Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study By Simone Dennis

After Appadurai (1995), I seek here not to take the distinctive organisation of Christmas Island locality for granted but to look to the techniques pressed into service in the production of locales and local subjects in the context of the constancy of movement. Included here is this production of locality in the conditions of high national temper and in the context of living in a migration exclusion zone. Residing here occasionally gives rise to pan-island experiences that everyone on the island shares. The shared experience of being a Christmas Islander during the Tampa crisis is reflected in the naming of a foreshore street Tampa View, so named for the masses of journalists who gathered there to watch the Tampa crisis unfold. Locals from all the different ethnic neighbourhoods named the place together, and in doing so, recognised their belonging to the island, as against the unbelongingness imposed on asylum seekers as the Australian government denied them access to the island and access to Australia.

Other sorts of things are included in pan-island experience. Experiences of red crabs are crucial in uniting the culturally and religiously distinctive and spatially separate neighbourhoods; they are often understood as blood connecting the different mostly Muslim Malay, mostly Buddhist Chinese, and mostly either Christian or Atheist Australian neighbourhood ‘organs’ of the broader island body in circulatory unity. Being local on Christmas Island, in the middle of a human and animal migratory pathway, also involves being located in the middle of a history that spans the sociopolitical terrain in between the external territory that Christmas Island was in the 1950s and the migration exclusion zone of Christmas present. As noted, the island’s fraught past of ethnic separation is captured in the ethnoarchitecture of the present, but these memories speak as much to the island’s racist past as they do to its present as a multicultural microcosm of the nation, where architecture in three different styles might indicate tolerant and comfortable ethnic diversity on the island. The claim that islanders make, in things like tourist guide books, to multiculturalism is often made in the reworking in text of the meanings of local buildings.