Jared Davidson Treats History as Passion and Practice

Kate Carpenter 0:01
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.

Jared Davidson 0:37
Thanks so much for having me, Kate.

Kate Carpenter 0:39
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.

Jared Davidson 1:37
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 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.

Kate Carpenter 3:55
It's amazing to me that you've written five books while also while also working a full time job. When do you do your writing?

Jared Davidson 4:12
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.

Kate Carpenter 6:45
How do you like to organize your research and your writing? Are there tools that you use?

Jared Davidson 6:49
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.

Kate Carpenter 9:39
Fantastic. How about revision? How do you approach revision?

Jared Davidson 9:43
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 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.

Kate Carpenter 10:53
How do you think about organizing the narrative 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?

Jared Davidson 11:16
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.

Kate Carpenter 13:14
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?

Jared Davidson 13:38
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.

Kate Carpenter 16:41
What do your colleagues think about your writing?

Jared Davidson 16:43
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.

Kate Carpenter 18:15
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?

Jared Davidson 18:47
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.

Kate Carpenter 22:14
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?

Jared Davidson 22:43
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.

Kate Carpenter 26:39
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?

Jared Davidson 27:20
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.

Kate Carpenter 31:40
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?

Jared Davidson 32:26
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.

Kate Carpenter 34:29
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?

Jared Davidson 34:55
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.

Kate Carpenter 38:18
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?

Jared Davidson 38:34
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.

Kate Carpenter 42:06
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?

Jared Davidson 42:40
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.

Kate Carpenter 45:36
Your writing is just so great. Who do you read as inspiration?

Jared Davidson 45:41
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.

Kate Carpenter 47:44
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Jared Davidson 47:47
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 gave me: 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.

Kate Carpenter 49:33
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?

Jared Davidson 49:41
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.

Kate Carpenter 50:59
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.

Jared Davidson 51:11
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Kate Carpenter 51:13
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, subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss any of our new content starting next month. I can't wait to show you what we've been working on and to keep talking about the practice of history. After all, friends don't let friends write boring history.