Hard labour

The results of penal servitude are hidden in plain sight after nearly two centuries of public works, farms and forests.

- NEVIL GIRSON

BLOOD & DIRT: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, by Jared Davidson (Bridget Williams Books, $50) 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.