The Cocos (Keeling) Islands

A view of the [indecipherable name of] village, just beyond a natural breakwater (seen in the foreground). Good shelter for boatsThe Cocos (Keeling) Islands, now an external territory of Australia, became a formal part of the British Empire in 1857. Before this, from 1820, a Scottish family ruled the island as self-styled ‘Kings.’

The settlements are based around a small coral atoll and were said to be first acknowledged by western explorers in 1608-9 by William Keeling, a member of the East India Company.

By 1885 the Islands were under the formal control of the British crown, when EW Birch (1857-1929), a crown agent, was sent there by the governor of the Strait Settlements, an area covering modern-day Malaysia and Singapore.

Birch’s visit was with the expressed intention of investigating the state of the atoll, including taking a census. In this process he recorded a variety of aspects of island life, including the currency issued by the Clunie-Ross family.

Within island culture, Birch registered the means through which the Ross family had assembled a colonial hierarchy, subjugating the Cocos people and Bantamese migrants from Sunda and Java to indentured labour.

Birch’s companion Horace R Adams took photos of the island and the islanders, including indentured domestic servants taken from the local population.

Picnic house on Hasburgh IslandDespite their strange British outpost in the Pacific Ocean, the Clunie-Ross family was said by Birch to have been educated on the British mainland. Moreover, far from being deliberately isolationist, the Clunie-Ross family were hoping Birch’s report could further their plans for a telegraph to be installed.

The islands remained in the ownership of the family until 1978, when they were purchased by the Australian government for $4.75 million.

The photographs reproduced here highlight an instance of ‘representing the unfamiliar.’ The Clunie-Ross family represented a strange instance of white-settlement. Whilst it was common for white settlers to establish an exclusionary government, it was not common to see a single family establishing such control along racial, economic and patrimonial grounds.

Link to King's College London catalogue record:

EW Birch. The report of Mr EW Birch, deputed by the officer administering the government of the Straits Settlements (Mr. Cecil C. Smith, C.M.G.) to visit the Cocos-Keeling Islands [Singapore?: publisher not identified, 1885]

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