Edenic Futures, Cocatollian
By Michael H. Kew
Darwin’s The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs is a roaring good read. Also his first monograph, one of many that earned him Royal Society medals of honor. The book exposed his gleeful premier treatise on the philosophy of nature and how gradual geologic change could define all forms of life—surfers included.
To wit: “The description given of the structure and proportional dimensions of the reef and islets of Keeling atoll appears to apply perfectly to nearly all the atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans. The islets are first formed some way back either on the projecting points of the reef, especially if its form be angular, or on the sides of the main entrances into the lagoon—that is, in both cases, on points where the breakers can act.”
I was 11 years old and had just recently started acting upon gentle Southern California breakers when the March 1987 issue of Surfer appeared in my parents’ rusty mailbox. Photographed by Peter Crawford and written by Jim Banks, “The Cocos Islands: Forbidden Fruit” filled six pages of the magazine.
For non-residents, I would learn, the Cocos-Keeling Islands were esoteric and invite-only. In 1985 Banks’s wife had sent an open letter to the West Island post office; the note was received by a man named Bill, a surfer/schoolteacher. Bill organized two visas and invited Banks and “partner in crime” Crawford to the atoll, where while shooting he was bumped by a shark.
“We were keen explorers,” Banks told me by phone 32 years later. “Sometimes we would go to boating supply shops and buy navigation charts. Pre-internet, it was simply a matter of looking at the maps and saying, ‘Oh, look at this island south of Indonesia, smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It’s bound to have surf.’”
Referring to the Crab Slab, a bawdy and erratic beast so-named because the majority of its tubes sharply pinch shut: “There were the peaks at the top/back of the reef, that corner where it started to wall out, and it was really hollow. I remember seeing it one day being similar to Pipeline in Hawai’i. It was very solid.”
Surfer, 1987: “Full, vertical drops into the pit and giant, pitching lips.”
For me, an Encinitas grommet, Banks’s tale was an ark of tropic travel surf fantasy. He touched on the waves’ severity, the robust swell, the barrels and the heat and the isolation, but it was the edenic atollian innocence that gripped me. I stared at the pretty pictures, memorized the prose.
Last sentence, referring not to the Crab Slab but to another left on an uninhabited isle several miles north: “If I close my eyes, images from the dreamlike trip fill my mind: the white birds, the huge palms, the clear, warm water, and the long walls with silky, aqua faces….”
John Clunies-Ross had transported the surfers.
“I remember those guys,” Clunies-Ross, now 63, told me by email. “There were a few of us on the boat that day. The surf wasn’t big when we got there but it built steadily throughout the day. Took us a while to get home, bashing into the swell and chop!”
“John was quite generous,” Banks said. “He took us in his boat up there at his expense. Never really had much discussion about his family situation there or anything that was going on.”
What was going on included the then-recent family bankruptcy and the 1984 UN-sponsored vote in which Cocos-Keelingites were offered either independence, free association with Australia, or full integration. The latter won—sort of. Decades on, while having “most of the benefits,” Clunies-Ross says Cocos-Keeling is stuck. He sought full integration and ownership of the land and fisheries given to the resident Malays instead of to the suits in Canberra, 3,620 miles away.
“It is only technically feasible,” he told me. “Realpolitik would make it impossible. We’re still administered as a colonial outpost of Australia. We’re still an External Territory administered under Australia’s external powers. The legislation and judiciary do not reflect any democratic base and no sign of it ever happening. The saying here is boleh juga, which translates to ‘it’ll do.’ This has become so pervasive now that abar kabar? (‘what’s news?’) will often be responded to with boleh juga rather than the polite bagus (‘good’).”
By early 2020 Canberra had tightened its grip via a AU$184 million Department of Defence contract to upgrade and extend the Cocos-Keeling runway. The hard end goal is enhanced military infrastructure and application to support larger and heavier aircraft, including the P-8A Poseidon, a militarized surveillance breed of Boeing’s normal 737. “Australian strategic thinkers,” Samuel Bashfield wrote for The Diplomat in 2019, “are increasingly seeing Cocos as a valuable offshore Indian Ocean outpost which should be invested in and shared by like-minded Indo-Pacific partners to contribute to Indian Ocean security.”
John Clunies-Ross can dream, however. On CommunityRun.org there remains an open petition he posted in 2013: “Fulfill (Australia’s) obligations under the plebiscite, carried out in 1984, to integrate Cocos-Keeling Islands ‘in all equality’ to the mainland.”
Today, toward its target of just 200, the petition has received 121 signatures. Darwin’s is not one of them.
Nor is Banks’s. He never made it from boozy expat-filled West Island across the wide cyan lagoon to Home Island, home indeed to the entire Malay population (though it too was originally imported), all sober devout Muslims, a classic microcultural juxtaposition that Pauline Bunce, a former Cocos-Keeling schoolteacher, described thusly in her recent letter to The Sydney Morning Herald: “(A) daily pattern of social and cultural interaction…in which too many gin-and-tonic mainlander officials dictate father-knows-best policies to the majority Cocos islanders.”
“We didn’t have much interaction with the Malays,” Banks told me of his 1986 trip. “It was that kind of weird colonial outpost thing, you know? Tiny community and quite isolated. I had the feeling they were a bit lost.”
Darwin’s atoll fascination?
Unshared.
“Because of the way the trade winds were at Cocos-Keeling,” Banks said, “I felt like the atoll was floating. I didn’t seem like I was on land because it was so flat and you look out and you see all this ocean streaming past. It seemed like the island was sailing through the water. I came to the conclusion that atolls are for birds and fish. (laugh) I like a little bit of land. I like rivers and mountains and forests and things like that. Atolls are just a bunch of shells and some palm trees floating around in the ocean.”
Carrying colonial despair and tons of plastic trash.
The Crab Slab?
Still unridden.
Still adrift in Darwinian eyes.
{Sucked from Cococandescence, pan-Indian Ocean volume set to burn hotly in 2022 via Spruce Coast Press.}
Vibes ‘86. Surfer, March 1987.
Futurism. Photos: Kew.
