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These were tastes and scents that Audrey had not partaken in for nigh on 20 years, but somewhere between the temporal and spatial and other distances that had passed for Audrey, somewhere between the island’s small bats and Perth’s Big Macs, olfactory memories moored to place and time long gone sufficiently loosened so that fragrant frying scents could fall fleetingly into Audrey’s waiting nostrils. Audrey said she could almost smell those smells emanating from island food as she spoke of it to me in the Perth McDonald’s; the scents still lingered—not entirely lodged in the past, not entirely available now—yet they persisted as she savoured her past in a present moment of sensual longing.
These memories, and the others that span a period of 50 years, are made of having been bodily involved in the sensual world of Christmas Island, or in other words, of embodying Christmas Island—not now, not strictly just then, but in the persistence of memories of the sensual, embodied kind.
Four Movements
I describe four movements in this work. The first of these, which I explore in chapter 2, focuses on the kinds of movements that island animals, especially red crabs, make within Christmas Island terrain and how these movements might offer up materials for locals to understand, describe, and act in and on Christmas Island life. Crabs are involved in numerous ways in islander conceptions and experiences of being a local Christmas Islander. Food taboos involving crabs are important in making and establishing claims of localness and even native claims to place for and about some islanders; red crabs are particularly important to claims that all islanders make to being locals of the place. Red crabs figure prominently as enduring points of connection with the island. They form constancies in the memories of those who no longer reside on the island but who can nevertheless still hear the relentless scuttling of hard, red bodies in the leaves. Red crabs are equally important in the ways in which external threats to island safety are understood and articulated.