Pre-Tropical Tristesse: Fieldwork Sites

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are framed, both geographically and historically, by the Indian Ocean.

In the 1500s, the Spanish and Portuguese had collected untold reserves of wealth through their Atlantic forays in the New World. The 1600s was the turn of the Dutch and the English. Their trading companies sailed the Indian Ocean’s reaches in almost unchallenged dominion. The legacy is immediately apparent as the plane banks west ascending from Perth airport; beneath us sprawls Rottnest Island. Rottnest Island was first charted and named by the Dutch. (They called the little marsupials they found “Rat” (Rott), and given their abundance, deemed it as Rat’s Nest”). Aboriginal people indigenous to south-western Australia believed the souls of the dead resided on Rottnest. Had they known about this, the rational, practical Renaissance Dutchmen would have dismissed it as superstition. These hardened Protestants, credited with inventing the modern trading company, would have set little store in charting such islands. Cocos, Keeling, or Rottnest all would have been merely navigational aids or perhaps hazards on the way to the riches of the Indies. In any case, Rottnest is the last I see of land for the next four hours as we fly across the eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean.

Virgin, our carrier, won a government contract to supply a subsidised service to Christmas Island and Cocos Islands, putting on three flights a week. I sit back to take in their no-expense-spared experience, inflight entertainment consisting of the teenage guy dressed up in his best singlet, shorts and ‘thongs’ (flip-flops) in the row behind. He delights his travelling companions; a teenage girl and her mother, with expletive-ridden stories of drunken escapades. His decision to change seat as the plane is about to land on Christmas Island earns him the microphoned rebuke of the air steward, but also the admiration of his companions. Sadly, they head through to the exit as we move to the transit area.

Christmas Island plays a crucial part in the history and current life of the Cocos Malays, but that is something I will write more about later. 

Our 30 minutes on Christmas Island is spent in the airport lounge. A duty-free shop, Chinese owned if the gold and red stylings are anything to go by, sells gold and jade. Next to it, a ‘tuck-shop’ (refreshment store) staffed by Country Women’s Association volunteers, offers Australian delicacies such as jaffles (toasted sandwiches, grilled cheese) and VB beer. Returning to the plane for the last leg is a dozen or so passengers; apparently Australian government workers flying to the Cocos Islands on business. This must be a comparatively light load compared to the average 2-300 people passing through Cocos Islands airport each week suggested in the statistics. We take off. I’m past the point of no return, only an hour to our destination.

This is the direct flight path from Perth to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
However, we went via Christmas Island.

The idea of a village on a remote tropical island would seem for many to be a classic situation in which to do anthropology. This goes back at least to the famous anthropologist Malinowski. During WWI, he famously did fieldwork on a tropical island, in the Trobriand archipelago off the coast of New Guinea. Written up as the 1922 classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific, he says of his arrival:

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight… Imagine further that you are a beginner, without previous experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you.

Like it or loathe it, this picture is the starting point for ethnography as we now practice it. Less famous, but still influential, was anthropologist Raymond Firth. In his “We, the Tikopia” (1936), he describes his arrival on Tikopia Island in the South Pacific, in a similar vein.

In the cool of the early morning, just before sunrise, the bow of the Southern Cross headed towards the eastern horizon, on which a tiny dark blue outline was faintly visible… In an hour or so we were close inshore and could see canoes coming round from the south, outside the reef… the men in them bare to the waist, girdled with bark cloth, large fans stuck in the backs of their belts, tortoise-shell rings or rolls of leaf in the ear-lobes and nose.

And lest I be accused of discriminating against jungle arrival scenes, consider one of the most widely-despised anthropologists, probably the last anthropologist-as-hero, and certainly the most macho of them all, Napoleon Chagnon, and his account of arriving at a Yanomami (also known as Yanamamö) compound on the Brazil-Venezuala border:

The entrance to the village was covered over with brush and dry palm leaves. We pushed them aside to expose the low opening to the village. The excitement of meeting my first Yanomamö was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled through the low passage into the village clearing.I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their nostrils—strands so long that they clung to their pectoral muscles or drizzled down their chins. We arrived at the village while the men were blowing a hallucinogenic drug up their noses. 

Such images of arrival are extremely evocative. Partly this is because they tap into older, more familiar stories: they recall the traditional castaway scene, first contact. It is the picture of an intrepid white explorer descending into savage realm, owing as much to the same imagination that inspired Prospero and Caliban, Robinson Crusoe or Heart of Darkness as to actual experience.

The tendency to depict these fieldwork sites as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ places also owes something to the anthropological concerns of the period. Anthropologists had been concerned to discover the ‘original’ or ‘elementary’ forms of human life; primitive culture in its pristine state. Anthropologists thought they could find this in jungles, in deserts, or on islands, which they perceived as closed off from modern developments. They thereby overlooked the trade, travel, and migration that often linked societies into the global context. Malinowski famously forgot to mention the existence of a colonial garrison located near his field site. Firth has been accused of overlooking the recent spread of Christianity. Without malice, these men portrayed actually their ‘objects’ as backward primitives in relation to the advanced civilization of the anthropologist. 

And so it is not without reservation and some consternation that I am now drawn to my fieldwork location. The reader could be excused for thinking that I am exaggerating, but consider one assessor’s comment on my first application to the government to fund my Cocos Island research:

In many ways, reading this application I felt like I was thrown back to the era of colonial anthropology, where the white man studies brown people to advance the interests of the ruling colonial government, and brings his wife along to gain access to the women in the community.

I am sure it would surprise and pain the reader to hear that their faithful author could be considered in such a light. Yet, contrary to popular opinion, anthropologists are not to be dismissed merely as harmless boffins, especially when writing anonymously. I realise, these days, anthropologists are likely to write about inner-city drug addicts or an S&M parlour. My tropical island idea, I worry, is so passé that I might as well turn up to the annual anthropology conference in pith helmet and safari suit. 

I console myself: Yes, the writing was often couched in terms of “savages” and “natives”, but it’s also easy to overlook how some of these early anthropologists emphasised a common humanity, which starkly contrasted the racist presumptions of their period. I think of their attitudes towards magic and religion. Frazer, the granddaddy of anthropology, implicitly showed that the beliefs of Christianity were no different to ‘savage’ and barbaric beliefs and rites elsewhere. Tylor, another forefather, marvelled at the ‘savage philosophers’ who must have provided the basis for contemporary animistic and religious belief. Malinowski saw his savages as eminently practical, intelligent people; their magical beliefs no different to our lucky charms. The sought those societies which they imagined to be furthest from their own to demonstrate the unity of the human mind and...on-and-on I think.

Thankfully, more pragmatic concerns intervene. We have commenced descent, the landing gear is out and the destination is in view. It lies below me unmistakable; a turquoise blue lagoon, ringed by stretches of white sand and green jungle. Fringing this, the outside reefs; huge swell lines emanating from the southern Indian Ocean dump on these shallow landings teeming with coral. The plane begins its final descent and we are level with the tops of the tallest coconut palms before gently easing onto the runway. Regardless of what I think, fieldwork is about to begin!

Looking over the lagoon to the southern part of the Cocos atoll

I emerge from the Virgin flight. Squinting, clutching my daughter with one hand, overstuffed hand-luggage hitched over the other shoulder, holding gingerly onto rail, I tread down the moving staircase to shimmering tarmac. We haul our children and other belongings over to the airport, a small building. A tractor brings our luggage on a trailer. We take it through customs and then load it onto a ute (pick-up), which drives it off to the ferry.

.

Waiting for the bus

Bored and drenched in oppressive heat, we wait for the bus that will take us to the ferry terminal. My boy looks so tired. I got him up at 2.30 am Melbourne time. Now it’s 8.30pm in Melbourne, but here it's only 4pm. I’m sticky—dipped in syrup and dried with fairy-floss kind of sticky. We sit by playing fields which double as an Australian Rules football oval and cricket ground. At one end, the bar, which also functions as a cyclone shelter. At the other end, an asbestos mosque, where the Cocos Malay men who work on West Island can perform their Friday prayers.

I am in the doldrums, literally. Slumping down; my trousers, pockets stuffed with passports, kid's drink bottle, wallet, and iPhone, barely hang onto my waist. Caterpillars, suspended on their silks, drop out of the ironwood tree. Sweat oozes down my temples and back. Everything seems to be weighted down by a blanket of humidity and burning sun; everything except mountainous, billowing clouds, which rapidly and aggressively bubble and spew upwards. They surge up ravenously, billowing in violent paroxysms like a pot boiling over.

Rising into these clouds, the plane has taken off, leaving us behind. Resolve is beginning to triumph over self-reproach. I begin composing my own arrival scene;

Picture yourself on a tropical island, exhausted; wife and kids hot and fatigued. The plane that has brought you here flies off to the east, leaving you all behind. You are waiting for the bus. A little puff of wind against your sweaty forehead feels blissful, your head begins to droop. Heavy eyelids try to close on eyeballs warmed by the heat. You spring awake, head throbbing. You go into robot mode: try to push your body through, forget about feelings and emotions.

Thankfully for the discipline of anthropology, that’s as far as I get, for, finally, the two minibusses arrive. We board; adults are 50c each and kids are free—I don’t bother to ask for a receipt! It’s the end of the working day, so the bus is crowded with Cocos Malay heading home to Home Island. Lively Malaysian pop music rings out.

A brief respite, for then we wait at the ferry terminal, for the ferry that will take us to Home Island. When it docks, I help load the luggage onto the back. Surprisingly pleasant, the ferry, donated by the federal government, is air-conditioned and had a large screen TV showing fishing videos. Thirty minutes later, Mak Emma meets us at the jetty, and we load our luggage on her Ezy-go golf buggy, and off to her accommodation, Ocean Villa.

Ferry to Home Island

 

Getting on aforementioned ferry

We had called ahead earlier, organizing for dinner of curried fish and beef ribs with rice to be made for us by Darling, who runs the local cafe. After eating, we all collapse before 7pm; probably a mistake as the kids are up at 3.30am and moving about soon after.

I try to get back to sleep. I’m not too sure what to expect after dawn. Will life be the same? How will I fit in? I want answers, and straight away, but I should know better. It will take months or years to begin to understand the culture and society on this island.