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These memories were told to me in the island’s deep cool forests, even as they were being made. They were told to me in McDonald’s Cafes in Perth, even as they were being forgotten by those long gone from its shores, and they were told to me across kitchen tables, even as they were being recrafted by research participants who recalled memories of heat and scent, even while they sat in much colder and differently odoured settings. These settings of the moving in between, as well as those others I have prefaced here, form the ethnographic heart of this book.
A Place in Movements
Movement is, for Christmas Islanders, a way of life; the island, as all locals know, moves unhurriedly, but unswervingly, toward the Java trench that, locals say, will swallow the island in 3 million years. The moving geography of Christmas Island imposes a pattern of movement on its residents. The migrant population, the additional transient population of some 1,200 labourers building the Immigration Reception Centre, which will house 1,200 asylum seekers, and the water that flows beneath the limestone crust of Christmas Island means that movement is implied and included in the very constancy of the island place. The movement of asylum seekers, migrating birds and fish to the island, and the frequent movements off of the island that animals and local women giving birth make are also evidence of constancies of movement. The constancy of movement on Christmas Island offers up all of the potentialities of being somewhere, including being somewhere in between, coming from, and going to.
Animal Movement
The relentless geographic movement of the island place is coupled with specific movements undertaken by animals from specific place to specific place on the island. The movement is particularly relentless among the island’s numerous crustacea. The island was once declared ‘Kingdom of the Crabs’ by the famous naturalist Sir David Attenborough (see Squires, 2007) since it provides a home for 20 species of terrestrial and intertidal crabs, including the world’s largest land crab, the robber or coconut crab, as well as an additional 12 species of true land crabs.