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The particular approach I take in doing so is characterised by an attunement of my ethnographic antennae to the sensual dimensions of Christmas Island life and, more importantly, by their attunement to the peculiarly sensual terms in which islanders described their home to me. Islanders come from three main ethnic groups: Chinese, Malaysian, and European.1 This latter group refers to itself, and is referred to by others, as The Australians. The Australians do not include a recently arrived subgroup of Australian workers, who, as this book goes to press, recently completed construction on the island’s new Immigration Reception Centre. The centre will house 1,200 people at capacity and has been built to deal with asylum seekers, ones who are seeking protection as refugees under the 1951 Convention, arriving by boat to Christmas Island and to other areas in Australia. Since September 2001, the island has been declared a migration exclusion zone, which means that asylum seekers who manage to arrive alive after the short but perilous boat journey from the north arrive to Australian territory—but not to Australia—for the purposes of migration.2 The ways in which asylum seekers are understood by locals is one focus of this work.
The capacity of the centre is 1,200, which is roughly the same number of workers who arrived on the island to build it between 2005 and 2007. I include ethnographic data from some of these labourers in this work but, mainly, the descriptions herein are largely derived from those who considered themselves to be locals, either now or in the past or both. What being a Christmas Island local means is the specific focus of chapter 3 of this book.
The descriptions that locals gave of their island home were in the terms of detailed sensual remembrances in the case of those who had left the island and those who had lived there for a very long time and in the terms of a present sensual engagement for those currently in the midst of living locally on Christmas. These ethnographic data are so richly sensual that they occasion a theoretical approach that is grounded in attention to the sensual body. I turn to detail the theoretical and methodological foundations and particulars of this sensual approach later in this introductory chapter.