It may be argued that while certain practices of ‘homemaking’, which produce artefacts and traditions, may relate to cultural and religious practices, others might draw from colonial ideals of the home, or wider influences from trade, empire, economic and societal changes. This research argues that in the process, as practices become hybridised and creolised, home always speaks to that which is intimately present and simultaneously ‘away’, diasporic, or absent. These absences could be understood as ‘hauntings’ (Gordon 2008), always present yet often unacknowledged.