The fascinating history of the Cocos Keeling Islands
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands is a small archipelago in the Indian ocean, entirely composed of overly-cliché coral islands abundant with coconut trees. They all look gorgeous, like this one:
These islands look so peaceful that it’s very easy to imagine that nothing of significance ever happened there, that all they witnessed over time is people harvesting coconuts and taking naps in the sand. But every piece of land on this planet has an history worth telling and in only a few centuries of human activity, the Cocos Islands have seen much more than what we would expect from their holiday wish-list looks: they have been ruled by a Scottish dynasty whose founder was born 12 000 km away from his kingdom ; they have seen a so-called White Rajah settle on an inhabited island with his own harem or witnessed an entire population, mostly brought against their will, being paid in plastic coins.
As a tiny piece of land who functioned in semi-isolation for a large part of its history, they can give the feeling of a snow-globe version of the world in the colonial era or a symbol of the struggles faced by our modern civilization. But despite obvious similarities between the history of the Cocos Islands and other places of our global world, their past, as much as their future, cannot be reduced as a mere illustration of its time and is clearly unique.
Let’s dive in.
The Cocos Islands can be divided into the North Keeling Island which is small and uninhabited and the South Keeling Islands which are small and very slightly inhabited.
North Keeling Island is a beautiful place, filled with coconut trees and birds, including the Cocos buff-banded rail, a very endangered bird that only lives on this specific piece of land. But apart from this probably delicious animal (the locals call it ayam hutan which can tastily be translated as chicken of the forest), nothing really happens there, so that’s all we will say about North Keeling Island.
The South Islands are the main deal: 24 individual islands (I was told islets is actually a more appropriate term for most) forming an incomplete atoll ring. Two islands, Home and West Islands, are inhabited, the rest of them being too small, too low or too weird to host the local population of slightly more than 500 people.
To help you paint a better mental image of the place, here is a truly splendid map from the 1976 CIA Indian Ocean Atlas showing the islands.
Now, as you can imagine, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands are remote, very remote even. But how remote is that, really?
Well, the closest piece of land is Christmas Island (with an incredible population of 1500 souls) which lies a mere 960 kilometres away. To find more significant emerged landmasses, you have to travel North-East for a little more than 1000 kilometres to reach the Indonesian Island of Java or South-East for over 2100 kilometres to reach Australia.
So very remote to say the least.
In fact, here is what you get if you zoom out from the islands in Google Map:
That’s right, blue emptiness. I’ve never experienced being in a place this isolated so it kind of freaks me out a bit just to think about it.
Since Google Maps is on the table right now, it is worth mentioning that, to my total surprise, Google Street View is available for most roads on the Home and West islands. You can browse through the quiet and beautiful paths of the two main islands, which is great, but what is even better is that if you grab the little yellow Street View man (poor thing) you can see that most “streets” displayed by Google are not on land. A big part of it actually looks like this:
I sometimes like to think this guy is a rogue Google employee that fled the boring streets of Menlo Park and unilaterally decided to street view the whole Indian Ocean armed only with his great courage and incredibly cool hat. Sort of like a Silicon Valley version of The Old Man and the Sea.
But to go back to being more informative, it could be added that the Cocos Islands have a combined surface of 14.2 square kilometres, which is around a quarter of Manhattan’s size or the size of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The two inhabited islands, West and Home, make for half of the global surface (mostly West Island, with over 6 square kilometres). They have no rivers or lake which means that their access to fresh water is made by digging wells to reach water lenses (that’s pockets of fresh water floating above salted water underground).
I think that you now get the picture: pretty small, clearly remote and with very few natural resources apart from coconut-based products it’s not hard to understand why the Cocos Islands have managed to stay uninhabited until the 19th century. Most probably because no one had been crazy enough to settle there. Yet.
It’s difficult to tell who first set eyes on the archipelago and it’s possible that some brave sailors from the Indian Ocean have landed on the Cocos Islands at some time or another, long before European started touring this corner of the globe, claiming everything they could as theirs with the frenzy of young kids hunting for Easter eggs. However, the official discoverer of the Cocos Island is the very fine British captain William Keeling from the British East India Company. In 1609, after numerous travels in the region, he was sailing back home from Java via the middle of nowhere when he spotted the coconut-tree abundant archipelago that is still carrying his name today.
On that subject and to clarify its parenthesis-baring name, the islands were called both Cocos and/or Keeling islands in a confusing manner for 300 years until the official decision was taken to compromise and settle on Cocos (Keeling) Islands in 1916.
Before we move forward in time, away from our beloved captain Keeling, it must be told that he was keeping a diary aboard his ship, diary where he never bothered to mention the discovery of the Cocos Islands. Some will say that this casts a shadow of doubt on the reality of his finding but I guess discovering new islands was not considered interesting enough an event for our noble captain. After all, he is said to have organized performances of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Richard II on his ship, the Red Dragon, in a previous journey.
I am very far from an expert in maritime travel (when I close my eyes and think about 17th century ships, I see drunken sailors with missing teeth fighting away cruel pirates, not Oxford-bred Englishmen playing Hamlet in the middle of the ocean) but I nevertheless question Keeling’s judgment on what is noteworthy since he did note care to note the discovery of islands unknown to European civilization but still bothered to write down in his journal on an other day that “[he] got plenty of lemons very cheap, as they gave [him] 200 for a penny knife”.
After being so brilliantly discovered by our good pal William Keeling in the early 17th century, the islands remained very much alone for two extra centuries of tranquillity during which only a few ships waived from a distance. Among these passers-by was the Swedish scientist and explorer Carl Gustaf Ekeberg who made some sketches of the islands, probably the first ones, in 1749. These drawings eventually led to gradual appearances of the Cocos Islands on European maps like the one shown below.
James Horsburg, a British hydrographer also made a quick cameo-esque appearance in the region in 1805, drew some charts of the place and decided they should be called the Cocos-Keeling Islands. Unlike our fellow William Keeling, he did bother to write it down in his travel diary and to congratulate himself of his good journaling work, he named one of the islands after him.
As you see, apart from being a hip charting place with name-giving opportunities for ambitious hydrographers from the British East India Company, the Cocos Islands were left completely alone until the beginning of the 19th century when John Clunies-Ross and Alexander Hare made their grand entry in this story.
John Clunies-Ross was born in 1786 in Weisdale, a small locality of the Shetland Islands, where I believe he developed a taste for remoteness. After all the Shetland Islands are a slightly inhabited subarctic archipelago of 300 islands, 170 km North of Scotland and 300 km West of Norway. If it seems less remote that the Cocos Islands, it more than makes up for that with its rather cold climate and yearly average of 250 raining days.
Unfortunately, very little is known of his childhood and early life (or at least I could not find anything) but the taste for sailing and exploring seems to be part of his DNA. A clear example of the family spirit is Robert Clunies-Ross, John’s younger brother, who apparently went to sea at age 10.
Young John Clunies-Ross was not different than his brother and at 13 he was already working on whalers around Greenland. After that, he stayed in the whaling industry but was soon en route for the Indian Ocean, probably looking to discover more remote places of his own.
We find his trace again in the Indonesian island of Timor, in 1813, where he arrived aboard the whaler Baroness Longueville of which he was Third Mate and Harpooner. While he was there, in the Timor city of Kupang, the ship Olivia was sadly without a captain. John Clunies-Ross, 27 years old at the time, was offered to take command of the two-masted boat and accepted the job, with the condition that his younger brother Robert would accompany him aboard the Olivia. How do we know that you may wonder? Well, like the future captain that he was, John Clunies-Ross kept a diary and unlike the fine William Keeling, he did bother to write it down.
By 1825 John Clunies-Ross had made a life for himself and was now commanding the Borneo, a trading vessel which he partially owned. One day, as he was supposed to investigate Christmas Island for settlement opportunities (the island was uninhabited at the time), bad weather in the region prevented him from doing so and forced him away. I don’t know what was John’s personal knowledge of the Cocos Islands at the time but since he could not explore Christmas Island, he decided he would take a peak at them instead. He explored the Cocos Islands, setting foot there for what I believe was the first time in is life and while exploring the islands, he used the opportunity to dig some wells and plant some fruit trees (not coconut trees we can fairly presume).
Alexander Hare was born in 1775 in London and, not unlike John Clunies-Ross, was prompt to respond to the call of the unknown. After a rather uneventful childhood, he joined a trading company based in Portugal around the age of 25 and set sail for the Indian Ocean.
In 1807, he settled in Malacca, in the southern region of the Malay Peninsula. There, it seems he mostly focused on trading and making high-ranking acquaintances. On the trade side, which was in a form or another the main occupation for all Europeans in the region, I don’t have enough information to judge if he was successful. On the acquaintance side, however, I believe he was very good and was notably introduced to Stamford Raffles, the British Lieutenant-Governor of the Dutch East Indies (the Dutch East Indies were at that time temporarily governed by the British, a weird thing apparently called interregnum if you want to know).
So when the British invaded this part of Borneo, they had to replace all the local Dutch leaders with their own, which probably meant quite a lot. Sir Raffles was not a man to forget his friends, so he appointed Alexander Hare Resident of Banjarmasin and Commissioner of the Island of Borneo in 1811, where he would soon try out some ideas.
If you are not very familiar with the geography of South-East Asia, I think that at this stage of the story, it might get a little bit confusing, so I’ll take the liberty to interrupt the story of Alexander Hare and give you a little geographical context. If you are already familiar with the regions where our story takes place, please fill free to jump to next section, I will never know if you do.
Most of our story takes place in and around the Sunda Islands, a group of islands in the Malay Archipelago, that are mostly part of Indonesia. Slightly confused? Here is a map that makes it all much clearer.
Let’s start with Borneo, at the centre of the map.
The Island of Borneo, where Alexander Hare was staying in the 1810’s, is a huge island (the third largest in the world and more than 3 times the size of the UK) placed at the crossroad of today’s Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. The southern part of the island belongs to Indonesia and the north to Malaysia and the small nation of Brunei. This division is mostly inherited from the colonial days of Borneo, with the Dutch and British each ruling a part of the island. Some other seemingly artificial divisions can be seen in many other islands in the region such as Timor, divided between the state of East Timor and the western section that is part of Indonesia (as a bonus, you can see Kupang there, where young John Clunies-Ross found his first captain job, you can waive but he won’t see you). Same goes for New Guinea further west. It’s pretty clear that Europeans made quite a mess here, on a way larger scale than our story.
Before we move back to Alexander Hare, here are few key places from our story that you can spot easily on the map: The Cocos Keeling Islands (south-west end of the map), Christmas Island (a little north-east from the Cocos), the coast of mainland Australia, the island of Java (south of Borneo) where Stamford Raffles is based, or the city of Banjarmasin in southern Borneo.
Soon after being appointed Resident of Banjarmasin in 1812, Alexander Hare had an idea. A vision I dare say.
First, he bought around 3600 square km of land from the Sultan of Banjarmasin. Actually, the majority of documents I have read on the subject (and especially in the coolest ones where you can read things like “for your clear memorandum”) indicate that he did not buy the land but got it from the Sultan as a personal grant. Nice move.
After that, as he was probably thinking that the local governance was already quite complex, he decided that no one would notice or care if he started his own little thing. So in 1812, he simply created an independent state there, called Maluka. Pretty much like starting a small side business to make extra money, nothing big.
So Alexander Hare went on and created his own monarchy where he issued his own coinage to make this look more official.
His fiefdom was probably quite empty and of little value, but remember: Alexander Hare was a tradesman. So he traded, or more specifically, he imported some goods. Luckily for him, he could count on the help of his good friend Stamford Raffles, which was apparently on board with all this, and he “applied for a population”. His application was well received and Raffles simply gave him a huge amount of prisoners from the Island of Java to import in his kingdom and put them to use.
This indeed added some people to Maluka but there was one last problem: as it is often the case, the prisoners from Java were mostly male. And Alexander Hare was not OK with this and a “supply of females” was soon needed.
Hare and Raffles started spreading the word that women were needed in Maluka and first tried to find some voluntary newcomers by offering some kind of financial compensation to families willing to export some of their female members. However, their please come to our new kingdom full of convicts, we’d like a feminine touch over here offer did not work as expected and yielded little to no result.
Not a man to give up easily, Stamford Raffles decided to push this to the next level and issued an edict “commanding all the Residents of Java to seize upon suspicious persons (of either sex) and forward them to [Banjarmasin]”. Kind of like when you receive a suspicious email and you forward it to a friend to get his opinion. No big deal really, just forward anything suspicious.
A majority of people from Java refused to obey to this decree but it worked nonetheless and managed to populate the kingdom of Maluka and most of all it finally brought some women to the new country. With this new feminine influx, Alexander Hare was finally able to achieve his final goal and set up a personal harem of around 40 women. And as a kind of bonus, he started to be known as the first “White Rajah”.
But all things come to an end and the kingdom of Maluka only lasted 4 years, from the settlement in 1812 to 1816 when the Dutch regained control of this part of Borneo and kicked everyone out. Stamford Raffles was no longer in control so Hare fled Borneo where he was not welcome anymore. He spent the following 10 years travelling and was seen during this time in various places, such as in India or South Africa.
If you think about the activities of European nations such as Britain, the Netherlands, Spain or France in 19th century South-East Asia, you probably believe that their appreciation of what was “right” and what was “wrong” was a little off to say the least, considering what was done in the colonial era. But even at the time, what Alexander Hare and his pal Stamford Raffles had managed to do in Borneo was, as soon as a few years later, called by the British the Banjermasin Outrage.
An estimate of nearly 4 000 people were kidnapped in a form or another and sent into slavery, as workers or harem members, in the kingdom of Alexander Hare.
The investigations led by the British in the 1830’s on this series of event are very similar to modern-day post-political-scandal enquiries: everyone remotely involved is either saying that nothing happened, that they were not aware of anything happening, or just blaming other people for what happened. And sometimes all of that together.
Now, you may be wondering what Alexander Hare and John Clunies-Ross have to do with each other? We left the first in 1916, bitter from the fall of his little kingdom and the second in 1925, the head full of coconut trees and settlement ideas. So what happened between during this decade for Hare and Clunies-Ross? Here is what we know.
Let’s go back to 1813, on the island of Timor. Do you remember where this is? Or did you just skip the geography briefing and really believed me when I said I would not know? The ship Olivia, which provided John Clunies-Ross his first captain post, was hired by the British Government of Java but belonged to no else than Alexander Hare. John served as captain of the ship for two years, during which he ended up meeting its owner on a few occasions. From what I have read on Alexander Hare, he is largely described as being “charming”, which pretty much checks out with the fact that he was able to persuade quite a lot of people to participate in his shenanigans. He is even more largely described as “dishonest”, which checks out even more with his global life story. Nonetheless, John was apparently “charmed” by Alexander and became his harbour-master at Banjarmasin in 1815.
When Alexander Hare’s own kingdom crumbled in 1816 he probably got the feeling that people were starting to be less fond of him and fled the scene around 1818. But he remained officially in office in Banjermasin until 1824 although it was his younger brother, John Hare, that was really in charge because well, he was not running away and was, you know, actually there. John Clunies-Ross stopped working for the Hare Brothers in 1823 but by then had started a building a large ship, the Borneo, that was also co-owned by John Hare (and very marginally by Alexander).
After leaving Hare, John Clunies-Ross embarked on the newly finished vessel for what would be the ship’s only voyage to England. He had no intention to settle back home and wanted to find a place of his own, that met his taste, which mostly meant a very remote place.
He hoped to find a suitable island between the East Indies and South Africa, where he could start a settlement and use the place as a trade outpost between the Malay Archipelago and Europe. His remote island short-list included Melville Island, Christmas Island or Kerguelen but he deemed these places too mundane and finally chose the Cocos (Keeling) Islands which he had already surveyed in 1825. He had an agreement with Alexander Hare and the men had planned to occupy the islands together and use the archipelago for their future trading activity.
When he arrived in England in 1826 he did not stay long and took on board his wife (Elizabeth Dymoke, an English woman who seemed to appear out of thin air as John’s wife in 1826), his mother-in-law and a few other English people who were tempted by the adventure. He sailed away from England, towards the middle of nowhere and on February 27, 1827, finally reached his destination.
There, he was greeted by Alexander Hare, already well established on the islands with some “menservants” and a “very large harem”.
I find it quite difficult to believe that after several years of working for Hare and witnessing his kingdom attempt that included slaves and a famous harem, John Clunies-Ross was so surprised when he discovered how Alexander Hare had decided to settle on the islands. Knowing his previous history, I expected no less from the dear White Rajah of Borneo but all the information I encountered shows that John Clunies-Ross was, if not surprised, very unhappy with what he found on the islands in 1827. Maybe they had agreed to a no-harem or no-slave policy on the island? Maybe, he was fully on board with the harem before but now that he was living with a wife and mother-in-law, it was not acceptable anymore? Just joking. But still.
Or maybe he had agreed to a small harem but was thrown off-guard by its magnitude? After all, the harem included as much as 200 women, roughly ten times the number of men that arrived with Clunies-Ross, and reports indicate that Alexander Hare had surrounded himself with women from Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes, Java, Madura, Bali, Sumbawa, Timor, New Guinea, South Africa, India, China…
Anyway, John Clunies-Ross public opinion on the subject (we only have his writings on this matter) was that he disagreed with Hare on moral grounds, mostly because he was treating his “servants” as slaves and not as nominally free employees. Here, I’ll simply quote Gibson-Hill who wrote on this dispute: “The distinction is often a subtle one”.
Since the two men were no longer bros and Alexander Hare had settled on the island of Pulo Beras (or Prison Island), John Clunies-Ross decided to settle on Pulo Atas (South Island).
On the map above, South Island is the most south-eastern point of the atoll and Prison Island is a very small islet near the north-east corner. It is worth noting that the islands shapes and sizes have largely evolved since the early 19th century.
This kept the two colonies quite distant from one another, but clearly not enough to prevent quarrels. The main object of tensions between the two came from the fact that the members of John Clunies-Ross’ settlement, mostly men, spent quite a lot of time persuading the women who made up the majority of Hare’s entourage to leave him and join them on the fun side of the atoll. As time passed, a lot of women did so and left Alexander Hare for the sailors. John Clunies-Ross denied every request to send them back to the harem, on the condition that the newly-formed couples would go through a sort of wedding (more mother-in-law influence).
This exodus ended up eroding Hare’s dream of harem and the general conditions started to degrade for him. After a few years in the archipelago, he left the islands around 1830. He never returned to the Cocos and died in 1834 in Sumatra.
With Hare out of his hair, John Clunies-Ross was left as the sole master, not to say the King, of the Cocos Islands.
In 1830, the Cocos Island still had a very short history of human inhabitation but the way it all started pretty much sets the tone for what happened in the two following centuries.
The islands were just starting to settle in but already had the visit of some European explorers, not unlike your friend that insist on coming to check your new apartment before your house-warming party and is somehow surprised that your living room is full of cardboard boxes.
I feel like a late-night show host when I say this, but our first guest definitely needs no introduction as it is no less than Charles Darwin.
During its über-famous world tour, the HMS Beagle toured most of the planet’s oceans and in April of the year 1836, the last of his 5-year journey, stopped in the Cocos Islands to study the coral reefs of the atoll. Charles Darwin and the Beagle’s crew stayed only 11 days, during which John Clunies-Ross was absent from the archipelago. Apart from the natural beauty of the islands, Charles Darwin did not have a very favourable impression of the place. On a material level, he found that their settlement, nearly 10 years old, had a “desolate aspect”, with no garden or cultivation and very poor houses destitute of furniture. On the living condition of the non-European population (that would soon start to be referred to as the Cocos Malays, because of the large proportion of Malay workers in the early days) he is even less enthusiastic as this extract from his journal shows:
The next notable visit was from Dr. Henry Ogg Forbes, a Scottish naturalist and explorer who came to the islands in 1879, during what is often considered the period of greatest prosperity of the Cocos Islands, although I’m not really sure what this is based on. So what had changed since Darwin’s visit?
In 1879, our old friend John Clunies-Ross was unfortunately long dead and was followed as ruler and owner of the Cocos Island by his son John George and then by his grand-son George. Please note the fabulous smoothness of this transition from John to George.
John George Clunies-Ross, or Ross II if you want to add a little feudal spirit, ruled for about 30 years, from the death of his father to his own, in what would become the classical Ross Dynasty style. During this time, he came up with an ingenious idea to tackle the lack of workforce in the coconut tree plantations: simply import convicts from Bantam, on the island of Java, to work for free of the islands. It’s not very hard to see where they got the inspiration from this idea, clearly in the typical style of the late Alexander Hare, harem not included.
The only other notable event during the Ross II era was the incorporation of the Cocos Islands in the British Empire in 1857.
What’s that? An invasion?
Well, when John Clunies-Ross and Alexander Hare settled on the islands, they were fully inhabited and claimed by no one (that’s called Terra nullius, just in case you liked interregnum and wanted to start a collection). So after Alexander Hare left the place, John Clunies-Ross could consider the islands to be his very own kingdom, without any foreign country having anything to say about it. And that’s what he did: he established himself King of the Cocos islands.
But John Clunies-Ross was realistic and he guessed that if an other country (the kind with an army) decided to annex them, he would be pretty much helpless. So, very early on, he tried to find the protection of a major European power established in the region and first reached out to the British to have them acknowledge his ownership of the islands. However, the tiny islands seemed to spark very little interest and it was only in 1857 that the British Empire deigned to invade the islands and put poor Clunies-Ross out of his misery.
It is worth noting that some reports indicate that this was actually a mistake and that Captain Fremantle was actually supposed to take control of the Maldive Islands. There is however no consensus on this and Fremantle’s rather huge geographical error is not certain.
This event changed nearly nothing to the life on the islands since the Clunies-Ross kept ownership of the land and Ross II was appointed governor-king of the place. A little later, in 1886, the Queen Victoria even granted the Clunies-Ross family perpetual control and ownership of the island.
Now, back to 1879. Ross II had been dead for 8 years and Ross III was busy as a bee modernizing the place all around. Ross III (George) is said to have been a popular leader of the islands, much more appreciated by the inhabitants than his father. This is backed up by the notes of Dr. Henry Ogg Forbes, who described the place differently than Darwin half a century ago: he found the inhabitants “fairly contended”, the houses “neat” and “comfortably furnished”. George had stopped the importation of Bantamese convicts but free labour was still recruited there however and the habitations were still separated into two groups: the locals (of European and Malay descent, more and more a mix) and the workforce from Bantam.
Even if the practice of convict/slave importation had been sort of over for 4 years, Dr Forbes found that this had left the island with an “unruliness” issue due to this population. At the time, the island was under a strict curfew and everyone had to report at the guard-house at fixed hours. Despite being theoretically free, no one had the right to leave the main village at night and every boat was tracked with an accuracy that evokes your run-of-the-mill totalitarian state more than the classical idea of a tropical island.
At the time however, the economy was looking good for the Cocos Islands, or at least for the Clunies-Ross family. Coconut-based products (coprah and coconut oil mainly) were shipped by the family's own fleet and sold in large quantities.
This revenue stream allowed the Islands to import a variety of products which went from rice to wives, the latter being harder to get.
Financial prosperity probably peaked during the following decades, largely thanks to Christmas Island where the Clunies-Ross established the first settlement in 1888. When a little later, Phosphate was found, they were given around half the shares of the company that extracted it, to avoid litigations on land property. This turned to be very profitable and helped fuel the development of the Cocos Islands.
This economic prosperity of the Islands probably coincided with a period of improved living conditions around the 1890’s or 1900’s after the Clunies-Ross stopped importing convicts and tamed down the totalitarian surveillance a notch. This wealth is mostly visible if you look at the Clunies-Ross estate and their famous Oceania House that was built during that time, using locally-sourced organic wood and Scottish stones.
However, the wealth trickled down to the average Coco Malay quite lightly. To be honest, their payment was a little low (that’s bound to happen when your boss has a monopoly on employment) and most of all, a little fake. The workers were paid with local money, first in the form of notes printed on sheep skin and later in the form of plastic coins.
Workers could use their token coins in a single shop, run by the Clunies-Ross family, where prices where very high. But again, that’s monopoly rules.
An other option (on which I have very little information) was to convert some coins into silver money that you could probably use in other places of the word but only at 5/6 of their face value.
The 20st century saw a very slow opening of the Cocos Island to the rest of the world, with the implantations of a telegraph relay station and more broadly the events of the two World Wars which gave the islands strategical importance. World War II might seem far from the Cocos but war-time events occurred in and around the islands, without causing great damage. However, the large presence of foreign soldiers had a very strong impact on the population, being the first significant contact with the outside world for many islanders.
But the reign of Ross IV (John Sidney Clunies-Ross) was marked by the gradual decline of the islands’ prosperity, partially due to terrible cyclones that hit the islands and dramatically reduced the production of coconut-based products while their trading prices were also divided by two in a generation.
All inhabitants were still provided with work, even when there was none to do, but wages were low and only usable on the more-and-more empty shelves of the official shop where rationing was also in place. Money mostly piled as a virtual amount, only usable if the family decided to convert it to silver and leave the islands, which was not uncommon during these times but took a great deal of courage. Leaving the island, on top of being pretty scary because they had virtually no knowledge of the outside world, was a one-way journey: no return was allowed for those who left.
On the bright side, by 1941, crime had become almost non-existent with no murder in 30 years and very rare thefts.
I believe these few sentences, written by C. A. Gibson-Hill in 1941, give an interesting insight on the mood there at that time :
If you think this is a bit dark, he also adds a little later:
“The settlement was an aged person, slowly slipping out of life, and nearly content to see it go”.
You probably got it, times were not great for the islanders and a lot of them (around 1500, more than today’s population) left the islands at the end of the 1940’s, most of them settling in Borneo.
In 1954, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands were still a part of the British Empire, as a dependency of the Colony of Singapore, and even had the honour of a visit from Queen Elizabeth II that year.
This courtesy visit was very sweet but times were starting to change and vast colonial empires were falling out of fashion everywhere in the world. Our beloved islands were no exception and would change hands a year only after the Queen’s tour.
The rough idea at the time was that maintaining an empire was starting to be difficult for financial and political reasons, but loosing all ties to the former territories was not desirable for European leaders. The concept of Commonwealth was pretty much the answer to that: give these colonies some economical and political independence while keeping a close relationship on these two aspects and thus maintaining British influence. That’s oversimplified, I know, please don’t yell at me. For the Cocos Islands, since full independence was not really on the table, the idea was to transfer them to the Commonwealth of Australia.
So, after complicated administrative machinery, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands became a part of Australia in 1955.
Now Australian citizens, the people of the Cocos were under the direct authority of a new and shiny local administrator, appointed by the federal government. So what had happened of our local Kings, the Clunies-Ross?
Even after the transfer to Australia and the arrival of a new governor, John Cecil Clunies-Ross, or Ross V, was still a de facto leader of the place. After all, he had never been clearly removed and the Clunies-Ross family still owned the totality of the islands, which is still quite a lot.
This situation remained this way for two decades but the Australian government was not a big fan of how things were going on there and in 1978 they forced the Clunies-Ross family to sell the islands for A$ 6,250,000, allowing them to keep only a few pieces of land, mostly their Oceania House property. This marks the unofficial end of the Clunies-Ross reign in the Cocos Islands.
But despite this strong move, the Australian government deemed that the Clunies-Ross were still too much in charge (they still were the employer of a vast majority of the population) and applied more pressure. They told John Cecil Clunies-Ross that he should leave the islands, which was clearly not his first choice. Some legal battles were fought, involving even the High Court of Australia but the government finally found a way to win this: in 1984 they declared that no government business should be given to the Clunies-Ross shipping company, which eventually led to its bankruptcy and forced the family to sell many of their assets, including their long-time glorious residence, Oceania House.
That same year, a UN mission oversaw an official referendum to decide the fate of the island. To a large majority (88 %) the islanders chose integration to Australia over free association or independence (less than 4 %). This referendum is considered the “smallest act of self-determination ever conducted” with only 261 voters but its consequences were not a bit small and its outcome was interpreted by the Australian government as a validation of their current policy on the islands.
After that, the islanders became full-right Australian citizens (with the right to vote in federal elections) and the Cocos Islands were removed from the United Nations’ list of Non-Self-Governing Territories.
But this was nearly 40 years ago, so what about now?
John Cecil Clunies-Ross (Ross V) has left the islands after the events of the 80’s and lived in Perth, Western Australia until his death in 2019 at the age of 91. His son, John-George Clunies-Ross (which would have been Ross VI if things had went differently), still lives on the islands to this day, apparently in a more humble fashion that his ancestors. Oceania House, after being sold by the Clunies-Ross in the 1980’s, is now owned by an Australian mainlander and currently a tourist accommodation where you can spend the night (their website if you want to visit). The islands don’t export any coconut-based products any more (not in notable quantities at least) and I believe than the main industry has now shifted to tourism, which is probably a great thing.
This could be the island’s endgame and it’s tempting to see this as the “end of history” for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in a now all-peaceful paradise on earth. After all, in the summarized history of the Cocos Islands on their official website, the last historical event is “Cossies Beach on Direction Island is named Best Beach in Australia” (2016).
As much as I’d like to leave it there, I still need to add a word on the current situation: like any place in the world, no matter how small, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands face internal struggles. The most visible one are the recurring disputes that occur between the Cocos-Malays and the people of more European descent (of British origin for the earliest settlers and Australian for the newest). In a pure textbook illustration of this division, West Island is mostly populated by English-speaking Caucasians (widely employed by the government) while Home Island is almost entirely occupied by the Cocos-Malay-speaking majority.
Tensions arise particularly on the subject of language, the use of English being enforced by local government in disfavour of the ethnic tongue (this article from The Australian is interesting if you want to know more). The fact that the Cocos-Malays are Muslim (they have been since the earliest days of the settlement) in a mostly Christian country adds additional elements of distinction between the already very different population groups and is another common subject of tensions.
As a final proof that the Cocos (Keeling) Islands are now fully part of our modern society, or at least cannot escape it anymore, I’ll note that despite their great isolation, the islands are not spared by plastic pollution, far from it. A 2017 study showed that the beaches of the Cocos islands contained an estimated total of 414 million pieces of man-made debris (including 977,000 shoes and 373,000 toothbrushes).
If you feel like you want to continue your journey in the Cocos Islands, here are a few references and links to get you started. I used most of them as (sometimes conflicting) sources to write this story so feel free to tell me what mistakes or inaccuracies I made.
I’ve tried to include a variety of opinions and sources so you can also check out other points of view on the depicted events, or just try to know more on this archipelago.
- General documents on the islands’ history, geography, culture, etc:
- Notes on the Cocos-Keeling Islands by C. A. Gibson-Hill, a major source of information for this story.
- The official tourism website.
- Some historical timelines: from the Shire of the Cocos, from the Touristic Board.
- The colourful early history of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, also by C. A. Gibson-Hill.
- The Evolution of Space Organisation in Cocos Malays’ Dwellings in Tawau, Sabah, by Noor Aziah Mohd Ariffin and Nurul Ain Osri. - On the Clunies-Ross family:
- Dynasties Ep.2, a 2002 documentary from ABC.
- Jacobus Arnoldus Hazaart and the British interregnum in Netherlands Timor, 1812–1816 by Steven Farram for insight on John Clunies-Ross’ activities in Borneo with Alexander Hare.
- This article from Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary, a source of information seemingly unrelated to our story. However, this article is great because it shows current-day pictures of the birthplace of John Clunies-Ross. As a bonus, a Clunies-Ross descendant commented the article.
- These old pictures from the early 20th century on the Cocos for additional visual context. - On the transfer of the islands to Australia:
- The very well documented A Federation in these Seas by Alan Kerr and Christine Good is an incredibly detailed account of how Australia acquired its external territories, with Chapter 11 focused in the Cocos Islands.
- Australia, the Cocos Islands and self-determination, by Phillip Tahmindjis. - On the current situation in the islands:
- This article by The Independant
- This one, by The Guardian
- This last one, by ABC Australia - On Alexander Hare and the Banjarmasin Outrage:
- A coin to start off easily
- This article, by Pan Jie, on Stamford Raffles, an important and very controversial figure in the history of Borneo, Java and mostly famous for “founding modern Singapore” although not everyone agrees to that, especially no the author of the article. You can find plenty of literature on Raffles, flattering or not.
- Alexander Hare in the East indies: a reappraisal, by David Oats, which I have not found the courage to read so far, although I know I’ll have to. You can find other sources that defend him or try to shed a new light on his life (like this one), mostly on the grounds that a lot of what we know of his life was told by people which he had fights with, like John Clunies-Ross for his last years.
- If you find the courage, the letters exchanged by the British in the aftermath of the Outrage that I have quoted in this story (you can find a scan on the website of the British Library). - I did not mention it because it would have been too much for a single story, but some stuff happened around the islands during WWI, you can read about it here (Sydney Morning Herald), with this quote clearly deserving your attention: “The locals implored von Mücke to avoid damaging the island’s tennis court”.
- Other historical elements :
- Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, which you can fin online on Project Gutenberg, relates his stop in the Cocos. - And if you still want more, check out this really more professional annotated bibliography from Nick Herriman. Now that’s some serious research.
If you made it this far, I guess that you found this story interesting or really bad to the point where it makes you mad, either way I’ll be very happy to hear anything you have to say on the subject.
