Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study By Simone Dennis

Here, the tension between local red crabs and foreign, destructive yellow ants reawakens much older Australian chromatic metaphors of disruptive peril. The Yellow Peril, the movement of Chinese people into Australia, which was thought to be descending on the nation in tidal waves and other oceanic disasters in the 1900s (see Crock, 1998; Cronin, 1993; Walker, 1999), is metaphorically reinvoked by some locals to describe terrorist forces, also known as asylum seekers, descending on Christmas Island from over the sea in the present (Henderson, 2001). The idea that these alleged terrorist people and these dangerous ants don’t belong is rejected by others, many of whom have advocated for asylum seekers held in detention in the new Christmas Island Immigration Reception Centre. Both notions come from specific embodied sensualities; peculiar metaphors spring forth from the ground of the localised sensual body and help locals to make sensual sense of their moving world and the people who frequently move into it from over the ocean.

Those arriving by boat to Christmas, as the yellow ants surreptitiously did, arrive to third base, on liminal ground, in the migration exclusion zone. Perhaps the most powerful indicator of this persists in the location where asylum seekers were accommodated on the island prior to the construction of the new Immigration Reception Centre—in the old sports centre, on the foreshore, looking out to sea, facing the north, facing away from the destination that the asylum seekers had imagined relocating their bodies in, that is the southerly land of Australia. Arriving on Christmas Island means arriving into the migration exclusion zone; it means arriving in Australia and, concurrently, not arriving in it for the purposes of migration. It also means being stopped, sometimes for very long periods of time, in midmovement. It means being forcibly stilled.

Memorialisation made by local Christmas Island people about asylum seekers in the specific context of the migration exclusion zone very evidently privilege stillness. Such a privileging is remarkable in a world of movement.