Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”: From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank

Abstract

Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. I study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” While colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” The view from Australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing tensions between Indigenous struggles and settler-colonial nation building, and the urgency around climate change, are far from resolved. The politics of the Anthropocene are particularly poignant in Australia because anthropogenic destruction looks very different when viewed from the perspective of either Indigenous people or settlers.