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Very often, in plaques and tourist guides, the racist history of buildings is dispensed with to make way for equitable access to the material memories of the island place. In these contexts, questions of being local within the confines or borders of the nation arise.
On Australia Day, January 26, 2007, at Flying Fish Cove in the Malay Kampong, being ostensibly Australian meant consuming eggs on toast with baked beans and sausages, waving a small plastic Australian flag while watching an Irish national receive citizenship papers from a Chinese administrator. Obvious nods in the direction of multiculturalism were made in the reportage of this event in the local paper, The Islander, much as might be found in any other Australian paper (‘Australia Day 2007’, 2007). But this representation of Australianness is actually one made in the absence of a claim of the priority native entitlement to place and in the presence of a great many other culturally significant events, including the Chinese New Year and Hari Raya, which are accorded equal status in terms of their calendrical validity in the island’s year.
Leaving Home
Movements of the migratory variety are not necessarily characterised by their memory worthy departure points or even their milestone arrival points but the experiences and places that make up the middle. For those island locals whose home is arrived to by migrating others seeking asylum, a participation in movement crucially involves staying, in this case, in the middle ground between the departure and the intended arrival points of asylum seekers who were intercepted and taken to Christmas. The memories of those who have left Christmas are also ones that are made in the space between being somewhere and being somewhere else and once again draw attention to those aspects of migration that make up its middle.
As I interviewed her in mid 2007 about her childhood on Christmas Island, Audrey inhaled the smell of quarter pounder hamburgers cooking at the local Perth McDonald’s as she craved, out loud, for the scent of chilli emanating from the flesh of a fruit bat, freshly killed by her and her brothers with sling shots and deep-fried by their mother, ‘Chinese-style, crispy and golden and fragrant’.