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Local islanders have also taken account of this restricted movement in their memorialisation of migrant lives in the form of the still and firmly emplaced monument.
Being Local on Christmas
Particular qualities of truncation also characterise being local on Christmas Island. Locals undertake truncated sorts of movements that revolve around and persist in the three identifiable neighbourhoods on the island. These are precisely the sorts of movements of cultural familiarity and habit that Thomas (2004) made mention of when she wrote about the ways in which people make and express home, or ‘homely cultural worlds’. The kinds of movements that people make include particular island paths and places and exclude others and expose people to certain sensual experiences of the island and not others. As I explain in chapter 3, this habited and partial exposure is crucial in the claims people make to being local.
These sorts of movements have been produced and are carried out in the shadows of the distinctive ethnoarchitechture that marks out the three ethnic neighbourhoods on Christmas Island: Poon Saan, where most of the Chinese people live; the Kampong, where most of the Malay people live; and the Settlement, the site of original European occupation.
It is tempting to simply presume that the historical constancy of ethnically organised island space requires no explanation and that it is merely a reflection of the historically racist foundations of the island. The fraught history of labour relations and its attendant conceptions of ethnic property and space have been brought to bear on the island to create and maintain very separate Chinese, Malay, and European settlements and cemeteries. But despite the overt significance of racist labour history in the physical production of ethnic neighbourhoods on the island, any analysis of Christmas Island must avoid simple recourse to the strictly ethnically genealogical, even as it is evidently and ostensibly permanently embedded in place and in the history of the island place. In other words, these physical manifestations of locales are not just handed down generationally; they are continually made and reworked in, around, for, and under the conditions of being local.