Jared Davidson

An archivist by day and author by night, Jared Davidson is a writer based in Lower Hutt, Aotearoa New Zealand. As well as his five books, his work has appeared in Overland, The Guardian, History Workshop, Radical Futures, Labour History, The Spinoff and other publications. He is currently the Research Librarian Manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Jared’s latest book, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books), was named a best book of 2023, longlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand General Non-Fiction Book Award and received an International Labor History Association Honorable Mention Award.

Photo by Hagen Hopkins

*International Labor History Association Honorable Mention Award 2023
*Longlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand General Non-Fiction Book Award
*A best book of 2023 according to NZ Listener, The Spinoff, RNZ, Sunday Star Times and The Australia Institute

Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand.

Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand’s urban centres and rural landscapes and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely unknown: a hidden history in plain sight.

Blood and Dirt explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. Jared Davidson asks us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand. 

Published by Bridget Williams Books, 1 August 2023

Published by Bridget Williams Books, 2021

Published by Otago University Press, 2019

Published by AK Press, 2013

Published by Rebel Press, 2011