Evening event: 'Exhibiting International Law in the Botanic Garden' - Dr Jessie Hohmann, University of Technology, Sydney

Time: 18:00 hrs - 20:00 hrs (in-person event only)

Lecture summary: The botanic garden is normally experienced as a place of leisure and relaxation, a cultivated green space created and maintained ‘for the people’s pleasure’.⁽¹⁾  While scientific knowledge and expertise is on display, botanic gardens do not immediately appear as spaces of law, and few visitors would leave the garden impressed by their encounter with international law.

But botanic gardens display and exhibit their relationship with international law for the visitor, revealing their deep enmeshment in it.  Botanic gardens were key to the colonial project, and accordingly to the spread of European international law’s dominance across the globe, as well as to the development of international legal regimes.  Botanic institutions and international law entwined to make plants knowable, claimable and exploitable.  And these gardens remain at the centre of a number of international legal efforts: for example, to preserve biodiversity and to combat climate change, and these ongoing projects overlay the sediments of the previous ones.  Botanic gardens are not just conceptually, but materially, spaces of international legal interaction and ordering.

In this paper, part of a broader project on understanding Australia’s relationship with international law through its botanic gardens, I ask what sorts of legal stories botanic gardens contain, and how they are presented to the visitor? Drawing on the growing body of literature on international law’s objects and material culture, its visual culture, and its practices of sightseeing and tourism, I ask what we learn about the narratives of international law, and international law more broadly, by looking for law in the botanic garden?

Dr Jessie Hohmann is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney.  Her work focuses on the objects and material culture of international law, on human rights – with a particular focus on the right to housing – and on Indigenous Peoples in international law.  She has a passion for gardening and for exploring new methodologies for international legal thought.

Chair: Dr Tor Krever

⁽¹⁾ Carol Henty, For the People’s Pleasure: Australia’s Botanic Gardens (Greenhouse Publications, 1988)