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Appadurai’s notes on the production of locality also include the idea that localities are spatially produced in the hard work of gardening, the making of pathways and buildings, and in the case of Christmas Island, the keeping at bay, the scarping back of, the omnipresent wet jungle and the reworking of the historical meanings of buildings. Persons are fully involved in such work, in sensual terms, taking comfort in the cultural familiarity they have created in undertaking the work of making an ethnically and culturally specific neighbourhood within a broader island locale.
Local conceptions of time are also productions of local labour; differentiated activity undertaken in different neighbourhood places have yielded ethnically differentiated neighbourhoods and serve to articulate their difference from each other. The marking of cultural and religious time at the Muslim-dominated Flying Fish Cove, for example, through the special sounds emanating from the mosque, are not heeded by those in the Settlement and are unheard up the hill in Poon Saan. Such local knowledge is undertaken for the benefit of locals; it is not only of itself, but it is for itself in the sense that people undertake this work, this activity, in a ceaseless production of the local that is meaningful to Christmas Island claims to place and to being in place and belonging.
This is particularly important to consider in a place where most locals have been born elsewhere. There is a rule on Christmas Island that pregnant women must depart the island well prior to giving birth due to a lack of obstetric facilities and staff on the island. Giving birth on the island has only been conceptualised as a problem in the last 12 years, and it is largely problematic in the context of public health regimes and standards. This is appreciated as a special kind of irony by some women who wanted to give birth on the island. These women had recognised the habits of particular birds, which used the island for the specific purpose of producing the next avian generation. The island is, in fact, famous for being a safe haven for nesting birds, free as it is from mammalian predators, save the introduced rats and cats.6 The fact that no one is born on the island now makes being local even more about hard work since the facts of one’s birth will increasingly be redundant in such claims to being a Christmas Islander.