Islands Inside
[An Unholy Abecedarian]
By Michael H. Kew
A IS FOR AUSTRALIAN INDIAN OCEAN TERRITORY. Geographically, Christmas Island is Asian. Jolly green Java is 220 blue miles north. Australia’s red Ningaloo Coast is 960 miles southeast. Christmas Island has been “Australian” since 1958. Just 52 square miles, it is the thickly forested dog-shaped crest of a basalt volcanic seamount 3,200 miles from Canberra. Sixty-three percent of the island is a national park and 100 percent lies within the Northern Territory electoral division of Lingiari, but most laws and services come from Western Australia. Ultimately, Canberra calls the shots. Longtime Shire of Christmas Island president/separatist Gordon Thomson once said this ensures a “democracy deficit.”
His rainforested “colony” is ringed abyssal. Minimum of coastal shelving; Christmas Island is not a surfing destination. Instead it has achieved fame and infamy for its immigrant detention facility, phosphate mining, and fascinating red crab migration.
In February 2020 another sort of incarceration began crowning all news of Christmas: the then-empty detention center was revived via nearly 300 Australians evacuated from China in the early days of the COVID-19 mess. “For years, (Christmas) was known as an island of incarceration,” Thomson told The Guardian. “We were emerging from that and, while this is short-term and the reasons are different, again, all that people are hearing about Christmas Island is people being incarcerated. It’s a hysterical response and it’s going to be ruinous to our tourist industry.”
B IS FOR BOAT PEOPLE. In the mid-1970s Australia received thousands of post-Vietnam War refugees by sea, a legal entryway for aliens. By 1992, however, visas were mandated and future visaless “boat people” faced mainland confinement at prisonesque detention sites.
An incident in August 2001 sparked the onset of Australia’s offshore detention centers. The Norwegian freighter Tampa rescued 433 people (mostly Afghanis) from a small wooden boat as it sank into the Timor Sea. Citing emergency, Tampa’s captain defied Australia’s demands for him to reverse course and, despite Indonesia agreeing to accept the asylum seekers, he steamed to Christmas, the nearest landmass and one that happened to be in Australian waters. Special Air Service Regiment seized the ship. Its asylum seekers were sent to Nauru and New Zealand.
Then came 9/11. Muslim immigration became a wedge issue in Australia’s looming federal election. Prime Minister John Howard’s “Pacific Solution,” launched two weeks after 9/11, affirmed boat people aiming for Christmas Island would be nabbed by the Navy and flown to detention sites in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, two countries that greatly relied on Australian aid. After Howard’s reelection in November 2001, the number of boat folks dropped from 5,516 in 2001 to just one in 2002. In November 2007, when Howard’s Liberal Party lost to the Labor Party, the Pacific Solution was scrapped by Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister.
So the boats returned. In the next three years, tens of thousands of Asian refugees headed to sea; more than a thousand died en route to Christmas. Rudd lost the 2010 federal election. His successor (Julia Gillard) revived the Pacific Solution.
C IS FOR CASINO. AND CHINA. I enjoyed spicy Hakka fare at garish Lucky Ho Restaurant on Poon Saan Road. I learned that 60 percent of the island’s 1,800 residents were Chinese. Mostly Buddhist. Some were related to “coolies,” the phosphate mine workers shipped to Christmas in the early 1900s when the island was a British colony. Treated as slaves, many early mine workers succumbed to beriberi, a nutritional disorder caused by thiamin deficiency.
On Christmas are two traditional Chinese cemeteries (designed per the Tibetan Book of the Dead), plus 18 temples and six formal shrines, all in use. The Chinese diaspora has eroded since the closure of the Christmas Island Resort casino, which attracted rich elites flying direct from Jakarta, 45 minutes north.
Chewing on AU$12 billion in its first two years (1993-1994), CIR was Australia’s most profitable casino. But after 1998’s Asian financial crisis, termination of regional air routes, and gross negligence, the place went bankrupt. Later it housed detention center staff. In 2014 Christmas Islanders asked the Australian government for a license to reopen. Proponents said the casino employed locals and lured a lot of cash to their “prison island.”
Thoughts from the Commonwealth parliamentary committee: “Neither mining nor immigration-related activities will sustain the island’s economy indefinitely, and the casino has the potential to play a major role in transitioning the Christmas Island economy away from its traditional mainstays. While phosphate mining will continue for the next 20 years, there is a need to diversify the economy as the detention centre activity declines.”
The resort/casino remains closed.
Fishermen, south coast.
D IS FOR DETENTION CENTER. I visited Christmas Island in June 2013. The weather was bright but the vibe dark. Six years old, the North West Point Immigration Detention Centre (IDC) housed 2,960 refugees. I viewed some of them through aggressive fencing. It seemed cruel to most (some had criminal records) of the frowning souls who’d paid high sums of money and cheated death. But laws were laws. If unenforced, Canberra reasoned, anarchy would erode Australia’s civil society.
Visually akin to a maximum-security prison, the IDC’s normal capacity was 1,094. In 2013 the detainees rioted. Moods were tense. Tourism was nil. From a vista, admiring the north coast’s leeward idyll, you would not know Christmas life revolved grimly ‘round the IDC.
After the Tampa fiasco, a makeshift detention campus was laid but it lacked size, amenities, and security. In 2002 Australia announced its replacement of the temp grounds with a big ultramodern IDC. A logistical nightmare and miracle, its construction cost taxpayers $400 million.
“Prison islands have a certain terrible fascination, particularly in the tropics, as places from which escape is impossible,” David Marr wrote in September 2009’s The Monthly, an Australian news magazine. “Sharks and drowning are essential parts of the imagery. (Prime Minister) Howard’s camp on Christmas Island was to be part-Alcatraz and part-Ellis Island: a place of incarceration far from public scrutiny where inmates would be processed for a possible new life in some distant country, almost certainly not Australia.”
By 2014-2015 the scheme had worked and the boats stopped coming, rendering the IDC futile. Extant refugees were transferred to further contentious IDCs on Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. But Canberra would not let its expensive jail rot in the tropics. In December 2014 Section 501 of Australia’s Migration Act was amended, allowing detention and deportation if a minister or a delegate felt a non-citizen had failed a “character test,” typically because he/she had committed a minor crime. Critics found the revision to be broad and subjective. Mostly Brits and Kiwis were sent to Christmas. The IDC morphed into an odd prison for “the 501s.” Many were middle-aged or older and had lived in Australia most of their lives.
In November 2017 Australia announced all remaining deportees would be transferred to new jails on the mainland. North West Point would close on June 30, 2018. It would retain a caretaker staff so it could reopen within 72 hours, if needed. Department of Home Affairs press release: “Keeping selected immigration detention facilities in a state of readiness is a prudent contingency measure to ensure there is appropriate capacity in place to respond to any change in operational requirements.”
E IS FOR ECOTOURISM. Christmas Island Tourism Association’s motto is Christmas Island: A Natural Wonder. For scuba divers there are sublime caves and some of Earth’s longest drop-offs into the Java Trench, the Indian Ocean’s deepest point. Most walls are just 20 yards from shore. The island is ripe for world-class birdwatching, fishing, nature photography, hiking, snorkeling. Poor for surfing or jail-gazing.
“(The detention center is) not good for the long-term economy of the island,” President Thomson told Television New Zealand in February 2018. “A prison does not attract tourists.”
Thomson would rather his island be known for its rare fauna—the golden bosunbird or the red crabs, say—and its profuse flora as the island abuts Asia and the equator and hence evolved in lush isolation. There are 411 recorded plant species, many endemic. Six-hundred species of fish, 20 types (more than anywhere else on Earth) of terrestrial and intertidal crabs, 100 bird species, four native reptiles. As for Homo sapiens, Christmas was uninhabited until the late 1800s, when it was claimed and settled by the timber- and phosphate-keen Brits who quite perversely are the island’s indigenous peoples.
“It is indeed a time of transition,” Jahna Luke, manager of Christmas Island Tourism Association, told me. “With the detention center closure and the uncertainty of the future of the phosphate mine, islanders are looking for future economic drivers. We’ve been promoting ecotourism for many years. With most of the island being national park and home to many endemic species, we are certainly identified as an ecotourism destination.”
Claiming the park was poised to be an ecotourism “treasure,” Parks Australia publicly solicited entrepreneurial ideas for environmentally sensitive ventures. “It is the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean,” Australia Environment Minister Greg Hunt said in the press release.
Two Australian naturalists created Swell Lodge, a handful of upscale “eco-chalets” atop wooded cliffs along west-facing Martin Point, a mile from the IDC. The lodge became the first ecologically sustainable accommodation ever approved in an Australian national park. Nightly all-inclusive rates for couples, AU$895/US$650 each; a solo run will cost you AU$1,342/US$975.
F IS FOR FLYING FISH COVE. The island’s main but rare surf spot. Southeast trades blow offshore. The wave—a weak left—faces north and breaks over shallow coral near the concrete boat ramp. “It’s mostly locals who surf here,” another tourism office lady told me. “The waves are too unreliable to attract surf tourists, unfortunately. When the swell is up, the surf can be good, but it’s hard to predict when that happens and it only lasts for a day or two.”
Forest-bathing.
G IS FOR GRETA BEACH. Another funky and rare surf spot, east-facing Greta has the island’s best potential besides Flying Fish Cove. Walk through the dark crabby woods and down a steep metal staircase to a trashy (mostly plastics) white-sand pocket beach, its south end featuring a fat overhanging cliff that itself is a standing barrel. The adjacent reef is shallow and flat. Perhaps with a high tide and peaky clean northeast windswell, bowly lefts could occur. Actually, they do.
H IS FOR HOWARD, JOHN. Prime minister of Australia (1996-2007) and leader of its Liberal Party (1985-1989, 1995-2007). A nationalist. Post-9/11 he invoked the ANZUS Pact (security treaty between Australia, New Zealand, and the USA created to provide mutual aid in wars and disputes) for the first time since the treaty was formed (1951). Australian troops were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.
After 9/11 and the Tampa crisis and his strict immigration policy, critics felt Howard had snuffed Australia’s multicultural trajectory—prevalent during the Hawke and Keating administrations—that embraced globalization, Asian immigration, and Aboriginal redemption. Ironically, through jingoism and what some would deem as pure xenophobia, the detention center fueled Christmas Island’s economy for 14 years.
I IS FOR INDONESIA. Population 11 million, Jakarta is the metropolis nearest Christmas Island. A three-hour drive from Jakarta leads you to the jungly southwest coast of Java, usually Pelabuhan Ratu Bay, where asylum seekers were sardined into sketchy boats for the treacherous crossing. Human-smuggling was big business from 2010 through 2013, after which the odds of evading Australian Border Force patrol boats were zilch.
Daniel Jones, Greta Beach permatube.
J IS FOR JAPAN. Christmas meant much to Japan for its phosphate and as a possible military airbase. Since 1900 the island sent phosphate to Japan and mainland Australia. At the start of World War II, a Japanese sub torpedoed and sank a Norwegian phosphate freighter off Flying Fish Cove. A few weeks later, as Japanese troops honed in, Christmas lost communication with Singapore, which surrendered; the 80,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops there holed-up. Japan was beautifully poised to seize Christmas.
In February 1942 three Japanese bombers destroyed Flying Fish Cove’s wharf, the nearby Malay village, and Chinese coolie huts. Fearing more air attacks, islanders fled their homes to hide in jungles and subsist on crabs and pigeons. On March 1 nine Japanese aircraft bombed the island which had no way to contact the outside world. On March 7 shelling from two battleships, two cruisers, and a destroyer was augmented by dive-bombing. The island’s British garrison cowered.
On March 31 Japan’s warship Naka was shot by Seawolf, an American submarine. Also in Flying Fish Cove, in November 1942 the Japanese cargo ship Nissei Maru sank, hit by another American sub. The attacks snuffed Japan’s goal of phosphate export. England did not reclaim Christmas until 1945.
K IS FOR KUALA LUMPUR. For AU$1200 (US$940) return, Malindo Air, a Malaysian “low-cost” carrier, provides biweekly charters between Kuala Lumpur International Airport and Christmas Island. Former island administrator Barry Haase unsuccessfully lobbied for more frequent flights via Kuala Lumpur to help Christmas morph into a unique tourist destination. Its other (also expensive) flights are via Perth (twice weekly on Virgin Australia) and Jakarta (weekly on Garuda).
L IS FOR LAWSUIT. In severe seas 10 days before Christmas Day 2010, 48 Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers died. Their flimsy wooden Indonesian fishing boat (later named SIEV-221, i.e. Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel 221) smashed into and was shattered by sharp limestone cliffs at the island’s northeast tip near Flying Fish Cove, the normal (and only) port. It was Australia’s worst shipwreck in more than a century. Forty-two asylum seekers were saved by Christmas Islanders and the Navy; 30 corpses were found.
In 2016 the boat’s survivors and family members filed a class-action lawsuit against Australia claiming authorities failed to respond and stop what otherwise was certain disaster in hectic conditions. The suit alleged that Australia breached its “duty of care” by not quickly saving drowning victims, that it did not have ample search-and-rescue options, and that it was liable for SIEV-221 by time it was within 12 nautical miles of Christmas Island.
Immigration minister Scott Morrison said the case was “shameful and offensive…like someone who was saved from a fire suing the fireman, (or) someone who was held hostage being saved by police and suing the police.”
In September 2017 the New South Wales Supreme Court ruled Australia was not culpable for SIEV-221 nor its passengers since Australia had no say over the shoddy overloaded boat and its captainless crew, the rough monsoon conditions, and, from Java, Australia had not sent the boat to sea. “The Commonwealth had no control over the risk that a SIEV, if not intercepted, might be shipwrecked on the coast of Christmas Island due to factors such as poor weather, poor navigation, or running out of fuel,” Justice Geoffrey Bellew said. “Further, the Commonwealth did not put the plaintiffs at any risk of harm.”
Northeast coast.
M IS FOR MALAY. After Chinese and Australian, Malay is the island’s most common ancestry, followed by English and Irish.
N IS FOR NATIONAL PARK. A green gem in blue. For millennia, pre-island, the submerged volcano inched skyward. Sometime before surfacing, Christmas was likely a big surfable reef.
The island’s distance from other landforms limited the scope of flora and fauna able to access and thrive. Its ecology evolved distinctly. Established in 1980, Christmas Island National Park is 21,000 acres, two-thirds of the isle and most of its fringing coral reef. Thankfully never completely scalped (like Nauru was) for its phosphate, the park preserves vast biodiversity—uniquely structured rainforests, several hundred endemic species, two wetlands of international importance, millions of land crabs, and a narrow but complex marine zone.
O IS FOR OUTPOST. With or without humans, what Christmas Island will always be.
Jones, south coast.
P IS FOR PHOSPHATE. Seabed uplift made layers of the world’s favorite fertilizer and led England to annex and fleece the island. Exploitation of Christmas had its origins in 1887, when a bold band of Brits clawed through rainforests and collected samples of pure lime phosphate. Henceforth the island’s economic fate a decade on, when Scotsman George Clunies-Ross (of Cocos-Keeling fame) and his rival John Murray launched Christmas Island Phosphate Company. The men imported Chinese, Malay, and Sikh laborers. Was three years until their first export of Christmas Island phosphate—the first victory from converting lush green woods to a dusty white moonscape of rocks and pinnacles.
Until recently, Phosphate Resources Limited annually sent 700,000 tons of phosphate to Australia, New Zealand, and southeast Asia. With 250 workers, PRL was Christmas Island’s primary employer. In the 1990s PRL sought to acquire 630 more acres to masticate; this would have extended phosphate export operations from five years to 10 or 12. The request was denied by Australia’s Minister for the Environment.
In 2015 CI Resources acquired PRL and in 2017 it angled for another 320 acres of pristine woods to destroy. But PRL faced “a barrage of ideological opposition from the bureaucracy and environmental activists,” chairman David Somerville told one grumpy group of shareholders. PRL also fought to exploit phosphate stockpiles actually inside the national park.
“PRL’s proposals are a backward step for the conservation of biodiversity on Christmas Island,” a 2017 Wilderness Society press release said. “The clearing of rainforest has been banned for the last 15 years, and it was made quite clear to PRL from the outset that further clearing was banned because it was inconsistent with the government’s long-term strategy: the development of ecotourism.”
Since mining began, Christmas has lost 8,000 acres of forest.
Q IS FOR QUARRY. See above.
R IS FOR ROBBER/RED. Robbers are coconut crabs, the world’s largest terrestrial arthropod. They can weigh 10 pounds and have yard-wide legspans. They climb trees, open coconuts, and can live for decades. They taste great. They prey on the much smaller (and 50-million-strong) red crabs, which do not taste great.
The red crabs’ annual forest-to-beach egg-laying migration has been dubbed one of the “10 greatest natural wonders on Earth” by famed British naturalist Sir David Attenborough. The event occurs from October to December. About a month later, baby crabs leave the ocean and, if they aren’t eaten by birds or flattened by cars, ideally join their parents in the woods.
Temporary road closures protect the crabs. There are 13 miles of “crab fences” that direct crabs to a “crab bridge” (about 20 feet tall) and/or to 31 tunnels allowing crabs to avoid the (relatively) busy roads. In the early aughts, before the Christmas government had taken any steps toward preservation, traffic annually smashed half a million crabs.
Robber.
Red.
S IS FOR SPACEPORT. In 1998 Sydney-based Asia Pacific Space Centre schemed a satellite-launch site atop the old phosphate mines at South Point. Locals were less-than-thrilled at distant politicians and bureaucrats creating such plans. The island was chosen for its remoteness, allowing clear flight paths to the east and south. Equatorial and polar satellites could be launched with ease.
The spaceport would have been built across 210 acres on an existing mining lease. Construction was expected to take 18 months. It was to be arranged by the Russian Design Bureau of General Machine Building and the Design Bureau of Transport Machinery, with development costs hovering near AU$800 million. Within 20 years, APSC claimed, the site would bring billions of dollars to Australia as communications companies launched 10 to 12 bodies yearly—targeting the low Earth and geostationary Earth orbit satellite sectors—through the new millennium. The first launch was scheduled for 2004. Russia was to be the major client, using its tech to deliver advanced telecommunications, global positioning, and remote sensing services.
The plan tanked. Locked into a five-year environmental impact study, investors lost interest (pun intended).
T IS FOR TOURISTS. Barring more pandemicking, could nature-loving folks be the isle’s new economy? Eco-nomics?
U IS FOR UNSETTLED. Although the island was first sighted in 1615 by Thomas captain Richard Rowe, it was named by William Mynors (captain of the East India Company’s Royal Mary) when he sailed past on Christmas Day 1643. From the privateer ship Cygnet in 1688, British navigator William Dampier made the island’s first landfall and found it uninhabited. (Originally headed to the Cocos-Keeling Islands, Cygnet was blown astray.) Two of Dampier’s crew were the first Europeans to step amongst Christmas Island’s steamy fecundity.
Just 220 miles from Indonesia and its zillions of humans, it is baffling to me that Christmas was uninhabited by Homo sapiens until the late 19th century. By then, Java had been populated for eons. (The paleoanthropological site of Trinil, along Java’s Solo River, is famous for the 1891-1892 discovery of the first Homo erectus fossils [skullcap and femur], aka “Java Man,” suggesting the island had human activity a million years prior.) In November 1888 George Clunies-Ross sent his brother Andrew and a group of Cocos-Keeling Malay workers to establish The Settlement, a creatively named settlement near Flying Fish Cove, to block any other nation’s claim to the island’s natural resources.
Brad Masters and Jones (windsurfing).
V IS FOR VIRTUAL REALITY. In December 2017 Google hired Parks Australia’s Dr. Alasdair Grigg to capture Christmas Island’s red crab migration for Google Street View and Google Earth. Through photos shot by the 45-pound Trekker camera strapped to his aching back, Grigg hoped people would be “inspired to appreciate the world-class conservation values of the island.” His 3-foot-9-inch tall Trekker had a pole-mounted sphere containing 15 cameras which each second snapped high-resolution photos. Published in April 2018, the photos were meshed to create 360-degree mosaics of Grigg’s surroundings as he traipsed all over.
“The results are nothing short of stunning,” Melissa Price, Australia’s Assistant Minister for the Environment, told Australian media. “Through this virtual reality tour, viewers are immersed in the forests and beaches of Christmas Island while encountering a truly amazing abundance of wildlife along the way.”
W IS FOR WALLACE LINE. Suggested by 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Wallace. Since then, it has been biology’s and geography’s invisible but abrupt boundary between the Australian and Eurasian faunal regions, from the Indian Ocean through the Lombok Strait, the Makassar Strait, and up into the Philippine Sea. The Line delineates stark differences in the dispersion of several fish, bird, and mammal groups—some that are plentiful on one side of the Line are sparse or absent on its other side. And vice versa.
Located about 600 miles west of the Line, Christmas Island always was on the “Eurasian” side. This suddenly changed in March 2020 when researchers were amazed to find a few “Australian” species on the isle.
“Unexpectedly,” the University of Hong Kong’s Dr. Jason Ali said in a press release, “half of Christmas Island’s land mammal and land reptile species—two rats, two skinks, one gecko—have a genetic heritage to Australia’s side of the divide. A highly surprising discovery.”
“The world’s animal distribution map will need to be redrawn and textbooks updated,” University of Queensland’s Professor Jonathan Aitchison said. “We’re excited to see what other weird and wonderful discoveries are ahead.”
X IS FOR X, SIEV-. In October 2001 a small wooden boat (later named SIEV-X) left from a beach in southern Sumatra. Rocking and rolling with 421 asylum seekers, the vessel was dangerously overloaded. One day later, it sank in international waters south of Java, where Australia had launched Operation Relex, a marine surveillance. Drowned: 146 children, 142 women, 65 men. Forty-one survivors clung to boat debris and human corpses for 20 hours before being saved by Indonesian fishermen. Prime Minister Howard said SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters and hence was not Australia’s problem. Predictably the incident became a cause célèbre in partisan political posturing. It was later proven that SIEV-X sank in a zone patrolled by Australia’s Lockheed P-3 Orions. Failure to intercept SIEV-X was a combo of bad luck and miscommunication. Eventual evidence suggested SIEV-X was a tragedy borne not from Relex incompetence nor Howard’s deferral but from the greed of Indonesian people-smugglers who sent the doomed boat to sea.
Flying Fish Cove.
Y IS FOR YELLOW CRAZY ANTS. In the early 20th century yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) were unwittingly imported by ships to Christmas. Breeding by the billions, the ants formed huge colonies and made themselves known by spraying blinding/immobilizing formic acid into the eyestalks and leg joints of millions of keystone red crabs which became ant food. By the early aughts, ants had eaten 30 percent of the crabs.
What humans wreck, humans should fix. Right? Plan A—aerial- and hand-baiting, i.e. poisoning—had failed. Plan B: find something natural to kill the bugs that fed the ants that killed the crabs that were literally the foundation of Christmas’s forest ecosystem. We learned the ants’ preferred entrée was Tachardina aurantiaca, a yellow lac scale insect—armored and immobile tree parasites also invasive to Christmas. From tree branches they sucked sap then spewed honeydew that yellow crazy ants devoured.
In what could have been the most heavily scrutinized biocontrol project in Australia, in January 2017 ecologists unleashed 2-millimeter-long parasitic Malaysian wasps called Tachardiaephagus somervillei to hopefully eat Tachardina aurantiaca to disrupt the primary food source of Anoplolepis gracilipes so red crabs could rebound and flourish in antless environs.
“Our monitoring is showing the wasps spreading naturally,” Craig Brockway, Christmas Island’s invasive species manager, told me in 2018. “Parasitism rates on the scale insect is high at the release sites, which is encouraging for the wasp being an effective indirect biocontrol agent. Our ant monitoring before the wasp release shows a large variability in ant counts within the year and from year-to-year, so it is too early since the release of the wasps to see a definitive effect on the ant population. It may take another year or two before the effect is measurable.”
Z IS FOR ZERO-SUM GAME. You can visit Christmas Island. You won’t surf there.
Masters, south coast.
