The aesthetics of a name; emergence of The Kakadu Plum
Abstract
Efforts to commercialise native Australian plants in the last few decades have made plain the incongruences between Indigenous knowledge systems, Western scientific practices, and Euro-American intellectual property laws. The paper draws upon ethnographic work with Aboriginal persons, plant and food scientists, commercial bioprospecting entities, and government officials, to understand how the law shapes social relationships of production, exchange, and attribution of the Kakadu plum (Terminalia ferdinandiana). Against the historical backdrop of highly-charged biopiracy allegations in response to the (il)legitimate patent applications of several US cosmetic companies, the paper attends to the technicalities and materialities of recent claims to intellectual property rights over the name ‘Kakadu plum’. The paper will trace how, as plants and associated data are collected, exchanged with scientists from different fields, and transformed through bureaucratic frameworks, they are stripped of other forms of knowledge and culturally specific plant-human relationships. These circuits of exchange are shaped by the uneven application of sovereign power across jurisdictions, divergent practices of actors who operate in legal borderlands, and the translations that occur at the boundaries of different forms of knowledge in the pursuit of achieving “officialdom” in neoliberal bioeconomies.
Jocelyn is a PhD candidate on the ARC Laureate Project. Jocelyn is interested in the intersection of biodiscovery research and the patent system. She is undertaking a comparative analysis of the access and benefit sharing (ABS) legislation in Australia, and the implications of the United Nations (UN) Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity. She completed her studies at The University of Queensland, where she studied dual Bachelors of Science/Laws (Honours) with a concurrent Diploma of Languages (French). She is a graduate of the UQ Advanced Study Program in Science (ASPinS) and conducted three undergraduate research projects in plant biology and agricultural science. The results of her rice cold tolerance research were published in Crop and Pasture Science in 2016.
It's a really interesting issue and shares a lot with other foods that grow across different nations, different languages. In the case of macadamia nuts, they were variously called bush nuts, bopple or bauple nuts, queensland nuts, mullumbimby nuts and even Australian nuts. Aboriginal names include gyndl, jindilli, boombera and bauple. Macadamia, on the other hand, was the American trade name from the beginning. The alliance seems like a really positive move.