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But there are also yellow crazy ants, mosquitoes, rare sea birds, phosphate dust, and coral. The people divide themselves into three main ethnicities, Malay, Chinese, and Austro-European, and into three main ethnic neighbourhoods and cemeteries, Kampong, Poon Saan, and the Settlement. There is a recently innovated fourth segment, the noninsignificant ethnicity of exiles and potential refugees, up to 1,200 strong, who find themselves housed in the Immigration Reception Centre. All of these people come to partake of a Christmas Island ‘sensorium’: all come to know the sound of the crabs, and many come to look to the crabs’ seasonal movements for a temporal rhythm of island life. A template, indeed, for island living. To be a local of Christmas Island, Dennis tells us, is to produce a social identity through acts of sensual, localised embodiment—one enters a stream of island experience.
There is a sensuality to living on Christmas Island in the everyday, to having once lived in the place and knowing it nostalgically, and to yearning to again live in the place and knowing it anticipatorily. To be at home on Christmas is to have a multisensorial, embodied awareness of it. Hence, Dennis’ aim is to ‘bring a sensual world into appreciation to the point where it can almost be smelled, heard, touched, tasted, seen’.
When William James depicted a stream of consciousness as intrinsic to the human condition, he conjured up the constant flow of ideas, sensations, and feelings of our subjective phenomenology. Its depiction was to become an objective of modernist literature. As Virginia Woolf (1938) described the project,