Our island home: Difference, marginality, community construction and implications for heritage

This paper considers considers the understandings of attachment, identity and place found within the communities of a small offshore Queensland Island: Magnetic Island, which is located in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and World Heritage Area. Individuals, as members of the island community (which is characterised by various unbounded community groups), in living their day to day lives on the island, engage in a quest for identity and authenticity that is involved in a relationship between identity-making as a process and the way in which worlds and ways of living are meaningfully constituted. One of the outcomes is that the past is selectively constructed and organised in a relationship of continuity with the lived experience of the island environment and the nostalgic recreation and reinforcement of both place and community. In so doing the various physical features and intangible aspects of the island, and indeed the community itself, is imbued with cultural meanings that also act to reinforce the islander sense of marginality, difference and separation.