Recent writing on the ethnogeography of Vanuatu has identified mobility and primordial connection as two counterpoised aspects of connection to place that have a long history in the archipelago. These themes are taken up in this paper in the specific case of north Ambrym, an island community in north-central Vanuatu in which the accidental geography of active volcanoes has fostered an equally active interest in making connections outside the island. In the postcontact period, Ambrymese were more mobile than many of their neighbours, as they recruited vigorously in a labour trade taking them to distant destinations and facilitating a fragmentation of the local population, already decimated by introduced disease. In addition, conversion of a large proportion of the population to Christianity brought local movement. The named domains, with their primordial connections to ancient sites replete with cosmo-mythic significance, were reconstituted as villages of one denomination or another, containing members of many different origin sites. Cash-cropping became characteristic of coastal, Christian settlements whose residents saw themselves as opposed to their 'heathen' neighbours. For the bush-folk, kastom was both symbolic of their identification with the past and their justification for exclusive access to its popular manifestations in the artefact trade, in the present. In the pre-Independence 1970s, local politics and pressure on productive resources including kustom, forced a radical re-emphasis on primordial connection at the expense of the more 'rhizomatic' attachments inside and outside domains, the boundaries of districts and even the island itself that had been, until then, more characteristic of Ambrymese place-making.If an obsession with temporality, memory and history appear characteristic of 1980s anthropology, the 1990s has seen a geographic turn; the love affair with time has been usurped by place and space or, as in more complex formulations, place and spacehime are granted their mutually reinforcing presence, though 'place is the master of their shared matrix ' (Casey 1996:43; see also Fox 1997:2-3). Toponymies and ethnoscapes provide the neologisms for an ethnogeography, characterised in the recent literature on Vanuatu by the two master tropes of rootedness in place and mobility, metaphorised as the tree and the canoe, and more recently as manpleslwomanples and their transient alter, the European (see Bonnemaison 1985Bonnemaison , 1994Jolly 1992Jolly , 1999.In his early work, geographer Joel Bonnemaison (1985:32) stressed place and permanence over mobility, but later, it is the image of reticulated space, or networks that THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY