9/22/2023 0 Comments Dredge modern‘‘At three o’clock the wires, dipped in quicksilver and primed for a chemical reaction, were tripped. From the prison-made battery ran six wires, each around 60 metres long, snaking their way over scree and steel tracks and into the jagged face of Dunedin’s Bell Hill, where six tunnels were packed with half a ton of powder. ‘‘An afternoon crowd gathered to watch as the gang moved the galvanic battery into place. One can only imagine the long-term disturbance it caused: In his book, Davidson describes the blasting of Bell Hill. Prisoners took over the work four years later and rock-blasting began in 1864, with prisoners digging out boulders and chunks of rock, to be used as reclamation and other fill. In 1858, city planners decided the best way to deal with Bell Hill was to go through it, starting with a 6m cutting which linked Princes St to the Octagon. Less well-known is the flattening work prisoners carried out to remove a rocky knob and make the Octagon accessible to be a central point of roads throughout the settlement. Their demolition efforts almost halved the 42m-high hill, which split Dunedin in two and formed the shoreline where Queens Gardens is today. The partial obliteration of Dunedin’s Bell Hill by prisoners over about 18 years in the 1860s and 1870s was probably New Zealand prison labour’s most remarkable achievement and ‘‘the pride of the prisons branch’’, Davidson says. It also ‘‘targeted idleness’’ and conditioned people to accept their place in a world of waged labour. In fact, prison labour was crucial to colonisation,’’ the book says. Prison labour ‘‘shaped the environments needed for capital accumulation and settler societies to flourish. To our history books, their work regimes unseen by those who have the privilege not to see.’’ Or perhaps the stigma of prisons and the modern practice of hiding them out of sight have carried through Perhaps as a mostly urban practice it has been obscured by New Zealand’s rural mythology, a mythology dominated by settlers-turned-farmers and smallholders that leaves little room for cities and their working-class gangs. Many of its first roads, ports, parks and public works: made with prison labour. The first European structures at Waitangi: built by prisoners. The first land transaction between Māori and Pākehā: paid for by prison labour. But the firsts associated with prison labour are not among them. ‘‘New Zealand loves to trumpet its firsts. Published by Bridget Williams Books and released this week, Blood and Dirt reveals just how much we owe to the thousands of prisoners and their hard labour now ‘‘congealed in the clay’’, as Davidson says in the book: In fact, the city ‘‘could rightly claim the title of New Zealand’s prison labour capital,’’ according to Wellington author and archivist Jared Davidson in his new book Blood and Dirt. Their toil and sweat, their lives in some cases, amounted to an attack on the indigenous landscape to make it more comfortable for Pākehā settlers.ĭunedin has a starring role in this environmental transformation by prisoners. Who ever considers the provenance of that road they are walking along, the public park and gardens they’re strolling through, the schools they wander past, or the retaining walls they’re leaning on and which hold up their homes?įor some it might be an uncomfortable truth that significant chunks of our colonial infrastructure were actually built by prisoners from across New Zealand, put to work in chain gangs in the mid to late 1800s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |