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This sensual field reaches out to connect Christmas Island with Perth and Katanning, where I also spent considerable fieldwork time visiting with Malay islanders who had moved there during the 1970s for employment reasons. The vastly different locales slip into one another in the intersection between the senses and memory. But many remained local islanders in terms of their sensual experiences. These experiences served to stretch a sense of placeness over geographically distant terrains.
It is from this sensual locatedness of mine and theirs that I intend to invoke the distinctive scents emanating from Christmas Island’s thick, wet vegetation and its powdery, mouth-filling phosphate dust, to call forth in words the showy, verdant green and the delicate, lacy apricot, to evoke the rusty bitterness of lettuce that had arrived in the local supermarket weeks past its expiration date, which cost $9 for a grizzled head, and to usher in the distinctive sounds of the island’s iconic red crabs as they scrabbled and scuttled, creating a sound so constant it seemed to lay at the very edge of hearing. The combination of these sensual dimensions as they melted together in the wet heat of the late afternoon yielded the warm mix of everyday life on the island as it was described to me, as I interpreted these descriptions, and as I, a new and sensually raw arrival to the island, experienced them.
I collected these sensual descriptions of life on Christmas from those engaged in the very business of living it, and, indeed, I lived it as I collected. I listened to islanders as they spoke of the constant sound of crabs scratching, but I listened dually to hear the crabs as they scratched all about the island. In doing so, I tried to follow Stoller’s decade old, but still excellent, advice that anthropologists ought to ‘resituate our visual bias and tune into the dimension of sound in ethnographic work’ (1996, p. 168). The results Stoller predicted, that we might resultantly ‘better appreciate the intangible and…cross thresholds into the deep recesses of a people’s experience’ (1996, p. 169), certainly appeared to be borne out; scuttling and scrabbling were memorialised mainstays for those who left the island and were a constancy of sound for those who stayed. Understanding these sounds meant understanding something important about the place that drew leavers, stayers, and me into aural worlds of shared experience.