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It is through the intersection of sensual experience of a place, in this case of Christmas Island, and of memory that I argue place or locale stretches well beyond the geographic bounds of Christmas Island. This elasticity is evident in the ways that exislanders now living far from Christmas Island in Perth and Katanning, Western Australia—nearly 3000 kilometres away—continued to describe themselves as local Christmas Island people. The persistence of place in memory has been discussed by many theoreticians, including Casey (1996), Thomas (2004), Dennis and Warin (in press), and Warin and Dennis (2005). This persistence might take several forms. Sometimes in its movements, the body fails to find itself or is dislocated; it feels out of place and lost. In desperation, memories may strike out for known shores and return to the safe harbours of priorly known places and sensualities. As Thomas (2004) showed in her work conducted among Vietnamese migrants in Australia, the new place can be an alienating place, which can bring on sensual rejection; people’s bodies may shrink away in terror from new sensual experiences, closing the mouth to new tastes, going blind to new visions of life, and blocking out unfamiliar olfactory aliens that sidle, unidentified and uninvited, into unwilling nostrils (also see Kleinman, 1982).
For others, living in another place might not inevitably result in the devastating crumpling of the familiarity of the spatial world recently departed; the place newly arrived in may offer up for sensual consumption sufficiently similar sensoria as to allow the body to continue, relatively unhampered, in its habits of hand (cf., Mars & Mars, 2001). As I have argued in other ethnographic contexts, a complex, fraught, and continually negotiated process of substitution, mediation, negotiation, and sacrifice can yield a sense of new and old placeness, in which a sufficiency of being at home is accomplished, as the migrant body reaches out towards and harks back to the new and the old place. For others, acculturation to the new place might involve seeking out the familiar in the ostensibly unfamiliar, getting a grip on it or a feel for it. For others, desensitising the body to difference might work. All of these sensual potentialities were experienced by participants in this project who had moved away from Christmas Island.