Heavy metal: Forced labour, commodity frontiers and highways through Aotearoa’s central plateau

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Heavy metal: Forced labour, commodity frontiers and highways through Aotearoa’s central plateau Jared Davidson

Tongariro National Park, located in the central plateau of Aotearoa’s Te Ika-a-Māui (North Island), is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the country’s oldest national park. It was also the site of several prisons in the twentieth century – temporary roadmaking camps that became permanent sites of incarceration. These prison camps were established to forge highways through the central plateau, opening the area and its resources to circuits of capital accumulation. This included tourism, fostered by an extra-human environment that featured active volcanos and vistas of ecological diversity. Te kāhui maunga – the chiefly cluster of mountains that included Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe, Ruapehu, Pīhanga, Hauhungatahi and Kakaramea – and surrounding ecosystems were a boon for the settler government, and the rhetoric of a national park for the public good justified the aggressive enclosure of Māori land and the forced labour of unfree workers. ‘Protected area creation is a particular form of primitive accumulation that involves both enclosure and dispossession of land and natural resources’, writes Alice B. Kelly.1 As a result, the work of the incarcerated within the central plateau is a useful way to explore the socioecological nature of capitalism.

Building on my publication Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, this research charts the construction of State Highways 4, 46, 47 and 48 through the central plateau (and Tongariro National Park in particular).2 However, this is more than just a story of unfree roadmaking.

Viewed through the lens of infrastructural and commodity frontiers, these highways illustrate the inseparable nature of capital and the state, imprisonment and ‘improvement’, colonisation and commodity frontiers. That’s because capitalism is much more than just a market economy based on waged labour. To separate prisons and their carceral geographies from ‘the economy’ is to miss how seemingly distinct social relations are mutually constitutive within capitalism.

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The economy, law and the state are moments in a capitalist totality, or as Marx wrote, distinctions within a unity. They are ‘forms of appearance of one and the same definite social reality.’3 As Nate Holdren and Rob Hunter argue, ‘there is no economy per se that is distinct from society. The existence and endurance of production and circulation are predicated upon the existence and endurance of other social relations.’ As such, ‘the reproduction of capitalist production is impossible without the reproduction of the totality of social relations.’4 Prisons form part of capital’s drive to turn all of life into work for its own reproduction. They help reproduce the fundamental relationship between capital and labour on an ever-expanding scale.5 And it’s no surprise that forced labour is a feature of commodity frontiers, for the appropriation of unpaid work/energy/raw materials are their raison d'etre. As Benjamin Marley writes, commodity frontiers are a moment in the constant rewriting ‘of the productive and reproductive activities of human and extra-human natures, a fundamental environment-making reconfiguration of how humans and the rest of nature are organized.’6 As we’ll see, commodity frontiers are useful for ‘understanding the appropriation of land, dispossession and displacement, the exploitation of cheap labour and how value-in-nature (including humans) co-produced cheap energy.’7 By exploring prisoner-made highways in this way, I hope to show that the appropriation of prison labour (and cheap nature more generally) is not outside of ‘real’ capitalist social relations or the economy. I also want to highlight the fact that the colonisation of the central plateau was (and is) imbricated in commodity frontiers and ongoing primitive accumulation – they are not separate and cannot be studied separately.8 It’s worth saying this again: the reproduction of capitalist production is impossible without the reproduction of the totality of socioecological relations. The critique of political economy as a critical social theory allows us to make these connections explicit where narrow definitions of the economy and settler colonialism cannot.9 This explains the level of abstraction found in Part I, which explores the theoretical frameworks underpinning the paper: capitalism as an ecological regime, cheap nature, and commodity and infrastructure frontiers. Part II sets the scene in terms of Māori dispossession, economic development and infrastructure within the central plateau, linking the national park district to a wider set of value logics. Part III tracks the prison-made highways within the district, before analysing this roadmaking in more detail in Part IV. The view from above is a vision of progress emptied of class antagonism and colonial violence, of public works and preservation for the national good. The view from below highlights the experience of iwi/hapū Māori and unfree workers, whose lands and labour were appropriated against their will.

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Map of Te Ika-a-Māui’s central plateau and Tongariro National Park in particular, showing modern-day townships, highways and railways. Waimarino township is now called National Park. Waitangi Tribunal.

I Capitalism is not just an economic system, not just a social system, but an ecological regime. As the environmental historian Jason W. Moore writes, ‘one can no more extract “nature” from the constitution of capitalism than one could remove law, class struggle, the modern state, science, or culture.’10 As an ecological regime, capitalism does not just use or abuse an external ‘nature’ separate from human social relations (although it certainly does this). Rather, capital accumulation, power and the co-constitution of nature unfolds within a relational unity.11 Capitalism-in-nature is dialectical,

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an evolving mosaic of interdependent flows, forces, conditions, and relations. This means that the accumulation of capital and the pursuit of power in the modern world-system do not have an ecological dimension, but rather are ways of human organization moving, representing, channelling, and reworking a singular metabolism: the web of life.12 Within the web of life, human activity is ‘ontologically coincident with, and constituted through, specifically bundled relations with the rest of nature.’13 As Adam David Morton writes, this relational approach ‘avoids the distinction of Nature versus Society, or viewing the environment as an object based on its interaction with society as externally related. Instead, the philosophy of internal relations guides us through the inner ties of class, capital, Nature to address how frontiers of appropriation are produced and reproduced in the web of life.’14 In this reading, the valorisation of capital is much broader than the exploitation of labour power via the wage relation. Moore – following Marxist feminists and value theorists – argues that the generalisation of commodity production proceeds through an expansive web of relations ‘whose scope and scale extends well beyond production.’15 ‘The history of capitalism,’ writes Moore, ‘flows through islands of commodity production, developing within oceans of unpaid work/energy.’16 The appropriation of unpaid work/energy/raw materials within the circuit of capital ‘foots the bill for endless accumulation’, a process that is premised on the availability of cheap inputs (what Moore calls cheap nature).17 Capital ‘must not only ceaselessly accumulate and revolutionize commodity production; it must ceaselessly search for, and find ways to produce, Cheap Natures: a rising stream of low-cost food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials.’18 These inputs are not external to accumulation through the exploitation of waged labour but are an essential component in the reproduction of capitalism. ‘Strategies of commodification and exploitation can work only to the extent that uncommodified natures are somehow put to work, for free or very low cost.’19 In other words, the appropriation of unpaid work/energy – both human and extra-human – are core to capitalist social relations.

What does Moore mean by cheap? As Michael Niblett writes in World Literature and Ecology, cheap nature is not ‘to be construed narrowly in terms of price alone. Rather, what is at stake is its value composition and the complex set of relations determining this, relations that implicate wider issues of class struggle, geopolitical power, and social domination.’20 The process of cheapening is core to capital’s valorisation: On the one hand, capitalism lives and dies on the expanded reproduction of capital: value-inmotion. The substance of value is abstract social labour, or socially necessary labour-time. On the other hand, this production of value is particular – it does not value everything, only labour power in the circuit of capital – and therefore rests upon a series of devaluations. Plenty of work – the majority of work in the orbit of capitalism – does not register as valuable.21

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As Niblett explains (and this is worth quoting in full): Moore casts this relationship between value and that which is devalued in terms of a dialectic between exploitation and appropriation. Exploitation implicates the realm of socially necessary labour-time as the substance and measure of value; appropriation refers to the various processes through which unpaid work/energy is identified, secured, and mobilized in service to value production. Such un- or de-valued work includes the life-making capacities of extrahuman nature—the biophysical processes through which soil fertility is maintained or fossil fuels produced, for example—as well as certain work performed by humans, such as the domestic labour (typically gendered feminine) required to reproduce the worker on a daily basis. To the extent that this work remains outside the immediate circuit of capital, yet within reach of capitalist power, it can be appropriated in service to commodity production at no or relatively little cost. Such unpaid work has been fundamental to the expanded reproduction of capital: it enables the creation of “cheap natures”—use-values produced with a below-average value composition—without which “the costs of production would rise, and accumulation would slow”.22 To employ the language of Amy De’Ath, the appropriation of cheap nature is not outside of the sphere of value production but a negative dialectic internal to the capital-labour relation.23 There are obvious resonances between Moore’s work and geographers who have framed similar processes in terms of combined and uneven development, accumulation by dispossession, first and second nature, formal and real subsumption etc. As Matthew Ryan notes in his thesis on Australian commodity frontiers, an advantage of Moore’s work is that it is firmly situated within value theory and the critique of political economy.24 It also takes historical specificity seriously. Rather than an allencompassing nature that is both transhistorical and ’out there’ (what he calls ‘Nature in general’), Moore writes of historical natures that are both producers and products of capitalist development: Historical nature is not an output of capitalism. Capitalism does not produce an external ‘historical’ nature according to its needs (a functionalist position). Nor does capitalism simply respond to external changes in nature (a determinist position). Rather, phases of capitalist development are at once cause and consequence of fundamental reorganizations of worldecology. Both ‘capital’ and ‘nature’ acquire new historical properties through these reorganizations: hence the couplet historical capitalism/historical nature may be given real historical content. Historical natures are, in other words, a dance of the dialectic between part (modes of humanity) and whole (the web of life) through which particular limits and opportunities come to the fore.25 Studying how these limits and opportunities unfold in time and space is why commodity frontiers feature prominently in world ecology. But as Niblett argues, defining what commodity frontiers are is harder than studying what they do – especially with the baggage of a term like frontier. Are commodity frontiers a logic or a specific site? Are they zones, edges or boundary spaces? And should we understand them as a linear phenomenon that expands from core to periphery?

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For Moore, commodity frontiers are not just the extension of commodity production and exchange to uncommodified spaces or materials (a common misunderstanding of commodity frontier theory, he writes). In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore writes that commodity frontiers are: bundles of uncapitalized work/energy that can be mobilized, with minimal capital outlays, in service to rising labour productivity in the commodity sphere. Such frontiers can be found on the outer geographical boundaries of the system, as in the early modern sugar/slave complex, or they can be found within the heartlands of commodification, as in the proletarianization of women across the long twentieth century.26 Tied dialectically to accumulation, commodity frontiers ‘extend the zone of appropriation faster than the zone of commodification’, shifting the balance of accumulation towards the appropriation of cheap nature.27 So, when Moore uses the term frontier, he names ‘a set of relations or, more accurately, the relationship and constantly shifting borderline between different logics.’28 These logics have clear spatial dimensions but in ways that complicate binaries of inside/outside, core/periphery, productive/reproductive. As a result, commodity frontiers exhibit ‘certain recurring logistics and rhythms (boom and bust, for example), but the specific instantiation of these will necessarily be different in any given place or context. In this sense, commodity frontiers are profoundly dialectical and, as such, demand to be thought dialectically.’29 Ultimately, what commodity frontiers describe is capitalism’s logic of separation unfolding in specific time and space. As Ryan notes, ‘capitalism does not have frontiers, rather it exists only through frontiers; an understanding of the frontier is not mere prehistory to the establishment of “pure” capitalist relations, but rather is instructive of the forces that constitute and drive capitalism, then and now.’30 To paraphrase Werner Bonefeld, ongoing primitive accumulation manifests as frontiers; frontiers are capitalism’s presupposition and premise.31 Frontiers constitute the ongoing reproduction of capitalist social relations within historical nature.

Like commodity frontiers, infrastructure is increasingly viewed as part of capital’s need ‘to open up and connect, control and shrink.’32 More than just projects of modernisation and progress, infrastructures, argue the editors of Radical History Review, are historically-produced social systems that are embedded in lived relations of struggle.33 Infrastructures are rife with resistance and ‘prone to political and logistical frictions’, despite grand narratives of development that make infrastructure appear ‘smooth, seamless, and even inevitable.’34 Twentieth-century state projects that channelled work/energy in particular directions were no less extractive than commodity frontiers. In fact, some scholars of the infrastructural frontier have made the connection between the two explicit.

Writing that infrastructures co-constitute human relations and socio-political systems, Peter Schouten and Jan Bachmann note how ‘the brute power of infrastructure also extends to domination over and extraction from the “natural” environment.’35 Pockets of territory beyond the infrastructural reach of the state ‘are often designated as subversive or unproductive spaces’ but, at the same time, are opportunities for expansion and incorporation.36 Despite being ‘clad in a beneficent language of “development”, “upgrading”, and “modernization”’, Schouten and Bachmann argue that:

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this language hardly softens the blow of the infrastructural power it conceals for people whose livelihoods are upturned through the ensuing dislocations and disruptions. Such “frontiers” are never finished; once incorporated with the most rudimentary infrastructures, new infrastructural developments create more realms of life to be incorporated.37 An example of this in practice is the use of public works legislation by the state to take (with or without compensation) land for the national good. In Aotearoa, public works acts have been used by successive governments to dispossess Māori of their land, access cheap nature and develop infrastructure. Cathy Marr notes how they were used for mining, forestry, scenic, tourist, hydro and geothermal purposes – not to mention roading – across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The national good that justified such dispossession, writes Marr, equated to Pākehā settler interests at the expense of Māori.38 The use of unfree labour for public infrastructure often went hand-in-hand. In fact, unfree labour is a common feature of infrastructure and commodity frontiers the world over – and roadmaking in particular. From 1840 onwards, male chain gangs were used to construct and repair roads across Aotearoa, from major urban centres to far-flung projects at Milford Sound, Rangitoto and the central plateau. As prisoners were installed in Tongariro National Park, governments in the Americas, Africa and Asia were harnessing forced labour for roadbuilding. From California to colonial Senegal to Canada, mobile road camps for prisoners enabled states to construct highways on the cheap and expand zones of appropriation – all while appropriating the unpaid labour of incarcerated workers.

For Niblett, this dynamic is core to the commodity frontier. Uneven combinations ‘of advanced technologies with relatively archaic social modalities (forced labour, for example)’ is a hallmark of the ‘dialectic of exploitation and appropriation through which commodity frontiers operate.’39 The use of unfree labour for roadmaking existed alongside and complemented ‘free’ wage labour. The two were not mutually exclusive.40 The unpaid work/energy of human and extra-human nature features prominently in the central plateau. Its appropriation was tied to national (and global) logics of economic development, or more specifically, the valorisation of capital and the reproduction of capitalist social relations as a totality.

It is to the historical nature of the central plateau that we now turn.

II The period of sustained capital expansion into the central plateau began during the 1870s and 1880s.

These decades witnessed a massive recomposition of global capital, shaped by the Long Depression, and local crises of accumulation. The relatively narrow base of exportable products (and the rapid exhaustion of raw materials) meant local commodity frontiers were prone to booms and busts.41 As the value of wool declined and pastoralism appeared uneconomic, parts of Aotearoa – especially Canterbury, Otago and Southland – experienced a massive wheat boom. Land dedicated to wheat production jumped from 13,200 acres in 1874 to 240,000 acres in 1895.42 However, the cheap nature of wheat was quickly overshadowed by a surge in dairy farming, spurred by global refrigeration technology and the enclosure of Māori land. Vast tracts were converted to Pākehā farming in this period, and by 1920 four commodities accounted for 80 per cent of Aotearoa’s exports: wool, butter, meat and cheese.43

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The development of state infrastructure such as railways was also on the rise during this time.

Economic recession, the appropriation of cheap nature and the building of the main trunk line through the central plateau spurred aggressive land purchasing in the district. As the Waitangi Tribunal notes, ‘opening up the central North Island was considered to be an important step towards ending the recession and encouraging economic growth.’44 Lake Taupō and Rotorua featured prominently in such schemes. The unique ecology of what became Tongariro National Park also contained huge scenic and tourist potential, and settler governments were itching to unlock it.

Claiming that ‘the volcanic and thermal areas in the central North Island were worthless in Māori ownership’, in 1874 Premier William Fox argued that ‘with government ownership, possibly accompanied by government-facilitated private enterprise, the land could prove extremely lucrative to the nation.’45 There were two major obstacles, however. First, the area was extremely difficult to access. The lack of rail and roads meant the district ‘was practically a closed frontier to white people.’46 While the scenic properties of the central plateau could not be distributed to consumers because they were fixed, this was resolved ‘through a spatiotemporal reconfiguration, by bringing consumers to the commodity.’47 Railways and roads were crucial to the production of Tongariro National Park as a tourist leisure space.

Secondly, this was not an empty alpine wilderness. Te kāhui maunga and its surrounding forests, wetlands, streams, lakes, and geothermal outlets, were entwined with at least three major confederations of iwi/hapū Māori.48 Though permanent occupation was sparse due to the cold environment, the whakapapa, use rights and wāhi tapu of multiple kin groups were woven throughout the landscape. To appropriate this indigenous ecology, the state needed title to indigenous land. And as the Tribunal found, a national park was a bonus rather than the cause.

According to several iwi/hapū claimants to the National Park District Inquiry, the Crown – with its myth of the mountain peaks being ‘gifted’ to the nation by Horonuku Te Heuheu Tūkino IV – has distorted the sequence of events. ‘It was not a case of the government being resolved on setting up a national park, and then acquiring land to do it; rather the prime objective was getting title to the land.’49 The so-called gift of Te Heuheu came near the end of the Crown’s aggressive purchasing, which was preceded by armed conflict at Te Pōrere and the threat of confiscation. The Crown’s actions included the usual litany of abuses: pre-emptive purchases, the imposition of debt through survey costs and land court hearings, shady Crown agents and leases, below-market valuations and payments, and compulsory takings for public works and defence purposes. Of the 173,052 acres of Māori land in the district acquired by the Crown before 1900, only 25 per cent was for the national park (which wasn’t formally gazetted until 1907).50 Instead, the Tribunal found that the imperatives of economic growth, land for Pākehā farming, access to native timber and a national railway were the key drivers. In other words, cheap nature and commodity/infrastructure frontiers.

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Cheap nature mapped: this 1909 survey of the Waimarino District shows the stands of native forest within reach of the main trunk line. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Indeed, vast tracts of forests in the district were ripe for felling yet remained ‘locked up’ for want of decent transport; geothermal and hydro energy went ‘untapped’; the raw material of gravel and flax was valuable yet ‘wasted’ until it could be properly appropriated. The completion of the main trunk line in 1908 saw a boom in local sawmills: in 1911 alone, over 1.5 million cubic feet of timber destined for the railway was carted between Raetihi and Ōhakune.51 However, massive stretches of native bush were still burned for farmland due to a lack of decent roads, and sawmill traffic destroyed whatever roads existed faster than they could be maintained. In the early 1900s, local roads within the district ‘were a by-word for mud.’52

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The road to Ōhakune in the 1890s. Alexander Turnbull Library.

As a result, settlers in the district were constantly petitioning the state for more money, more labour and more roads. Deputations visited Wellington; ministers visiting the region were met with urgent requests for roads and bridges.53 The completion of a highway ‘is absolutely necessary to the vital interests of this District’ claimed one petition, ‘particularly in view of the very large tracts of most fertile Native Lands the Government are about to negotiate for, irrespective of many thousands of acres of both heavy timbered and sheep country, which can be brought into almost immediate use.’54 Farmers also clambered for infrastructure. Woolgrowers complained of their cartage expenses – cheap nature wasn’t cheap enough. Besides wool, ‘the extension of pastures and the growing importance and value of butter’ meant dairying became an important feature in the area. Yet ‘poor roading facilities – the existing roads were unmetalled and hence bad in winter – still remained the chief barrier to progress.’55 Pākehā settlers at Raetihi and Ōhakune worked as often on the roads as on their farms, for these bullock cart tracks were crucial to getting their product to market.56 To the west, the Kaitieke timber industry remained stunted due to the lack of roads: in 1911 the Kaitieke County Council was formed in Raurimu to address the issue.57 Nor were there any national roads of significance. There was no State Highway 1 through Taupō, only a pot-holed coach track from Waiōuru (the Desert Road was not finished until the 1940s). Until prisoners built what became SH4, the main routes connecting Auckland and Wellington by motorcar was a road that veered west to New Plymouth or via Rotorua and Napier to the east, avoiding the central plateau. In 1912, when Harold Richards, Ernest Gilling and Arthur Chorlton made the first attempt to drive from Wellington to Auckland via the central plateau, their mud-plagued trip took eight and a half days – and required building a bridge at Oio as the main trunk line service bridge had rotted away.

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This 1920 map of Tongariro National Park and environs shows the newly completed Waimarino-Tokaanu Road. There was no SH4 at this stage, and the road through Waiōuru was an old coach track. Alexander Turnbull Library.

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This was a common story across the country: in 1921, half of Aotearoa’s roads ‘were classed as unmetalled, unformed or as bridle tracks’ and entirely unsuitable for motor traffic.58 ‘The users of roads in this Dominion do so, in most instances, at considerable risk of life, limb and property’ claimed the country’s chief engineer in 1916.59 The scraggy service roads that trailed the main trunk line were considered impassable – especially as motorcars replaced horse-drawn traffic. ‘Higher speeds called for wider roads, better surfaces, easier curves, greater sight distances, and two-way bridges.’60 And as motorcars and lorries travelled further afield, the shared upkeep of roads that traversed more than one district caused headaches (and more than a few inter-council stoushes).61 The scene was set for greater state involvement in roadmaking, especially the arterial roads and highways that would pass through the central plateau.

Because the region had the potential to host the most direct routes between Wellington and Auckland, ‘the Crown, over 12 decades, has used various processes to obtain land for eight State highways, and the North Island main trunk railway.’62 Unsurprisingly, it was Māori in the district that often lost out. As well as outright alienation, when the Native Land Court issued Māori with formal title to their own land, up to five per cent could be set aside for roads – without compensation.63 Section 387 of the Native Land Act 1909 ‘allowed the Crown, without consent of Māori owners and without compensation, to develop roads on Māori customary land. European-owned land was treated far more favourably.’64 The first formal takings of Māori land in the area were for roads, and ‘some 20 blocks of land were taken under the Public Works Acts, without payment of compensation, between November 1885 and February 1925.’65 According to the Tribunal, ‘by 1900, just under 50 per cent of land remained in Māori hands; by 1970 this had reduced to 15 per cent.’66 Iwi/hapū were left virtually landless.

Given the large amount of Crown-owned land in the district and the conjoined needs of capital and state, it’s unsurprising that in early 1914 a roadmaking prison camp was established near Waimarino (now called National Park), the main railway station to the west of te kāhui maunga. The incarcerated were tasked with making a road from here to Tokaanu, which would link up with the road around Lake Taupō and connect to Wairakei and Rotorua. This ‘would provide the public with cheap and easy access to a fine thermal region’, while Tongariro would become ‘the best possible playground’ for Aucklanders and Wellingtonians.67 While the road ‘will afford a comparatively cheap means of access to the magnificent Taupo Lake and mountain districts’, tourism was not the only driver: the road would facilitate commerce and ‘tap a large area of land that can be utilised for settlement.’68 Forced labour would help to unlock the cheap nature of the central plateau.

III Around 64 kilometres long, the rough track between Waimarino and Tokaanu – also known as the Rotoaira Road – was a hodgepodge of half-efforts. As part of his pacification project, Native Minister Donald McLean had tried to employ Māori labour on the road. However, Ngāti Rangi rejected the low rates offered to them.69 As a result, the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road consisted of sections of partially formed dray roads, an old coach road formed by the Armed Constabulary 30 years earlier, and a swampy stretch of at least eight kilometres that was completely unformed.70 In fact, calling the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road a road at this point would be generous, for it was entirely unsuitable for cars and impractical for almost anything else. The odd wooden bridge existed, but typically travellers had to ford the area’s swollen rivers.

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Rotoaira Prison No.2 and the prison-built bridge over Mahuia Rapids, Whakapapanui in 1918. Archives New Zealand.

In May 1914, Rotoaira Prison No.1 was established on the left bank of Mangahuia Stream approximately six kilometres from Waimarino Station (the Mangahuia site is now a Department of Conservation campsite). This became a prison for habitual offenders. A second prison camp, Rotoaira Prison No.2, was built above the Mahuia Rapids at Whakapapanui Stream. It was proclaimed a prison in May 1915. As an advance camp, prisoners here began a major bridge that would cross the Whakapapanui. What they built was an impressive piece of prison engineering, complete with stone foundations, stone retaining walls, heavy timbers and major cuttings (its stone foundations are still there today).

Both camps were bleak. The first prisoners arrived at Rotoaira No.1 in the middle of a snowstorm and were welcomed with unlined and unfinished wooden huts. It was a bitterly cold environment to work in, with snow, rain and alpine winds the norm. In the middle of winter, the average high temperature was five degrees Celsius.

By 30 June 1915, there were 50 prisoners at these camps, as well as several work horses, drays and metal crushers (for breaking down larger rocks into gravel). Indeed, the cheap nature of riverbeds, gravel pits and pumice deposits were essential to the project. By using the readily-available raw material in the area, the state saved significant amounts of money. Surveyors used the latest technology to find, measure and map these deposits, which not only reduced costs but also determined where the prison camps were located. Quarrying was just as important as the actual roadmaking. In fact, by the 1930s the plunder of metal pits was a lucrative prison industry, supplying local councils, contractors and the Chateau Tongariro build with high-grade gravel. Metal was a crucial commodity.

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One of the bridges built by prisoners at Whakapapaiti, pictured in 1925. Note the car and cutting. Alexander Turnbull Library.

The same was true of bridge-building, which saved money by appropriating timber in the district – sometimes from state land, but also from Māori-owned land. ‘The whole of the necessary timber for the bridges was obtained from the adjoining bush and pit-sawn by prison labour’ noted the Prisons Branch, reducing costs significantly.71 For example, the state saved over £100 on the Whakapapanui Bridge by raiding the local bush for tōtara. It was slow work, but ‘the saving more than makes up for the labour expended.’72 Timber felled by prisoners was also shipped to Wellington during winter coal shortages, further linking this zone of appropriation to the capital city.

The incarcerated quickly repaired and improved the six-kilometre road from Waimarino to Mangahuia using crushed metal and pumice. Deep drains over four kilometres in length were dug, concrete culverts were installed, and two bridges were built: one over the Mangahuia Stream and one at Whakapapaiti that needed a major cutting on the approach. By the end of 1916, prisoners had formed a basic road that connected with the track established by the Armed Constabulary (which ran south from Tokaanu and stopped about 16 kilometres short of Waimarino). Massive repairs to this old road were needed to make it suitable for lorry traffic. Luckily, the discovery of new gravel pits near Waimarino and Whakapapanui produced a superior metal compared to the crushed stone from riverbeds, and prisoners were set to work widening and metalling this stretch.

Despite extreme winters and frequent deluges, by 1917 work on the road had proceeded far enough to warrant a move of the prison camps. Before that happened, however, the First World War intruded onto the works. The habitual prisoners were removed from Rotoaira Prison No.1 and replaced with war resisters – those who, for political, religious or moral reasons, had been courtmartialled for refusing to take up arms for the state. Initially there were nineteen resisters sent; by the time of their release in late 1919, there were 30 men at Mangahuia.73 Among them was the scholar and teacher Normal Bell; militant watersider Joseph Henry Jones (‘I want the working class to say to the masters: We don’t want war. We won’t go to the war’); longtime anti-militarist William Worrall; and Irish-born resistor Timothy Brosnan.74 Confined to their wooden huts because of snow in winter 1918, Tim dubbed it the Siberia of New Zealand.75 Ironically, Tim was a roadbuilder by trade: before going on the run and his eventual arrest, he’d earned his keep making roads at Ōwhango, around 27 kilometres to the north.

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Rotoaira Prison No.1, located on the left bank of Mangahuia Stream, in the winter of 1918. The site is now the Mangahuia Department of Conservation campsite. Archives New Zealand.

The forced labour of wartime resistors and the incarcerated saw the road stretch onward. By mid1919, enough of the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road was drivable for prison officials to note a marked increase in traffic. Tourists were making use of the road instead of the Waiōuru coach road to the east, as were local sawmillers, flax millers, woolgrowers and dairy farmers. Lorries belonging to the Department of Internal Affairs also made ‘daily trips during the fishing season, carrying the proceeds of the Lake Taupo fisheries.’76 As one prison official wrote, the road was ‘of great value to the people of the Dominion, opening up as it will considerable areas of flax-growing country as well as large tracts containing valuable timber.’77 Around this time the prison camps were moved. In early 1919, Rotoaira Prison No.2 was shifted from Whakapapanui to a quarry site near Mangatepopo Stream, becoming Rotoaira Prison No.3. From Mangatepopo a further five kilometres of road was made, three more bridges were built, and a long cutting on the approach to the Whanganui River bridge was formed. Meanwhile, a temporary camp was also established at Waimarino: prisoners at this camp were tasked with metalling and maintaining the Waimarino end of the road and widening streets in the town itself (such as Carroll Street).

By the end of 1920, the formation of the road and its bridges was essentially finished. Motorists could now drive from Waimarino to the modern-day Otūkou Road with ease before heading below Lake Rotoaira and on to Tokaanu (there was no road over the Pīhanga Saddle at this point). As the MP for Rangitikei noted, prisoners had created a ‘magnificent motor-road’ that added ‘much to the beauty and attractiveness’ of the district; ‘now that we have good roads from the railway through to Tokaanu there is no difficulty in getting access’ noted another.78 As the main thoroughfare, its traffic steadily increased: between December 1925 and February 1926, 1,170 cars and 613 lorries used the prison-built road.79 Today, the road forms SH46, most of SH47 and the stretch of SH1 into Tūrangi.

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A motorcar crosses one of the many prison-built bridges on the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road, 1927. Alexander Turnbull Library.

However, prison labour on the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road was far from finished. Ongoing maintenance work was just as important as the initial making. Patching, metalling, grading, widening, smoothing and diverting kept prisoners busy on this stretch for decades to come, requiring a constantly renewed source of cheap nature: more gravel, more timber, more labour. As Schouten and Bachmann remind us, infrastructural frontiers are rarely finished. And as the historical geographer Michael Roche notes, roadmaking was not a one-off engineering effort. Their maintenance is also ‘a highly mobile activity shaped by socio-economic and environmental rhythms.’80 Despite their fixed appearance, roads are mobile structures in their own right: ‘materials on the move.’81 Nor was roadmaking in the region done. There was still no way to drive from Wellington to Auckland through the central plateau. Trails between towns such as Taumarunui and Ōhakune were not suitable for cars. And the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road needed to connect with a north-south highway to realise its full potential. The next phase of unfree roadmaking was about to begin.

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Holiday traffic on the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road in January 1927, with Lake Rotoaira in the background. A major deviation constructed by prisoners in the 1930s replaced this section of the route. Auckland Libraries.

Calls to complete a north-south highway through the central plateau were loud and frequent in the 1910s. The Rotorua, Ōhakune, and Taumarunui chambers of commerce were among the many voices calling for prison-built highways in the area, as were local councils, automobile associations, sawmillers and farmers. The Kaitieke County Council were particularly vocal. Improving the practically non-existent track between Taumarunui and Waimarino would not only become ‘a portion of the Main Arterial Road through the North Island, but would also form a very important link between the Wanganui River and Lake Taupo.’ The fact that labour was scarce due to the First World War, and that prison camps were already in the area, meant prison labour was ‘the only means available of accomplishing a highly important public work.’82 At this stage the Prisons Branch declined as it wasn’t policy to employ prisoners for local councils and there was no labour to spare. However, Kaitieke councillors did not let up. Surely, with industrial turmoil afoot and the threat of railway strikes, a road through the island was needed?

By June 1920, state officials had come around to the idea. There were several reasons for this: the clear need for a state highway that connected Wellington and Auckland; the rise of farming and forestry in the district; the popularity of the national park; the under-resourced state of local councils; the Crown ownership of land traversed by the road; the availability of prison labour now the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road was essentially finished; and a major railway strike in April 1920 that stranded the visiting Prince of Wales (and embarrassed the government). In November 1920, the work of transferring the Rotoaira prisons to a new site near Erua began. Chosen for its access to vast tracts of native timber, this became Waikune Prison, which grew from 79 acres to more than 1,000 during its 65-year lifetime. Sub-camps were also established at Makaretu and Horopito to plunder ancient deposits of metal.

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Prison labour on the Taumarunui-Ōhakune Road was instructed ‘to be on par with modern highway road construction’, as it ‘will be part of the proposed main arterial road, Wellington to Auckland.’83 The amount of labour required was immense. The 35-kilometre stretch from Waimarino to Ōhakune needed major works through forest and over multiple gorges: bush was to be cleared, swamps drained, culverts dug, railways and valleys crossed, roads diverted, widened and metalled, grades reduced, curves straightened, dilapidated bridges fixed, or entirely new ones built. The cost was estimated to be £49,000 (over $3,000,000 in today’s money) but unfree labour would reduce this to £32,000. To the north the terrain was even worse and featured several rivers and steep grades (including the famous Raurimu Spiral). And bitter winters meant roadmaking was basically put on hold, reducing the number of available workdays.

To make the highway, prison and public works officials requested sawmilling plants, road graders, metal crushers with elevators and bins, a rotary screen, portable air drills, a vulcanised rubber plant, two motor tip lorries and a ten-ton road roller. And of course, more prisoners. The number of incarcerated workers in the area steadily increased, peaking at 126 prisoners in 1929. Whereas the daily average of men at the Rotoaira prisons was around 40, at Waikune and its sub-camps it was more than double that.

Number of prisoners at Rotoaira Prison Camps, 1914-1920 (excluding war resistors) Year Greatest Least Daily Average 1914 27 5 18 1915 58 25 42 1916 61 38 42 1917 46 32 41 1918 48 34 40 1919 51 36 42 1920 47 11 24 Number of prisoners at Waikune Prison and Sub-Camps, 1921-1934 Year Greatest Least Daily Average 1921 35 12 22 1922 50 30 36 1923 66 41 51 1924 86 53 68 1925 100 77 92 1926 94 69 81 1927 98 66 81 1928 95 63 80 1929 126 87 104 1930 99 77 88 1931 103 45 68 1932 98 70 82 1933 120 67 91 1934 106 85 92

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The highway deviation to Ōhakune shown in 1934. ‘Developing virgin country in the central portion of the North Island by the provision of better roads.’ Auckland Libraries.

By 1923, these incarcerated workers had formed and metalled around 12 kilometres of road between Raurimu and Erua. Bridges were built (including a 20-metre bridge with four concrete piers over the Makaretu Stream near Raurimu), and large concrete culverts were installed. Two years later the road stretched further south. Five more culverts had been made – three of which were 10metres long and two 15-metres long – as well as a 23-metre bridge over the Waimarino Stream that was constructed on the riverbank and then launched into position. The stretch over the Raurimu Spiral, ‘formerly a bugbear to motorists on account of the impassable nature of the road for the greater part of the year’, was also formed and metalled, providing vehicle access to Taumarunui (and onwards to Auckland) for the first time.84 It was such an important occasion that in 1926, Prime Minister Gordon Coates was on hand to declare the Raurimu Spiral Road open.

Next, prisoners drained the swamps on the stretch between Pōkākā and Horopito, straightening the highway and diverting streams in the process. This led to a major deviation that took the highway to the west of the main trunk line and on to Tohunga Junction, before swinging east into Ōkakune (now part of SH49). Photographs show the highway cutting through a scene of destruction as native forest was burned and cleared for farmland (today, fields of grass fill the landscape). More bridges were built: at Erua, Makatote, Manganuioteao and Mangaturuturu. The 36-metre Makatote Bridge sat on three concrete piers, with huge steel girders that towered more than 12 metres above the valley floor – although this feat of prison engineering was not quite as impressive as the Makatote Viaduct beside it.

The incarcerated also put through a new deviation between Raurimu and Oio to the north, and by 1928 had completed the access road to Whakapapa skifield and Mount Ruapehu (Bruce Road or SH48). Pākehā could now scale te kāhui maunga by motorcar. It was the beginning of a burgeoning skifield and tourist attraction worth millions of dollars annually, although at the time of writing, climate change and recession has made the skifield commercially unviable.

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When Depression struck in the 1930s, the activities of the Prisons Branch at Waikune were severely curtailed. But by this time the highway to Ōhakune had been finished. The link between Auckland and Wellington was complete, with motorists able to traverse the North Island through the central plateau for the very first time. Twenty years after arriving at Waimarino, the incarcerated had forged highways that remain in active use today. Every person who has ever driven these highways has benefited from forced labour – as did the state. In 1918 alone, prison labour saved an estimated £10,688 on wages that would have been paid to free labourers; in 1916-1917, they saved £8,023.85 That’s over $1.1 million in today’s terms – and doesn’t include the ‘free gifts’ of gravel and timber.

The appropriation of cheap nature had forged significant national assets.

IV By the 1950s, the central plateau was a dynamic economic zone. ‘Agriculture on the pumice lands has entered a new phase of rapid expansion’, wrote the geographer R. Gerard Ward in 1956. ‘Largescale utilisation of forests, construction of hydroelectric power stations, geothermal development, and an expanding tourist industry’ all contributed to ‘this dynamic character.’ Modern technology, state infrastructure and resources had combined ‘to break-in these former problem lands.’86 Key to this dynamic commodity frontier was the forced labour of prisoners and the highways they built, improved and maintained. The very year Ward published his article in New Zealand Geographer, the incarcerated still laboured on the roads. Motoring out of Waikune Prison aboard twelve prison lorries, they were conveyed to quarry sites, culverts, or sections damaged by traffic or weather and put to work. They metalled SH1. They metalled Bruce Road. They metalled SH4.87 Hundreds of kilometres of highways – built by an earlier generation of prisoners – were actively maintained by the Prisons Branch so that the dynamism of economic development rolled on.88 As Deborah Cowen writes, ‘infrastructures reach across time, building uneven relations of the past into the future, cementing their persistence.’89 For the state, the longevity of prison-built roads through the central plateau was a success story. Highways had helped to tame, harness and improve a once-desolate region for the national good. The compulsory acquisition of land was justified as a legitimate exercise of state power, for infrastructure was ‘essential to the functioning of the modern economy and society. All citizens benefit from its provision’, argued the Crown.90 Yet this beneficent language smooths over the colonial dispossession, forced labour and class antagonism at the heart of these highways – then and now.

An obvious example was the aggressive alienation of Māori land (as noted in Part II). While compulsory takings for public works was less frequent than in other districts, it still had a significant impact on local iwi/hapū. Ngāti Hikairo lamented the taking of their land for roads without compensation. State officials were aware of this and sought to avoid responsibility. When the Inspector of Prisons asked after the legal status of the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road in April 1917, public works officials noted that its status north of Papamanuka Stream was murky. While surveyors had obtained warrants for their work in 1895, it wasn’t clear if they were issued. ‘It is not considered desirable at the present time to raise the question of the legality of this road’ reported the chief surveyor, ‘as it may have the effect of giving rise to claims for compensation from the native owners.’91 It was finally declared a government road in September 1923.

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Tongariro with steam issuing from the Ketetahi blowhole, photographed from the new Waimarino-Tokaanu Road deviation in 1935. The new route split Pāpākai in two. Auckland Libraries.

A major deviation of the Waimarino-Tokaanu Road in the early 1930s was another case in point. To straighten the road and shave kilometres off the journey, prisoners were employed on a deviation south of Otūkou Marae (beginning at the modern-day junction of SH47 and SH46, now Lake Rotoaira Road). However, the new route split the Pāpākai settlement in two. When Ngāti Hikairo complained to the Native Department and proposed an alternative route outside of their settlement, officials claimed it would be too expensive and denied the road ran through any homes or cultivations.92 The deviation through Māori land went ahead. Once again, benefit to the national good came at the expense of Māori, who found what land they still owned was fragmented and essentially landlocked.

The highway enclosed as much as it opened.

The reoccurring plunder of cheap nature also affected local Māori. Over 16,000 feet of timber was taken from Okahukura 7 Block for bridges over the Mangatepopo and Mangapete streams, apparently without compensation.93 In 1922, the resident engineer sought legal means to secure pumice pits on Māori land: ‘the natives have generally objected and have sought a royalty on this material, which, needless to say, I have not sanctioned as it would be establishing a dangerous precedent.’94 In November 1932, Hori Maihi wrote to the Native Minister in protest. Not only had their land been taken for the Otūkou deviation, but gravel had also been removed without payment.

His demand for royalties was constantly ignored.95 The Crown also milled timber and helped itself to gravel from Waimarino 4A1, a block owned by Ngāti Maringi. The owners sought compensation, but prison officials denied their transgression – despite a long history of taking liberties with local materials.96 In the 1960s, the taking of land to access the Otūkou quarry and metal pit for roading was a further source of grievance for Ngāti Hikairo, a grievance so profound, writes the Tribunal, that bitterness lingers to this day.

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As these examples show, infrastructure is ‘the material force that implants colonial economies and socialities. Infrastructures thus highlight the issue of competing and overlapping jurisdiction – matters of both time and space.’97 Prison-built highways reworked the unique ecology of the central plateau, eroding Māori sovereignty and their physical presence in the landscape. As the Tribunal notes, ‘the majority of those who whakapapa to te kāhui maunga now live in cities and districts far removed from the National Park.’98 Highways are the preserve of settler jurisdiction, even as deeds of settlement between the Crown and iwi/hapū in the district seek cultural and financial redress.99 Notions of improvement and progress also mask the experience of the incarcerated. Those who were forced to actually make the roads embodied the contradictions at the heart of this project – freedom and punishment, modernity and toil, access and incarceration. While commodities, capital and motorcars were free to roam, and as science and technology worked to map and modernise with ease, prisoners laboured under armed guard. Improved access to the central plateau was premised on the confinement of people deemed to be criminal. Indeed, convictism was a powerful means of smoothing over these juxtapositions. As Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan note, compulsory toil was portrayed as an appropriate penalty for crime. Past indiscretions (as legally defined by the state) allowed the state to maintain that prison labour was for the public good.100 It was also claimed to be good for the incarcerated, providing employable skills and access to ‘nature’.

Rather than a seamless project of modernisation and rehabilitation, however, the carceral geography of the central plateau was prone to friction. Through their deeds the incarcerated showed the charade for what it was. Even as they laboured on the roads that confined them, they cut through the veil – by lingering, going slow, striking and absconding. From at least December 1914 onwards, men were constantly escaping the prison camps, prompting the gaoler at Rotoaira to ask whether using his personal firearm on escapees would see him stand trial (the answer was no).101 There was a mini breakout in 1924, when seven prisoners made a bid for freedom but were eventually recaptured. Two more escaped the following year – one made it as far as Queensland, where he was apprehended six years later – and in 1929 another group of seven left Waikune on their own accord.

That year new rules were introduced to prevent sabotage and negligence, but this didn’t stop a strike (and an escape) at one of the Waikune sub-camps in 1931.102

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Armed prison officers hunt for three escapees from Waikune in April 1933. Alexander Turnbull Library.

The presence of lethal weapons is a blunt rebuttal of Tongariro’s tourist image. The working conditions of the incarcerated also betrays the reality of hard, menial toil. Whether in seas of tussock or swollen streams, labour with a pickaxe or spade was heavy. And dangerous. Incarcerated workers were constantly injured on the works, requiring hospitalisation. Every year prisoners suffered from crushed limbs, deep cuts, peritonitis (internal tears and burst organs), influenza, pneumonia and appendicitis. In November 1926, a thirty-six-year-old prisoner named Arthur Halser died after being crushed at the Makatote Viaduct quarry (Ronald Neilson, who was working beside him, survived but had his leg broken in two places).103 Another prisoner had died in 1925, but it was claimed his death was due to an injury received before his incarceration.104 In October 1933, while excavating at the Wairehu Bridge site for the Otūkou deviation, a prisoner was killed when the trench they were digging collapsed.105 ––– As Desiree Valadares argues, following routes made with forced labour ‘reveals how state-crafted narratives distort labour history and land dispossession along roads and highways.’106 The study of State Highways 4, 46, 47 and 48 also reveals the dialectical nature of appropriation and exploitation, extra-human and human, within the web of life. The more-than-human world of the central plateau shaped the character of its penal regimes, with roadmaking eventually giving way to sawmilling and quarrying. The relative isolation and ecology of the national park also shaped the use of unfree labour there, as competition with free labour in core productive zones entailed the deployment of prisoners to the commodity frontier. The extra-human environment of the central plateau was not a bit player but an active protagonist.

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This unique ecology was entwined with wider zones of accumulation, ‘both backwards (primary production, construction of material infrastructures, transportation and communications infrastructures) and forwards (accommodation, food and trade services, car rentals, entertainment, etc).107 From timber to tourist routes, the appropriation of cheap nature in the central plateau widened, deepened and transformed regimes of accumulation at the national and global level.108 Key commodities such as timber, metal, wool and dairy were sourced and supplied in service of capital accumulation. These flowed outwards along prison-built highways and the railways they connected with, while increased access to the central plateau created new opportunities for accumulation within the district itself (including tourism). Cheap energy – in the form of timber, then geothermal energy and hydro power – further linked the central plateau and its prison-built highways to zones of production elsewhere, literally powering the ports and cities of Aotearoa.

Siphoned from the country’s cities and deployed to the central plateau, prisoners further linked these economic zones, as did the highways they built and the resources they extracted. The appropriation of their labour was a form of cheap nature, while the infrastructure they built was forged on the cheap, saving the state millions of dollars. These savings were passed on, through time and space, to the benefit of capital accumulation within and beyond the central plateau. Unfree labour was embedded within a wider logic of accumulation and did not exist in a separate world, even if prisoners were seemingly separated from ‘the core’ by geographical distance. Prisoners literally embodied the commodity frontier and its appropriation of cheap nature. Their lives and labour were also cheapened through the ideology of convictism.

As the Waitangi Tribunal’s National Park District Inquiry made clear, and as this paper shows, the dynamics of the commodity frontier played a major role in the historical nature of the central plateau. The booms and busts of Aotearoa capitalism entailed the appropriation of cheap nature within te kāhui maunga, linking them to wider logics of accumulation and crisis. Rather than existing outside of the economy and ‘real’ capitalist social relations, the commodity and infrastructure frontier of the central plateau unfolded within a socioecological totality – a totality that encompassed the appropriation of unfree labour and the free gifts of nature. The value imperative ensured that prisons, maunga and metal in the central plateau worked towards capital’s reproduction, not simply in a one-way, resource-extractive direction, but dialectically. The unique ecology of the central plateau was both producer and product of historical capitalism.

Jared Davidson, Te Awakairangi ki Tai, Aotearoa November 2024

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1 Alice B. Kelly, ‘Conservation Practice as Primitive Accumulation’, Journal of Peasant Studies 38:4 (2011), p.683.

2 Jared Davidson, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books: Wellington, 2023),

Chapter 2. There were more prisons in the area, including Hautū and Rangipō (now Tongariro Prison). For more on these, see Chapter 7.

3 Rob Hunter, ‘The Capitalist State as a Historically Specific Social Form’ in Rob Hunter, Rafael Khachaturian and Eva Nanopoulos (eds.), Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p.260.

4 Nate Holdren and Rob Hunter, ‘No Bases, No Superstructures: Against Legal Economism’, Legal Form (2020). Available online at https://legalform.blog/2020/01/15/no-bases-no-superstructures-against-legal-economism-nate-holdren-and-robhunter/.

5 Werner Bonefeld, ‘Capitalist Accumulation and its Historical Foundation and Logical Premise: On Primitive Accumulation’, Critique 51:1 (2023), p.198.

6 Benjamin Marley, ‘The Coal Crisis in Appalachia: Agrarian Transformation, Commodity Frontiers and the Geographies of Capital’, Journal of Agrarian Change 16:2 (2016), p.229.

7 Marley, ‘The Coal Crisis in Appalachia’, p.226.

8 By ongoing primitive accumulation, I don’t just refer to a historical/temporal phase but an ongoing and reproductive logic.

See Werner Bonefeld, ‘The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution’, The Commoner 2 (2001).

9 On the usefulness and problems of settler colonialism as a category, see Matt Ryan, 'Our land abounds in nature's gifts': Commodity frontiers, Australian capitalism, and socioecological crisis’, Thesis (University of Sydney, 2023), esp. Chapter Three.

10 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015) p.21.

11 Daniel Banoub, Gavin Bridge and Julie Ann de los Reyes, ‘Industrial Dynamics on the Commodity Frontier: Managing Time, Space and Form in Mining Tree Plantations and Intensive Aquaculture’, Nature and Space 4:4 (2021), p.1537 12 Jason W. Moore, ‘Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology’, New Geographies 6 (2014), p.12.

13 Moore, ‘Toward a Singular Metabolism’, p.12.

14 A.D. Morton, ‘On the violent abstraction of nature,’ Progress in Political Economy (2019). Available online at https://www.ppesydney.net/on-the-violent-abstraction-of-nature/ 15 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.69.

16 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.54.

17 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.87.

18 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.53.

19 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.192.

20 Michael Niblett, World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p.49.

21 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.65. See also Moore, ‘The Value of Everything? Work, Capital, and Historical Nature in the Capitalist World-Ecology’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 37:3-4 (2014).

22 Niblett, World Literature and Ecology, p.46.

23 Amy De’Ath, ‘Reproduction’ in Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman and Jeff Diamanti (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (Bloomsbury, 2018), p.401. Perhaps we could go further and, again, quoting De’Ath, suggest that Moore’s understanding of cheap nature dovetails ‘usefully with a current interest in what Roswitha Scholz calls “relations of value dissociation” – where “value and dissociation [from value] stand in a dialectical relation to each other”– as well as the theory of direct and indirect market mediation advanced by Gonzalez and Neton in ‘The Logic of Gender’, where reproductive activities are considered through a spatial analysis of their structural relationship to the market (that is, to the sphere of value-production).’ Amy De’Ath, ‘Gender and Social Reproduction’ in Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O'Kane (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Sage Publications, 2018), p.1547.

24 The argument is laid out by Ryan in 'Our land abounds in nature's gifts', Chapter One. 25 Jason W. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 45:2 (2018), p.255.

26 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.144.

27 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.66. Moore expands on the spatial dimensions of commodity frontiers in ‘The Capitalocene Part II’.

28 Niblett, World Literature and Ecology, p.46.

29 Niblett, World Literature and Ecology, p.52.

30 Ryan, 'Our land abounds in nature's gifts’, p.145.

31 Bonefeld, ‘The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation’. Or as Moore puts it, ‘primitive accumulation is equally about the restructuring of the relations of production – human and extra-human alike – so as to allow the renewed and expanded flow of Cheap labor, food, energy and raw materials into the commodity system.’ Capitalism in the Web of Life, p.98.

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32 Peter Schouten and Jan Bachmann, ‘Infrastructural Frontiers: Terrains of Resistance at the Material Edge of the State’,

Geoforum 136 (2022), p.219.

33 Wesley Attewell, Emily Mitchell-Eaton and Richard Nisa, ‘The Political Lives of Infrastructure’, Radical History Review 147

(2023), p.2.

34 Attewell, Mitchell-Eaton Nisa, ‘The Political Lives of Infrastructure’, p.4.

35 Schouten and Bachmann, ‘Infrastructural Frontiers’, p.219.

36 Schouten and Bachmann, ‘Infrastructural Frontiers’, p.220.

37 Schouten and Bachmann, ‘Infrastructural Frontiers’, p.221.

38 Cathy Marr, ‘Public Works Takings of Maori Land, 1840–1981’ (Waitangi Tribunal, 1997).

39 Niblett, World Literature and Ecology, p.3, p.56.

40 See, for example, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/sites/default/files/pdfs/jared-davidson-transcript.pdf and

https://garagecollective.blogspot.com/2023/08/from-crew-to-chain-gang-seamen-prison.html.

41 David Thorns and Charles Sedgwick, Understanding Aotearoa/New Zealand: Historical Statistics (Dunmore Press;

Palmerston North, 1997), p.60.

42 Muriel Lloyd Prichard, An Economic History of New Zealand to 1939 (Collins: Auckland, 1970), p.147.

43 Thorns and Sedgwick, Understanding Aotearoa/New Zealand, p.75.

44 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga: The National Park District Inquiry Report Volume 1 (Waitangi Tribunal: Wellington,

2013), p.195.

45 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 1, p.196.

46 James Cowan, The Tongariro National Park, New Zealand (Ferguson & Osborn: Wellington, 1927), p.5.

47 Martin Young and Francis Markham, ‘Tourism, Capital, and the Commodification of Place’, Progress in Human Geography

44:2 (2019), p.14.

48 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 1, p.42.

49 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.354.

50 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.372.

51 EG McDowell, ‘The History of the Development of Raetihi and the Surrounding District’, Thesis (University of New Zealand,

1936), p.53.

52 Merrilyn George, Ohakune: Opening to a New World (Kapai Enterprises: Ohakune, 1990), p.52.

53 George, Ohakune, p.52. At this time local road boards and county councils were responsible for roading, with assistance

from central government in the form of grants (or by building the roads and then handing them over to local ownership).

54 ‘Roads - Wanganui Road District - Waimarino – Tokaanu’, ACHL 19111 Box 1106/ 39/6 Part 2, Archives New Zealand (ANZ).

55 McDowell, ‘The History of the Development of Raetihi and the Surrounding District’, p.45.

56 George, Ohakune, p.46.

57 Wilf Couper and Ron Cooke, Kaitieke: The District, The People, The Schools (C & S Publications: Taumarunui, 1994), p.25.

58 John McCrystal, 100 Years of Motoring in New Zealand (Hodder Moa Beckett: Auckland, 2003), p.74.

59 Rosslyn Noonan, By Design: A Brief History of the Public Works Department, Ministry of Works, 1870-1970 (Government

Printer: Wellington, 1975), p.86.

60 Noonan, By Design, p.109.

61 Randal Burdon, The New Dominion: A Social and Political History of New Zealand, 1918-39 (Allen &Unwin: London, 1965),

p.105.

62 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.717.

63 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.722.

64 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.719.

65 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.725.

66 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.717.

67 Dominion, 11 April 1914 (Papers Past).

68 ‘Prison Labour on Tokaanu – Rotorua – Waimarino Road’, ACGS 16225 Box 261/ 1917/9/17, ANZ. 69 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 1, p.198.

70 ‘Prison Labour on Tokaanu – Rotorua – Waimarino Road’, ACGS 16225 Box 261/ 1917/9/17, ANZ. 71 AJHR 1918 H-20 (Papers Past), p.7.

72 ‘Kaingaroa Prison, report of Deputy Inspector, 17 December 1917’, ACGS 16225 Box 200/ 1917/16/1, ANZ. 73 Details on number can be found in the AJHR Prisons Branch reports and Army Department files. See also ‘Territorial Force -

Religious Objectors Advisory Board’, AAYS 8638 Box 743/ 10/407/15, ANZ. 74 Evening Post, 2 March 1917 (Papers Past).

75 Jared Davidson, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920 (Otago University Press: Dunedin),

Chapter 3.

Heavy metal: Forced labour, commodity frontiers and highways through Aotearoa’s central plateau - 27

76 AJHR 1919 H-20 (Papers Past), p.11.

77 AJHR 1918 H-20 (Papers Past), p.7.

78 NZPD 1922 Volume 198, p.230; p.236.

79 ‘Roads - Wanganui Road District - Waimarino – Tokaanu’, ACHL 19111 Box 1106/ 39/6 Part 3, ANZ. 80 Michael Roche, ‘Road Maintenance – patching a hole in Mobilities-Roading Research: A Case study of the Longbeach Road

Board, Canterbury, New Zealand, 1911-1938’, New Zealand Geographer 73:2 (2017), p.9.

81 Roche, ‘Road Maintenance – patching a hole in Mobilities-Roading Research’, pp.1-2.

82 ‘Prison labour on Tokaanu - Rotorua - Waimarino Road’, ACGS 16225 Box 261/ 1917/9/17, ANZ. 83 ‘Roads - Wanganui Road District - Taumarunui - Ohakune - Culverts and bridges’, ACHL 19111 Box 1110/ 39/27 Part 2, ANZ. 84 AJHR 1926 H-20 (Papers Past), p.14.

85 ‘Roads - Wanganui Road District - Waimarino – Tokaanu’, ACHL 19111 Box 1106/ 39/6 Part 2, ANZ. 86 R. Gerard Ward, ‘Land Development in the Taupo Country’, New Zealand Geographer 12:2 (1956), p.115.

87 ‘Annual Reports - General - Monthly progress report - Roadworks - Waikune Prison [Department of Corrections]’, ACGS

16211 Box 150/ 28/5/21, ANZ. 88 AJHR 1957 H-20, p.18. Other prisoners baked bread for the Chateau Tongariro and its guests.

89 Deborah Cowen, ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance’, Verso (2017). Available online at

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance.

90 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kāhui Maunga Volume 2, p.721.

91 ‘Roads - Wanganui Road District - Waimarino – Tokaanu’, ACHL 19111 Box 1106/ 39/6 Part 2, ANZ. 92 ‘National Park - Tokaanu Road deviation - Objection to route selected through Okahukura 8M 2C 2C’, ACIH 16036 Box 476/

22/1/37, ANZ. 93 ‘Roads - Wanganui Road District - Waimarino – Tokaanu’, ACHL 19111 Box 1106/ 39/6 Part 3, ANZ. 94 ‘Roads - Wanganui Road District - Waimarino – Tokaanu’, ACHL 19111 Box 1106/ 39/6 Part 3, ANZ. 95 ‘Rangipo No.1 and Rangipo 2C - Compensation for damage caused by construction of Tokaanu National Park Road and

metal from quarry’, ACIH 16036 Box 474/ 22/2/26, ANZ. 96 Waitangi Tribunal, He Whiritaunoka: The Whanganui Land Report Volume 2 (Waitangi Tribunal: Wellington, 2015), p.1096.

97 Cowen, ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance’.

98 Waitangi Tribunal, Te Kahui Maunga Volume 2, p.717.

99 Desiree Valadares, ‘Uneven Mobilities: Infrastructural Imaginaries on the Hope–Princeton Highway’, Radical History Review

147 (2023), p.161. Many thanks to Desiree for sharing this paper with me.

100 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan, Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-

1860 (Palgrave Studies in Economic History, 2022), p.27 (and elsewhere).

101 ‘Shooting escaped prisoners’, ACGS 16225 Box 189/ 1915/493, ANZ. 102 These figures come from the relevant AJHR H-20 reports for each year.

103 AJHR 1927 H-20 (Papers Past), p.16; Auckland Star, 23 November 1926 (Papers Past).

104 AJHR 1926 H-20 (Papers Past), p.15.

105 AJHR 1934 H-20 (Papers Past), p.15.

106 Valadares, ‘Uneven Mobilities’, p.159.

107 George Liodakis, ‘Tourism, Value Appropriation, and Ecological Degradation’, Tourism and Hospitality (2023), p.409.

108 See Banoub, Bridge and de los Reyes, ‘Industrial Dynamics on the Commodity Frontier’.

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