“Within the very marrow of Parliament House are the prison-made bricks from Pukeahu,” Davidson said.
“And in a way that’s a metaphor for the history, in that there’s a marrow of unfreedom right in front of us, holding up structures, holding up colonial public works.
“It’s all that unfree labour hidden right in front of us.”
Q+A with Jack Tame is Public Interest Journalism funded through New Zealand On Air
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