Visit draftingthepast.com to subscribe to the newsletter for book reviews, interviews, essays about history books, and more. Paid subscribers get access to ad-free episodes of the podcast.

In this episode, Kate is joined by our first guest from New Zealand, archivist and independent historian Jared Davidson. Though he was not trained as a historian and originally comes from a graphic design background, Jared has written and published five books that focus on overlooked and radical histories of New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as you’ll hear him call it.

During the day, he works at the Alexander Turnbull Library, where he is the Research Librarian Manuscripts. His books have won multiple awards in New Zealand and have covered subjects ranging from anarchists to censorship. His most recent book, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, uncovers the ways that incarcerated labor literally shaped the country’s environment and landscape. If you’re a historian who comes to the subject without formal training, you’ll especially love this episode, but there’s a lot here to learn for all of us, including how to weave compelling individual stories into a strong argument, which Jared does brilliantly in this book.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Jared Davidson’s website
• Jared Davidson, Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand
• Jared Davidson, The History of a Riot
• Jared Davidson, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920
• Jared Davidson, Sewing Freedom: Philip Josephs, Transnationalism, and Early New Zealand Anarchism
• Jared Davidson, Remains to Be Seen: Tracing Joe Hill’s Ashes in New Zealand
• Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
• Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War
• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves; To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
• “James Kelman: I’ll die at the desk. So what. Where’s the coffee?”
• Marcus Rediker books
• Marcus Rediker, “The Poetics of History from Below”

Hey there! Welcome back to Drafting the

Past, a podcast all about how historians write history. I'm

Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian

about their research and writing process. There are not many

historians that I would refer to as having a punk rock approach

to history. No offense, historians. But today's guest

definitely does. Though he was not trained as a historian and

originally comes from a graphic design background, he has

written and published five books that focus on overlooked and

radical histories in New Zealand. I'm delighted to be

joined by Jared Davidson to talk about how he writes history.

Thanks so much for having me, Kate.

Jared is also the first guest on the show to

join me all the way from New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as you'll

hear him call it. There, he works during the day at

Alexander Turnbull Library, where he is the research

librarian manuscripts. His books have won multiple history prizes

in New Zealand and have covered subjects ranging from New

Zealand anarchists to censorship. His most recent

book, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labor and the Making of New

Zealand uncovers the ways that incarcerated labor literally

shaped the country's environment and landscape. If you're a

historian who comes to the subject without formal training,

you will especially love this episode. But there's a lot here

to learn for all of us, including how to weave

compelling individual stories into a strong central argument,

something that Jared does brilliantly in this book. As a

small technical warning, the last few minutes of our audio

are a little glitchy, but I left them in because I wanted you to

hear about Jared's next book project. Thanks for hanging with

us. Here's my conversation with Jared Davidson.

I'm not a professional historian, so I

work in the archives sector, the work at the Alexander Turnbull

Library in New Zealand, and I've never actually trained as a

historian, so my trajectory is probably a little bit unique to

others. But my background is in graphic design and printmaking,

and I was in various social radical movements at the time,

and got the history bug and wanted to learn a bit more about

social movements and working class activity in this country,

and that's when I discovered the archives. And around 2009, 2010,

I decided to write a book on Joe Hill's ashes, who was a

Industrial Workers of the World singer songwriter from the USA,

based in the States. And apparently, his ashes came all

the way to New Zealand. And I wanted to find out if this was

true or not. And so, to do that, I had to learn how to do

research. I had to visit the archives for the first time, and

that's where I really got the history bug and became an

archivist. But my archival work has really been entwined with my

historical practice. So I would say that my writing career is

more of a passion and a practice. It's outside of my

nine to five job, but it is basically the driver for what I

do in my day-to-day work as well. So, in saying that, I've

been fortunate to have five books published, all generally

on kind of working-class history, history from below. I'm

interested in questioning some of the mythology around New

Zealand history, there's a lot of exceptionalism, and in our

country, we're kind of held up as the best race relations in

the world, and you know the workingman's paradise, things

like that. So, yeah, I'm interested in class, capitalism,

and how people have kind of struggled with that or against

that over time. So, yeah, I'm lucky enough to work in an area

that is close to historical production, but not overwhelming

my mental capacity, because I do have friends who are historians,

and you know the last thing they want to do is sit down at a

It's amazing to me that you've written five

computer and do their own work after they've been working all

day. So I think that's really lucky. So it's it's a handy

handy place to work. But yeah.

books while also while also working a full time job. When do

you do your writing?

I do joke that I'm an archivist by day, author

by night, and it's depended over over the years. So when our

children were young, it would be, well, I had my eldest, you

know, strapped in a front pack, and I'm busy on the computer

doing some research, and then would write in the spare moments

that I had. And I think that's really set me up well because I

didn't have the luxury of time, so I was very efficient with

whatever time that I had. My third book, Dead Letters, which

was about censorship and subversion during the first

World War, I was lucky enough to get a research grant for that

very small amount of money. Basically, I could take two

weeks off work and manage to fire out a few chapters there,

but, for that book, I was getting up at six a.m. and doing

an hour's worth of writing before the kids woke up. Now the

kids are a bit older, and I have a little bit more time on my

hands. I have a very supportive partner, and so my routine at

the moment is basically sitting down in the weekends, maybe on a

Sunday, and just do a couple of hours of writing. I'm lucky in

that I seem to write in my head because I walk a lot. I'm

writing constantly in my head. I go for a walk every morning

around the block, and I'm planning and frameworking the

the chapter and what's coming next. And I think having that

graphic design background also makes me think a little bit

about bits and components and where they're going to go. So

I'm lucky in that what I write tends to stick on the page. I'm

not one of those splurgers who write heaps and heaps and heaps

and then whittles down. I'm I'm sort of crafting as I go in my

head, putting it down on the weekends, and I'll do a little

bit of research during the week, or I might sit down in in the

evenings. But yeah, I I seem to be able to make things stick on

the page without necessarily having long stints of writing

time. But in saying that, I have been very lucky in having the

odd research grant and Blood and Dirt, which was my most recent

book, I was able to spend two weeks at a writing residency

working on that book. So yeah, at the moment it's trying to

have a regular practice when the time permits and doing

everything I can in between to make sure that writing time is

is as efficient as I can make it.

How do you like to organize your research and

your writing? Are there tools that you use?

Yeah, it's it's changed so much over time. So my

first book was still in the age of ordering printouts from

archives and having lots of folders and organizing physical

printouts right through to these days, I actually use Google

Docs, and I don't know the ethics or you know things around

that, but I found it really useful that I have documents I

can access whenever I need to. So I will have Google Docs

organized by chapters that I can kind of drop things into as I'm

working on them. I have an archives document, and that has

got the lists of material that I've either seen or I need to

see, and I color code them and have little summaries. I don't

write as I go, so when I'm doing research, I'm collecting and

gathering quite intensely in that first phase, and so the the

archives document is kind of my master directory in a way. And

yeah, I have a page for quotes, I have a page for bibliography,

people to thank, places to visit, and obviously a notebook

as well, where I can scribble in things as I'm going. But yeah,

it's been a real shift. I don't use any bibliographical tools or

those types of things. It's pretty DIY, pretty random

sometimes, but it seems to work for me. And I think things

definitely have moved more digital as my practices evolve,

so now I have folders on the computer, organized by primary,

secondary sources, the archives I've visited. You know, so

whether it's Archives New Zealand and Christchurch or in

Auckland, I'll have the folders matching up to that. It it seems

to work. The last couple of books, I've also found myself

creating massive spreadsheets, and I never thought I'd be one

of those people. But for Blood and Dirt, which was the history

of prison labor in Aotearoa in the wider Pacific, I needed this

tool to basically collate all the work that prisoners were

doing and where they were doing it, and that's become really

useful for me to have those kind of spreadsheets where I can dip

in and dip out and control F, find what I need to do,

highlight the different linkages between sites and people, and my

current book that I'm working on. I've actually even created a

Google Map where I've mapped out some of the the historical

events that I'm writing about now, just to give me that kind

of visual geographical spread as well. So, yeah, if you told me

when I started that I'm making Google Maps and spreadsheets, I

would have laughed. But yeah, it's, that's what I do these

days.

Fantastic. How about revision? How do you

approach revision?

Yeah, I really polish as I go. So if I've done

a stint of writing on Sunday or on the weekend, I'll always

email myself the the latest document because I like to open

up and view it in a, in a different space. So often, I

will read that on the train to work. I might print out the

latest chapter in the office and read it over my morning tea, and

I just need that visual change. And then I will just polish and

tinker and try and simplify language or see if I need to

move things here and there. So it means that as I'm writing,

the work is pretty tidy, I think, and I will definitely

take feedback from friendly readers and the publisher if

things need to change majorly. But my approach is generally to

get it as tidy and as so that I'm happy with it before I'm

submitting it on to anyone else, and I think that's, um, that's

just a hallmark of having come up through punk bands and having

a real do-it-yourself ethos and and wanting to have quite a

How do you think about organizing the narrative

creative control over my work. But yeah, I really love to,

emailing myself, look over it as I'm going, and just yeah,

tidying as I go, so it's as polished as it can be.

structure as you're writing? I mean, are you are you outlining

so that you can be that clean as you go, or do you just kind of

figure it out in the process?

No, I definitely make a plan. It it's more of a

high-level framework, and I think having a graphic design

background, that's really helped me. So I often like to have the

titles of the books and the chapters, and even visualize a

cover in my head before I even start. And I think it's helpful

for me for organizing my practice, but also helps to

think about audience and how they might engage with the

narrative. So I'll have a notebook, and it will have a

whole lot of different working titles, chapter titles, even

before I've even written the chapter, which is probably

really weird. But I will have a frame book and a notebook, and

obviously that can change as I go, but I really do like to

think about how a reader is going to experience this text

from start to finish, but with the flexibility that things will

change. So yeah, that's helpful when I am walking around the

block and thinking about what's coming next. It's also really

helpful for me then to think about in terms of narrative, who

is the protagonist or the people in this chapter that we're

following? Do they appear in other places? Whose voice are we

hearing? From what viewpoint are readers getting this

information? Because, like I said, I'm not necessarily a

trained historian, and sometimes I hesitate to use that term. I

think using the word author just gives me a little bit more of a

leeway to kind of think more about narrative nonfiction, you

know, without neglecting the methodology and the rigorous

research and scholarship that historical study brings. Being

able to write narrative nonfiction, or at least try to,

means that when I am thinking about chapter structure and

narrative, I've got a loose plan. But as I'm writing, often

it will go other places, and I'm really open to that as well.

I don't mean a lot of archivists who are also,

who are historians. I don't want to say they're not historians

because they are, but I don't meet a lot who write their own

histories. I'd love to know how you think about how being an

archivist shapes your approach to history, not just in terms of

having having kind of time and brain space to write at the end

of the day, but is there something about being an

archivist that that brings something different to writing

history?

Yeah, I think it works on a couple of levels. So,

on a very practical level, I've become very experienced in how

to navigate finding aids and catalogs, and thinking about

where is the treasure that I need in this historical project.

Who created the gems that I need to find? And as your listeners

will know, and as you will know as a historian too, Kate, like

you develop that over time, you start to think wider about

provenance and who is creating material and the connections

between the material you're seeing and the wider social

context. But I think having that lens means I'm very attuned to

maybe looking at places that someone just doing a keyword

search in a catalog might not think of, so in a practical

sense, it's really great for finding stuff. It's also been

really great for spurring ideas for for books. So for 10 years,

I worked at the National Archives, Archives New Zealand.

It's it's probably the equivalent of the National

Archives USA, so it's kind of the federal level. We don't have

states; we've got the one state in New Zealand. And so my third

book was coming across this amazing tranche of letters that,

as far as I could tell, were really under-described and

underused, and these were letters that the government had

stopped and censored letters sent on the home front, so not

to soldiers, you know, in Europe, but letters between

people within New Zealand and Australia, and finding these

letters and realizing there was this real gem of of material

here, kind of led to my third book, Dead Letters. So yeah, on

that level, it's really really useful. You get insights into

maybe collections that other researchers haven't used so much

yet. But then, kind of philosophical and maybe on that

intellectual level, I found it really useful when thinking

about silences, when thinking about biases, when thinking

about whose perspective is being told in this here, what's

missing, what is the rationale behind this source, why is it

being created, and I think good historians do that anyway. But

that is kind of the bread and butter of of archival work, I

guess. And so, yeah, that's that's been very handy. And I

always try and shout out this book because it's actually

probably lesser known in New Zealand than it is to your

listeners. But Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past:

Power in the Production of History, like when I read that

and the four moments of silencing that he talks about,

that just blew my mind. So yeah, it's I know it's like a

foundational text in a lot of studies where you are, but over

here it's it's quite hard to find. But yeah, those type of

things, thinking about silences, who's creating the record, and

what's missing.

What do your colleagues think about your

writing?

They like it, I hope. I definitely bounce ideas

off them. Like where I work at the Alexander Turnbull Library,

we have weekly staff hui and people--or meetings, sorry--and

we have guest researchers share their work, and so I often do

that as well and and bounce ideas. Yeah, I think people are

stoked to see that some of these collections are being used and

shared, but they're also interested, I think, in some of

the things that I managed to find, and and some of those

listen-on histories of New Zealand's past, which I'm really

interested in, and and that's always been kind of. If you had

to, if I had to look back at my practice and the topics, I'm not

one of those people who stay on a topic and become an expert.

Like it's really driven by my interests and my kind of

political thinking at the time, but the connection through them

all is kind of overlooked working class stories and how

people have negotiated work and the state, and so that's the

kind of unifying thread. So I think, yeah, I think my

colleagues are interested in what I find, and when I can, I

try and give back to the organization by maybe sending

through some metadata to the team that describe the catalog

and try and add name authorities and and make it more

discoverable at the same time. So hopefully there's some

reciprocity there too.

Well, let's talk a little bit more about Blood

and Dirt itself, your most recent book. So like you

mentioned, it tells the story of prison labor and how essential

that labor was to the creation of contemporary New Zealand

landscapes and cityscapes. It's a, it's a history that I think

is largely unknown, as I gather, especially just by people in

their daily lives. They don't necessarily walk around and

reflect on on this labor, and I was really astounded by just

like the the depth and range of stories that you tell to make

this argument. How did you find those stories?

Yeah, again, once again, being an archivist

is really handy. But also something to know in the

Aotearoa and New Zealand context is prisoners were set to work by

the government, so unlike say the Southern USA, where you had,

you know, planters and various businesses kind of drawing on

state and federal labor, a lot of the sources, the archival

record is in the government archive. In saying that, it's

not necessarily well described. The prison branch records, for

example, are just listed at box level, and it's like it will

just be file 1000 to 2000. So you have to dig through various

registers to find them. But handily for me, a lot of the

records they do, they do exist in the, held in the government

archive. Also, the government created very useful yearly

reports and publications, and the National Library of New

Zealand has digitized and OCR'd all of those. So basically, you

can run a keyword search through those reports. So I--spending

hours and hours and hours doing searches for where prisoners

were working, keeping a spreadsheet, doing that type of

thing, searching newspapers as well, but also expanding my

research into obviously secondary sources. But I tried

to do various site visits as well, so I really wanted to make

this a social and environmental history because one of the

things I had realized, and it was a gap in my practice, was

that the environment tended to be this kind of scene, this

nice, pretty scene where the events of human activity

unfolded, and I quickly realized that the environment was as much

of a protagonist in this history as people. Like it really

determined where these mostly men, because women did do prison

labor, but it was the kind of domestic drudgery within the

prison. The environment really determined where people were

working, so it meant that I needed to go out to these sites

and spaces. So, for example, in the central North Island of New

Zealand, before prisoners were sent out there to plant forests,

they were basically a tussock wasteland, and now they are

endless, endless hectares and acres of pine plantations. So

you know, I made sure to visit that site, to drive through it

to get a sense of what it was like. Tried to visit various

military harbor fortifications where prisoners had been sent to

work. So to answer your question, I guess it was just a

long slog of trying everything that I could think of to try and

uncover where these people were working and keep a good record

of that. And yeah, that's where that spreadsheet came in handy

because I could organize it by geographical region. I could

filter it by type of work, and then have the sources available

to me when I wanted to maybe come to write the chapter on

roads or the chapter on military fortifications or forest

plantations.

Yeah, I really love how much environment is

central to this book, both both in the sense that, of course,

humans and their labor is is changing their environment, but

also the environment itself. Of course, you write about the

agency of that environment and how, you know, it resists the

labor of humans or or alters it. How did you make sure that the

environment was part of your narrative? How did you kind of

keep that thread in the heart of your story?

I read a lot of environmental history and

historians and the kind of work they were doing, the more than

kind of human histories that have been flourishing in the

last decade or so, and tried to see what they did, and just

tried to take that comment to heart that the environment

wasn't just a backdrop that you know all of our activity is

bundled into these relationships, this web of life,

I guess, as Jason Moore writes about. And I found the the model

that Thomas G. Andrews had written about, he called them

workscapes. That was really useful for me to to keep that in

mind. That like where this activity was happening,

boundaries, so called binaries between the human and extra

human world were melting down. So there was that kind of

philosophical edge or approach, but also recognizing that where

prisoners were being sent to work was really shaped by an

environment. So, for example, Aotearoa is a pretty small

island in the South Pacific, we're surrounded by coastline,

water is very important. And in the 1860s and 1870s, the

government basically decided to employ prisoners at harbor

reclamation works and also building roads, and what they

did was in Dunedin, which is in the southern part of New

Zealand, they refurbished these old unseaworthy ships or hulks

and basically took the overcrowded prison population

from Dunedin, popped them on these hulks, and then each day

they would build this road around the harbor, and they

would move the ship every week as they progressed and

progressed along the harbor front. And I quickly realized

that you know they wouldn't be making that road and using that

hulk if it wasn't for the the maritime environment and the

harbor environment that they were working in, similarly with

the forests, you know, this so-called wasteland, this

unproductive empty space was wanted to be improved by the

government. And that's a word that came out a lot in my

research was this idea of improvement, and the the

original meaning of that word is to make profit from land. So

it's not necessarily to better yourself, you know, through

education or or career choices or whatnot, but was distinctly

linked to the environment. So keeping that lens in mind has

been really useful for the for the research as well, and so

yeah, knowing that these so-called wasted spaces, these

unpredictable spaces, were really important to the state

and for capital meant that I had to always keep the environment

front and center, and like you said, the environment resisted.

Forestry workers, you know, had their eyeballs scratched, and

and they would hurt themselves, or they would, you know, one of

the workscapes in the central plateau that I talked about is

has like mud pools and volcanoes, and and so workers

were having to navigate those types of environments, as well

as the kind of supervision and and the labor being forced upon

them as well. So yeah, in the end, it wasn't hard to keep the

environment front and center because it was so, the whole

point was to alter the environment, and we now in

current times are benefiting from that change in terms of our

cityscapes and the financial flows through the city and the

multi billion dollar forestry industry that Aotearoa is really

known for. So yeah, like you said, the environment became

really important, and it was not hard to keep that front and

center.

I also loved in this book how much you tell

fascinating but individual stories often of prisoners,

which both really you know keep them from being sort of just

anonymous figures, but also makes for great reading. Right?

These these stories are are interesting and and connect to

the reader, but you also weave them into this larger context to

the very strong argument that you're making in a way that

feels incredibly impressive to me, but comes off as effortless

when you read it. I assume it is not effortless in the production

of it. How do you think about putting that narrative together,

keeping one part of the book from overwhelming the other?

Yeah, thank you. I do think about that a lot. I

think a lot about plot and character and narrative, and you

know I've learned that from reading writers such as Adam

Hochschild and Marcus Rediker and and others who are weaving

these kind of histories of people into wider arguments. And

I think we all relate on a kind of deeply human level to

people's experiences. So I think about who we're going to follow

in this particular section or chapter, and I I really resist

that tendency that, and I've done this as well, is that you

start a chapter with a very juicy example from a person, and

then that you, we never hear from them again. Like that's it.

It's just the opening paragraph. Instead, I think about okay,

where does this person? Is their experience generalizable or is

it unique? Can can it tell a wider story for my chapter or

the argument that I'm making? Can I follow them along? Are

they intertwined with other characters who pop up later? And

so I try and I guess make them a bit of an organizing framework,

and try and honor their experience as well. You know,

like thinking about histories from below and trying to maybe

make those who aren't generally the focus of history generally

have a bit more limelight in my story as much as I can if I can

find those sources, but you know I guess it's kind of like that

journalistic technique where you maybe do a, you start with

someone and then you might branch off a bit to the wider

context or the argument and then you bring them back in and and

then branch out again. So yeah, it is thinking quite strongly

about how to do that, and I mean maybe one example I could use is

one chapter in Blood and Dirt looks at the labor of prisoners

across the wider Pacific, so the countries that New Zealand

colonized with its own empire, and so I start with New Ayan

workers on Maldon Island, which is sort of between you know

Hawaii and Nuay or Rarotonga the Cook Islands, and so I use the

example of Esseni, who is a worker from Nu'ui. He goes to

this island with his Nuayan comrades as a paid laborer, and

he ends up fatally wounding another worker, and is arrested

and sent back to New Zealand. And so I use this example to

open the chapter, but then I also follow him as he's

navigating or being kind of sent through the criminal justice

system, and as we go back to prison labor in Neway, as he

finds himself back in New Zealand itself, passing through

the central plateau where these other prisoners are planting the

forests. So that connects to the chapter that's about to follow,

and then I finish with his experience as well. So, yeah,

thinking very strongly about where and how these people are

going to frame the story, and I don't want to trivialize their

experience as well. You know, thinking very strongly about how

to do these stories justice, but like you said, I think it works

where you do follow a protagonist, a real human

person, and they become like a framing principle for for the

argument as well, and then of course there are chapters and

texts where you are elaborating on on your wider argument and

bringing in sources. But again, not being a historian, quote

unquote, means like I've never had to really do a literature

review in my books. You know, it's there, it's in the

footnotes. I have worked with the scholarship. I know what

people are writing, but I have my dad in mind. He's like 65. He

likes reading histories of Dave Grohl and musicians. He might

read a Stephen King novel. If I put a literature review in front

of him, he's not going to pass the first chapter. So again,

thinking about how I can bring the reader along this story to

make the argument without boring people, and yeah, I like to

think that even though I'm writing narrative nonfiction and

bringing people along with the story, there is a deeper,

rigorous, and often political argument through the book as

well.

I also like, I mean, maybe maybe part of that

sort of keeping your dad in mind, keeping that reader in

mind is the answer to this next question. But I love in this

book too how you you dip into the narrative occasionally. You

you certainly don't center yourself in the narrative. It's

not even framed from your perspective like sometimes

historians do it. But when it makes sense, you kind of just

pop in and you note like oh I went here and it it was like

this and it it works really smoothly I I really appreciated

it and and not to you know offer a spoiler but then in the

epilogue you have sort of a piece from your perspective and

it feels sort of lovely as you're reading you get these

glimpses of this narrator and then we really get to see you at

the end. How do you think about positioning yourself as a

narrator when you're writing?

Yeah, I mean, at one point, I wondered whether

this book might be a bit not like a travel log, but you know,

it's me bringing the researcher along as I discover the the

deeper layers of the places that I'm writing about, and pretty

early on, I decided I didn't want to do that because

sometimes I found when I read those types of books, the

narrative is too much in the story, and and it kind of takes

away from the other parts of the text. And sometimes it works

really well; like people do pull that off really well, and I

admire those types of writing, but in the end, I decided not to

do that. But I think you're right. I think it's not

necessarily a conscious decision. But if I'm excited

about something I've learned and I want to share that with the

reader, and I think it also does bring in a little bit of variety

as well. But like you said, that's kind of why I am more of

a focus in the epilogue, and and I wanted to do that to bring it

home to people that like if all of these sites that I visited

was impacted by prison labor, you know, look at how my

publisher of my third book, the grounds they work on, was

sculpted by prisoners. Look how when I'm having my tea break and

looking across at the hills from the staff room, I can see the

trees that were planted by prisoners. Like, and that's just

me. What about you? Like, can you think about the sites maybe

you've visited and never known that prisoners had worked there?

So again, I think it's just, I guess, like a narrative thing,

but a way to hit home the story. But yeah, you're right. I do

drop myself in every so often, but I'm conscious that it can

sometimes distract from the narrative and maybe jar people

out of the the story as the reading. So I don't do it all

the time, but I do think it is, you know, it is useful for us to

be in these stories because I've never pretended to be objective

or neutral.

I do want to talk a little bit more because

you mentioned earlier, it's come up that your histories tend to

be histories from below, stories of of labor, maybe radicalism,

but people who don't often figure prominently in archives,

which of course means that their stories aren't as obvious in

traditional archives. You have to sort of hunt for them, read

against the grain or along the grain. What draws you to the

stories, and how do you tease them out from sources?

What I love is the trying to find those

stories, like, you know, I enjoy writing. I really do, and I'm

lucky that it seems to stick on the page. But the difficulty of

trying to find the information is what I really enjoy. Like

that's kind of the the driver of what I'm interested in. And

yeah, you do definitely have to, like I said earlier, think about

who would have created the information I need here. Like,

where would this person's information be buried, or is

there a source, or maybe an equivalent story that I can draw

upon that might illuminate this particular person's case? And it

is really tricky because, as you know, like sometimes there's

just nothing about these people thinking about the kind of

nameless laborers that just ended up in the prison system

through drunkenness or vagrancy, which were the two highest

crimes in Aotearoa's history in the 19th century. Sometimes you

just have a name, and they're just on a jail return, and and

you'll have nothing else, and so you have to kind of tease out

maybe what they were doing through other sources, or you

know if they were a seaman, then what is the experience on board

ships, and where can I learn that from elsewhere? So yeah,

sometimes you do have to kind of fill in the gaps a little bit,

but I mean, I that's the beauty of history from below. I think

is that it's both a methodology. So you're thinking about where

to find stuff. You're thinking about linkages really

importantly, like where are the connections here, where are the

sources. But I also think it's um it's a it's a sympathy as

well. So you kind of bring a kind of political mindset to the

work, and so yeah, you are looking for material, but also

drawing on that wider argument to kind of fill in the gaps as

well. It can be really hard to do, and you know, thinking

about. So I'm currently working on a book that involves the

rural countryside, and so many people, especially women, are

absent. That you know, they're just their husbands' names. It's

really hard to find out anything more about them, and so you look

to feminist scholars, scholars of gender, to see how they've

done it, you know, and and look to see what other sources might

be available. So, yeah, it's it's a mix of doing that primary

sources, reading sources like you said against the grain, you

know, who's missing here. If I'm reading a police report about

this particular person, what is the perspective they're bringing

about this person compared to maybe their understanding of the

event that's happened, why they've ended up in the source,

and also being really conscious that you know often if you are

using court records or criminal justice records, that it is very

skewed towards a particular viewpoint, and it and to kind of

unearthing particular people, and that you're still going to

have a whole swag of others that just aren't in the sources

because they haven't rubbed up, say, against the the state and

had their name recorded.

I'd like to ask you a little bit of some

practical questions, I guess about publishing. You've written

and published five books with a range of presses, as you

mentioned to me. I'd love to hear more about them. How do you

how do you find a press? What what's your experience been like

in different places?

Yeah, so I mean, my first two books were, well,

the first book was with like a small kind of workers' co-op,

like a radical press based here in New Zealand, which fitted the

Wobblies book perfectly. And I had a, I mean, we had quite a

close working and collaboration. Like I pretty much did

everything, helped design it, and and you know I could even go

and work on the press if I wanted and and literally put the

book together like you know almost think like a zine shop or

a info shop. It was kind of on that level, and then my second

book was with AK Press, which is like the anarchist publisher

worldwide, and so it was kind of a larger extension of that

smaller model, and it was just really nice, really

collaborative. The whole ethos is against hierarchy, so you're

really involved as the author. You're still working with an

editor and designer and all that stuff, which was lovely. And

then my third book was within a university press. Obviously,

when you move from kind of smaller publishers into a bigger

press, then you get a lot more support and publicity. They were

really open to me being involved in terms of designing the cover,

and you know they help. They were okay with me getting the

kind of puff quotes or you know the reviews from various

academics that I'd sent the text to working with their designer.

But what they brought, I guess, compared to the, those smaller

publishers was probably a bit more of a rigorous process. So

you had a proper editor, you had a proper proofreader and

indexer, you had a publicist, you had that network of

university distribution, and that was very cool. So I guess

got to experience a bit more of a how a press works and the

publicity that comes with that. And then my last two books were

with Bridget Williams Books, so they are an independent

publisher but a commercial publisher. So you know they're

out to make a buck, and so they are basically supporting you as

much as you can in creating an amazing product, and then

supporting you to talk about that book, so that was amazing.

Like had the works thrown at it. the The physical book is

hardcover. It's got hundreds of photographs. The two designers

say-- two designers, which was amazing--worked on, you know,

the chapter spreads, these full color designs. Had one of New

Zealand's best cover designers work on it. So yeah, it's been a

really amazing experience to to have all those. And in saying

that, Kate, like if I approach a publisher and and I'll and no

one wants to publish it, I'm just going to put it out anyway,

and I have done that. Like I will just design a PDF and pop

it out there for the world to read because that's that kind of

DIY ethos that I've brought to it. So I hope that doesn't sound

flippant because I know it's really hard to get published,

and it's getting harder in New Zealand. We have a very small

readership and a small market, but in the end, I'm just going

to do it anyway. And yeah, so it's been really nice to have an

experience from the kind of radical end right through to a

kind of independent commercial publisher. I've never worked

with you know one of the big fives or whatnot, but yeah, it's

been, it's it's always matched kind of where I am as a person

and what I want to achieve with the book, which has been really,

really nice.

You, when you reached out to me, you correctly

pointed out that I have never had an author from New Zealand

on the show before, and and it occurred to me in reading this

that I'm not sure I've ever come across a specifically New

Zealand history. I'm I'm I'm sure that there are New Zealand

histories, but they have not been part of my education, part

of my my view. And to be fair, I have not been actively seeking

them either. But do you feel like New Zealand's history is

overlooked in the field of history more broadly? Is there

is there a disconnect between New Zealand and the rest of

history?

I'm not necessarily the expert to talk

about this, but I mean part of the answer to that is like why

would you look down to this small little nation in the

bottom of the South Pacific, you know? But people do, and we do

produce some really amazing histories and have produced

amazing historians as well. So I think it's probably dependent on

your field of study. I would say, to give the listeners

context, First Nations peoples, Tangata, Finua, Indigenous

peoples of this place, Māori, have been here for maybe 1000

years, and Pakeha or Europeans kind of started to arrive in

Aotearoa from the sort of 17, 1780s, 1790s, so you know,

pretty young place comparatively in terms of history, and even

within New Zealand, there's this idea that New Zealand history is

just really boring, like nothing happens here. We we don't

actually have history taught in our schools, it's only just

become mandatory as a curriculum, and so I never

studied history at school. I learnt about it later on in

life. I mean, I had an interest in history, but students in

Aotearoa will learn about the civil rights movement in the

U.S. They'll learn about the Russian Revolution. They'll

learn about Tudor England. That's changing now, you know,

because New Zealand is very much a settler colonial state.

There's, in terms of those fields, like, anyone who's

worked in settler colonialism will know that New Zealand has

interesting parallels with, say, Canada and the treaty experience

for First Nations there, or quite a different experience to,

say, Australia, so I think you know New Zealand and Aotearoa

does have a really interesting history, and people do draw upon

it. But it's often in comparative studies, or maybe

the wider Pacific. Like, yeah, I can totally understand why you

wouldn't sit down and read a history of New Zealand, and you

know there's a trend towards writing those big macro

histories, it's kind of come around again. Like every

practice, there's new histories coming out of about New Zealand,

but yeah, it's a pretty niche place, and and we do work in a

pretty small historical environment. There's maybe four

universities. I think if you took all the university teachers

together in the university, it's probably, you know, 30 to 40

people. I don't know. It's it's pretty small. So again, that's

that also drives my practice because I want to show people

that actually New Zealand does have a very interesting history.

It does have parallels to wider events and how capital is

unfolding, and the environment is being modified across the

globe, and also that it means I want to write in an interesting

way, so that maybe students and others will want to learn about

the history of this place.

Your writing is just so great. Who do you read

as inspiration?

Thank you. I mean, I I really appreciate

that. Having not been a trained historian, like I have a

master's in information studies, and when I studied fine arts at

at university, we did arts papers. So I always enjoyed

crafting essays, and I even did American studies and learned

about rock and roll and Elvis and Cyborgs and all sorts of

interesting things, but I just read so widely and try and think

about how people create the argument, their narrative. I

read a lot of fiction as well, but someone's books who really

helped me in the beginning was Adam Hochschild. So he he's

written books such as King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the

Chains, to End All Wars about the first World War, and I just

really admired how he seemed to create the stories where you're

following one person and suddenly they're interacting

with another person who then pops up elsewhere, and that it's

not random. Like he's thought about those networks and those

connections, and yeah, writers who really think about scene

setting and place. So I think he gives one example of when he's

writing about abolitionists in the UK, and they're meeting at a

pub, and he wanted to experience. He wanted the reader

to experience what it was like being there. So he read a whole

in newspapers and realized it was right next to a tannery. So

there might be a strong smell of urine, and you know, like

thought about the courtyard they're working through, walking

through. Sorry. So yeah, seeing how researchers like that do it

and bring in those experiential kind of references to the scene

and to the place and to what the people are experiencing. Yeah, I

just try and read really widely, and so as well as on the topic

I'm researching, but just very randomly as well. So I think it

is really useful to read widely and to read fiction and to keep

an open mind and to think about plot and character and narrative.

What's the most influential writing advice

you've ever gotten?

That's a really hard question, and because I

have read so widely, and I've had been lucky to have like

mentors who've helped me, especially when I was writing

these first books and felt like an imposter, and that I didn't

know how to do it, and I had great support from other

historians. So yeah, it's been such good advice given over the

years. But one thing I always remember is just advice someone

is they just said, "Go for a walk." No, go for a walk.

If things aren't working, or you just need to take a break, or

you want to plan something out, go for a walk, and that's really

stuck with me. When I was writing Dead Letters, when I was

getting up at six a.m. to try and finish the book, there was

some advice I read from James Kelman, the the Scottish

novelist and Booker Prize winner, and he said, "Make the

best hours your own, and not the ones you sell to your employer."

And they really stuck with me. I was like, "Yeah, I am going to

get up early. I'm going to dedicate an hour to finishing

this book, and I might be tired at work, but who cares? Because

the book's important. So that's been really good advice as well.

But the one that really I hold to heart is Marcus Rediker's

advice that you can tell a big story through a little story,

and I think that answers your question about why I choose to

follow people or to use examples that then illustrate a bigger

argument around, say, capitalism or the state, or you know, by by

following a little story and following that through, you can

use that to illustrate a much bigger topic or a bigger story.

So yeah, that's a really good piece of advice. I think tell a

big story through a little story.

Absolutely, I'd love to hear about the next

project you're working on. I know you're already deep in deep

in the middle of book six. What's that story?

Yeah, so I'm actually writing the last

chapter now. So it's tentatively titled "Farms Aflame: The Secret

History of Rural Arson," and it's following arsonists in the

19th century who burnt down harvested crops. Harvesting

methods have changed over time. But in the 19th century, you

basically gathered up the wheat, the oats, the barley. You made

these big stacks in the field, and you let them dry for two to

three months. And so they became a very appealing target for

disgruntled farm workers, but also a very lucrative target for

insurance fraud. And so the economic depression, the Great

Depression of the long 19th century and 1880s, had a massive

impact on Aotearoa. So that's what I'm working on. I'm

following the dark figures in the archive to see what I can

find about arson and what it tells about this kind of

mythology of exceptionalism and that New Zealand was this very

settled place where people came with nothing onto the land and

then made it and look how happy everything is afterwards. So

yeah, it's it's been a very interesting project and I'm

hoping to finish it and then in the next month or so.

Well, I it sounds very interesting to me. I

look forward to reading it as my second book of New Zealand

history. Jared Davidson, thank you so much for joining me on

Drafting the Past. Thanks for being willing to talk with me

about your writing process.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for joining Jared Davidson and me

for this episode of Drafting the Past. You can find links to

Jared's books as well as all the books he recommended in the show

notes. Be sure to visit draftingthepast.com to find show

notes and transcripts of every episode. And while you're there,

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content starting next month. I can't wait to show you what

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of history. After all, friends don't let friends write boring

history.