Living Museum of Christmas Island

Reanimating Christmas Island's Place-based Past

Left: Suzy and Mary Mathew, November 1971. Right: Two men, possible British Phosphate Commission officers, 1969 or 1970. Photograph by Roland Marsh.

Christmas Island plays a key but neglected role in Australia’s history of industrial, racial, and social relations. From the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, Christmas Islanders fought to end a longstanding racial apartheid system on the island and demanded wage parity and citizenship rights by unionizing, demonstrating, and exercising collective power. The history of this struggle and its impacts on the present-day island, much of which remains in the memories of living islanders, is minimally documented for future generations.

“Living Museum of Christmas Island” explores opportunities for community archiving to capture Christmas Island’s history and through Islanders’ own lived sense of place. Through community mapping events, augmented reality walking tours, and an interactive photo exhibit, this project aims to better understand how present-day Islanders can help shape the way Christmas Island’s history of social change is understood and remembered.

Dear Christmas Island

Held during Territory Week in October 2023, “Dear Christmas Island" is a participatory photo exhibit of never-before-seen photographs of Christmas Island in the 1950s-1980s.

Displaying photos donated by the late Roland Griffiths-Marsh and his family, this exhibit depicts Christmas Island’s social and cultural life during a key period of change on the island. The exhibit invites attendees, many of whom are long-time Islanders, to contribute to the record by writing directly on photographs, annotating them with knowledge.

Talking Maps

Talking Maps is a series of community mapping events held on Christmas Island that aims to spark and document location-specific memories about historically significant sites on the island and record them for the future. Each Talking Maps event brings Islanders together at a historic site on Christmas Island to respond to a series of prompts and create individual and collective maps of memory and emotion.

Our Island, Our Future

The result of a month-long poetry course at Christmas Island District High School, "Our Island, Our Future" is a print and digital zine that collects the voices of sixteen youth poets from Christmas Island.