Seeing Red, Tasting Blood: Sensual Citizenship on Christmas Island

Abstract

Christmas Islanders participate together in blood metaphors, drawn from the island's biotic life. These metaphors proceed along specific sensual lines such that, in and through participation in this shared sensual citizenship, the identity category ‘Christmas Islanders’ is yielded. Pan-islandic sensory citizenship is based on participation in a highly visual and rhythmic auditory Christmas Island sensorium and other specifically ethnic relationships to the Island proceed primarily along the sensory lines of taste. Participation in particular sensory registers of island life is key in locating Christmas Islanders precisely as such, and is equally important in creating and maintaining ‘senses’ of ethnic difference between them. At the same time as local people participate together in pan-islandic metaphors, some ethnic groups have made sensory connections with the island that are not made by others. These connections are instrumental in locating islanders of particular ethnic membership as ‘native’ (over local), or as damaging to pan-islandic identity.

Keywords:

• Blood
• Christmas Island
• Identity
• Metaphor
• Place
• Senses

Notes

1. At Singapore's impending independence from Britain, island sovereignty transferred from Britain to Australia, and Christmas Island officially became an Australian territory in 1958. The transfer occurred during a period when the White Australia Policy, designed to halt the ‘Yellow Peril’ from the Asian north in its tracks, was in full force. The presence of Asian workers on the island led Australia to designate the island an ‘External Territory’, with the result that Christmas Island could legally be regarded and administered by Australia under Singaporean law. Under these conditions, Asian workers were paid low wages, in line with other Asian workers in the region. Shifts in Australian politics, especially with regard to unionisation, hit the island in the 1970s. The Australian government removed the last vestiges of the British administration when it was faced with a well-organised labour union comprised of predominantly Chinese members under the leadership of Gordon Bennett (Woodmore 1996, p. 25).

2. There is an emerging fourth segment, comprised of asylum seekers, who find themselves housed in the recently completed Immigration Reception Centre.

3. For Tierney and Tierney (2007), who have produced the most recent travel guide to Christmas Island, the distinctive material locales are constantly produced in tiny ways and are not to be taken simply as the historical results of the European domination of Chinese and Malay people during the course of the establishment and operation of phosphate mining. Although the ethno-architectural features of the neighbourhoods reflect just such dominance—large veranda-bound houses complete with outhouses and servants quarters persist at European Settlement, whereas ramshackle Singapore-style flats are the norm at Chinese Poon Saan and compacted units stacked atop one another three to the vertical lot characterise buildings in the Malay Kampong—these material environments are ‘community constituting’ as much as they are the products of history (Nuttal 1992). It is after this idea that Tierney and Tierney (2007), pp. 24–5) claim that the distinctive ethic settlements are resultant of a ‘habitual stance’ and not exclusively a political or historical one, even though, for example, the Malay kampong houses are unlike the traditional kampong houses one may find in Malaysia, with a large yard with fruit trees. These kampong were not built by Malay people, but were meant as labourers quarters and, although they do have shared yard space, they are tightly packed in to make the most of the area. Nevertheless, and according to Appadurai (1995), the built structures of neighbourhoods have frequently been understood in the terms of the completed outcomes of community labour, as ‘ends in themselves’ (Appadurai 1995, p. 205), but these environs are both the products of spatial senses of locality and central pillars in the production of locality, wherein the general properties of social life occur and are made manifest in three very specific ways. These general properties are made manifest in what Tierney and Tierney (2007) call the ‘habitual’ bearing taken towards everyday activities that happen only in particular island neighbourhoods. They draw attention to these habits, which include the production of habitually taken foods in, for example, the Kampong: according to Tierney and Tierney (2007), it's the place to get roti and you should go only at certain times for breakfast. The production of the pastries is not made around the temporal and breakfasting habits of others, but is instead made for Malays who live in the Kampong to have for their breakfasts. You may go there to partake of roti with Malays from the Kampong, but you will do it on their time (Tierney & Tierney 2007, p. 28).

4. This quote was taken down by Price exactly as it was said, and I have reproduced this quote complete with the version of English used by the speaker.

5. Into this rich and sustaining blood comes another animal. The yellow crazy ant was accidentally brought to the island by ship in the early 1900s. These ants prey aggressively on the native red crabs, spraying poison under their shells and eating the blinded animals from the inside out. At certain periods, red crab numbers have declined in demonstrable relationship with the success of the yellow ants and, in particular, with the success of ant ‘supercolonies’. These invasive and aggressive insects are neatly incorporated into the lifeblood metaphor as an aggressive cancer. Against the cancerous ants, Christmas Islanders come to be metaphorically constituted as ‘one blood’. The cancerous ant invaders that attack this unitary local blood are very often positioned so as to reflect local islander understandings of asylum seekers. Their presence has the effect of making islanders think of themselves even more as of the one blood as they unite against the ‘cancerous’ threat.

6. Indeed, the crabs seek out such places, for their main food intake comprises young rainforest seedlings. Without the crabs, Christmas Island would be a differently forested place, but so efficient are the crabs at removing seedlings, the island's forests are tall and the ground is all but clear of saplings.

7. Red crabs require an intake of sea salt to remain in good health.

8. Such place–body circularity is difficult to capture in theories of metaphor that privilege a cognitive genesis for metaphor and its resultant expression in language (see, for example, Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Ortony 1993).

9. The taking of bat of course positions Audrey's whole body as particularly oriented to Christmas Island place. Bats, she explained, were killed with handmade slingshots and required a knowledge of Christmas Island places (where bats would be), noises (to cover one's approach) and, of course, its rocky outputs, so one could choose the right sort of stone. Audrey demonstrated some of the moves, indicating that all these competencies, knowledges and dexterities remained vested in her body.

10. Elsewhere, I have argued that just these sorts of associations with the animal world—the food ‘taboos’, such as the exclusion of crabs from the diet, and the ‘subsistence’ understandings of island animals—work to situate people in close proximity with nature and, with it, access to a series of relationships and knowledges that are unavailable to others who are not situated in this way (see Dennis 2008).

11. Tasting blood may remain a spectral possibility because, as Brenda's account indicates, visual vigilance may uncover the presence of blood in eggs before their bloodied contents are taken into the body. However, at other times, as Brenda also recalled, blood was to be found in the teacake, evidently present there, she said, because of its ‘awful stench’.