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On Christmas Island, the people who are perfectly content to stay come into direct contact with those people engaged in the act of moving from one part of the world to the other. The fact that people already live in a place that is at the heart of governmental strategies to halt the latter sort of movement is another key orientation of this work.
I look into this latter movement, on how it is to move between Christmas Island and other places in the world, in my fourth and final focus. I take interest firstly in the movements that Hage’s (2002a) ‘refugees of the exterior’ make into Christmas Island terrain to seek asylum (p. 21). This kind of movement is stopped by the Australian government in its current ‘deter and deny’ approach to those who attempt to enter Australia by ‘illegally’ crossing its borders. Stopping or halting movement is remarkable in a place that otherwise bears the hallmarks of constant movement; the island moves, albeit slowly, towards the Java Trench and will fall into it in a few million years. Crabs constantly circulate around and about the island in their blood red trips between island heart and sea bounds, and people move in truncated arcs around their neighbourhoods.
Stopping or halting movement is not only remarkable, it is remarked upon by islanders who reflect the halting of asylum seeker movement through the still forms of rocks and monuments. At this point, I turn theoretical attention to the philosophy of the senses to explore the role of visibility in the articulation of stillness, as Borthwick (2000) drew attention to it in her close examination of the hierarchy of the senses in western systems of knowledge and value. I draw attention to the invisibility of the bodies of asylum seekers to whom the memorials are made. I make use of the work that Voutira and Harrell Bond (2007) conducted on the invisibility of asylum seeker bodies and of the observations that Duncanson (2003) made of the statistical stand-ins that represent actual asylum seeker bodies in publicly consumable news stories and that, in his view, help to render asylum seekers invisible.
Along with the critical attention paid to geographic locales and the construction of fixed homes within them, I give careful disciplinary attention to other concepts that often accompany being local and being at home, such as memory.