End of the line for the Clunies-Ross men who ruled paradise

Palm plantation workers on the Clunies-Ross family owned Cocos Keeling Islands were described as slaves – but not everyone agreed.

John Cecil Clunies-Ross at his home in the western Perth suburb of Nedlands.

OBITUARY
John Cecil Clunies-Ross

Heir to the Cocos Keeling Islands. Born London, November 29, 1928; died Perth, September 13, aged 92.

There were costs and benefits to living under the Clunies-Ross family when it ran the then coral kingdom of the Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean.

You weren’t paid much, and then only in a currency invented by the Clunies-Ross clan. In turn, the Cocos rupees could be spent only at the store owned by the family, not that there was any competition. (But good luck to you if you held on to your rupee tokens – one was on eBay on Friday for $600.)

The Clunies-Ross dynasty owned the islands, the coconut trees and the business of copra that employed the Malay workers who had been shipped there for that purpose. Some thought the family believed it owned the workers too. However, electricity, water and education came free.

Nonetheless, this feudal anachronism was never going to survive. It is extraordinary to think it lasted so long and only quite recently did the islands come under Australian control (1955) and ownership – that wasn’t until 1978 when Malcolm Fraser’s government purchased them for $6.25m.

Housing has improved since then, and the food too. But some of the 500 or so who call Cocos home are grumpy that the Australian government has banned hunting turtles and shooting birds. (But the seldom seen Cocos buff-banded rails will be happy; they are already reduced to perhaps just 850 individuals.)

John Cecil Clunies-Ross was the final heir to own and run the islands. His son John will not be a king on Cocos.

The Clunies-Rosses once may have been good at business, but they are hardly an inventive lot – of the family members who ran the islands, all were John, but for a George who took over in 1871. That George returned the family to form naming his eldest son John. That John had a heart attack and died when the Japanese bombed the island in 1944, paving the way for recently departed John Cecil to assume control.

Queen Victoria had granted the family the islands in perpetuity back in 1886. The islands’ life had already been complicated. They had been discovered in 1609 by Captain William Keeling, but they were not charted for another 196 years. In 1825, Scottish trader Captain John Clunies-Ross, sailing back from what was then called the East Indies, chanced upon the islands and planted fruit trees.

John Clunies-Ross and his clam farm on West Island, which is part of the Cocos Islands group

He was back two years later to begin the dynastic takeover and start the copra trade. In 1857 the islands were claimed for England by Captain Stephen Fremantle. He had been instructed to annex Cocos Island in the Pacific but must have misheard. It was his final commission. Costa Rica picked Cocos up instead.

The generations of Clunies-Rosses ran the islands barely making a ripple. They made news mostly when touched by extraneous issues. The islands came under attack in both world wars, and towards the end of World War II the British built a runway on West Island, the capital, and at one point 8300 soldiers, RAF personnel and engineers lived there.

The young Queen and Prince Philip visited in 1954 and from then events moved swiftly, at least by island time.

The following year the islands were transferred by Britain from the Colony of Singapore to the Commonwealth of Australia, which then appointed a series of administrators to run them. That diminished the authority of the Clunies-Rosses, who no longer were lawmakers for the place but still its only employer.

John Clunies-Ross sought home rule for the islands in 1969, which turned things hostile. Australians mostly had been unaware their nation spread almost 6000km west from Canberra to Cocos Keeling, but that changed when a leaked report in 1972 likened the fate of Malay workers there to those of the slaveholding southern states before American civil war.

The report offended Clunies-Ross and his family. But the Australian government marched forcefully forward, coercing the family to sell the islands, demanding greater rights for the workers, then instructing the family to offload its ancestral home, Oceania House, which had been made of imported Glaswegian bricks and lined with tonnes of teak. This was ruled illegal by High Court, but the government then reportedly bankrupted Clunies-Ross by not contracting the family’s shipping company. In a 1984 UN-sponsored ballot the islanders voted for integration with Australia.

Clunies-Ross moved to Perth and a low-key life. His wife, Daphne, died in 2013. Their son John lives back on the islands breeding giant Tridacna clams that are exported to aquariums around the world.

“It broke him, he never really came home,” John said of his father last week.