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The migration exclusion zone was effected by governmental decisions made at the time of the now infamous Tampa Crisis of 2001 and makes for governmental stilling of asylum seeker journeys. These stillings are also effected by the ocean; the Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel—Unknown, or SIEVX, took 350 people down with it, mostly women and children, when it broke up and sank while en route to Australia in 2001. The memorialising of specific moments of truncation in the midst of attempted migratory movement, such as that to which the Tampa was subject owing to governmental intervention and that to which the SIEVX was subject owing to the treacherous oceanic swell also demonstrates the primacy of the visual in the making of memories of migrations from over the sea. Visual memorials, such as gravesites and monuments of remembrance, are lodged in special island places. These emplaced memorials are silent, scentless, and often cannot be touched. Meanwhile, the continual sounds, scents, and tastes of life bring visual representations like these into stark and still, contrast with the continuation of multisensual life.
Where vision, which is focused in this case on the still monument or the silent grave, is focused on the surfaces of the world—the odours of the jungle and the crabs, the rustling sounds of the crabs’ ceaseless scuttling, and the fading in and out of bird songs as the avifauna wheel in and out of audible range—all link persons into the deeper-than-surface ‘interiors’ of the moving island world. The visually apprehendable stillness of grave monuments to fallen movers remarks powerfully and tellingly upon the stopping and the stilling of movement that characterises seeking asylum on Christmas Island’s shores and alerts us to the sensual means that are mobilised to give life to these ideas.
Such stillness is of interest, too, in light of how migrants and asylum seekers position their bodies within new spaces in and through specific movements, in certain bodily orientations. Mandy Thomas (2004) noted, ‘this bodily orientation is achieved haptically through spaces that satisfactorily externalise our sense of community, cultural familiarity, and habit’. As far as new arrivals are concerned, opportunity to undertake these orienting movements is severely truncated since movement is largely restricted to the confines of the Immigration Reception Centre.