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I listened to adjectival narratives about the heaviness of the afternoon heat even as my body sweltered in it. I was treated to tales of boiling seas that pounded the island with a frightening vigour as I kept a wary eye on the thrashing waves over the shoulders of islanders who had turned their backs on the sea, knowing that it would do as it would whether they looked at it or not.
I also met with people who had last been on the island in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, and who recalled the island to me in the sensual language of memory, with bodies deeply impressed with the memories of the place. Noses remembered the stench of dead crabs crushed into a rosy pulp as they attempted to return to their forest homes from the site of their mass birth, the sea; skins remembered the damp, salted heat of the day and the ceaseless pushing of tiny proboscis belonging to the millions of mosquitoes. Some pined for the island, whereas others remembered it in other terms, without longing to be there again. Some scratched suddenly itchy skin, and some wiped imaginary sweat from his or her brow. These people were, in important, embodied ways, still at home on the stinging hot island that they left behind—but not entirely. Embodied memories persisted and embodied pasts lengthened under a different sun, but they still cast the shadows of Christmas Island.
It is of the ethnographic data on the sensuality of living on the island, of having once lived on the island, and of yearning to live on the island again from which I have crafted this ethnographic account. It has taken shape as unpredictably as smoke along the lines of patterns emerging from my unwieldy amassment of fieldnotes, photographs, tourist information, and old and yellowing photograph albums donated by participants. It has taken shape from the words of special songs sung in water-filled caves on special occasions, the remembrances of death, drowning, and detention that form part of islander knowledge, experiences of asylum seekers on Christmas Island, and the culturally specific and ethnically shared remembrances of repasts made of fried chilli fruit bat and stewed golden bosun bird (cf., D. Sutton, 2001).