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Preface
What is it like to live in a place that is administered by Australia, yet is located much closer to Indonesia? What is it like to live on an island that is part of Australia, yet is not part of it for migration purposes? What is it like to make home in a place where others from across the sea continually arrive? What does it mean to say you are native of a place in which your ancestors arrived as migrants as late as 1950? How do people become local in a place where, now, no one is born? What is it like to live in a place that has more crustacean inhabitants than human ones? What is it like to live in a place where these crustacean inhabitants are under unrelenting attack by invading yellow crazy ants? And where the shoreline is patrolled every day by great, hulking silent naval vessels?
This book is an attempt to look into these sorts of questions; it is a book about what it is like to live in the migration exclusion zone and, in particular, what it is like to live on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean, Australia. This book is the first attempt made in the discipline of anthropology to ethnographically explore Christmas Island and its people, who are mainly of Australian, Chinese, and Malay descent. This work is driven by an orientation to the island in the term of movement. I look at four main qualities of movement in this book.