Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study By Simone Dennis

Acknowledgments

Any ethnographer is ultimately dependent on those people whose lives make the bases of our ethnographic products. To say that a decision to share your life with an anthropologist is a generous one is to say the very least; our presence is sometimes too much, too long, our questions too inane, our insights too inaccurate. My deepest thanks go to the people of Christmas Island for sharing their experiences of that place with me. I do hope I have done you justice.

I am also very grateful to the University of Adelaide’s Small Grants Program and to the Public Memory Research Centre at the University of Southern Queensland, which each provided funding for this research. I wrote this book whilst in the employ of the University of Southern Queensland, and I want to make special mention of the support that the institution gave to me as I completed it. The university is a small one in the national context, but it plays a crucial and oft unrecognised role in supporting new researchers to research and to publish. I would like to thank, in particular, Associate Professor Chris Lee, Associate Professor Bryce Barker, and Dr. Lara Lamb for their support. I am also grateful for the comments of my colleagues who attended the seminars I gave based on material for the book.