LIFE ON COCOS

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 July 1936, Page 8

LIFE ON COCOS

A QUEEN OF REMOTE ISLANDS

A small, quiet woman returned to Britain recently from one of the loneliest islands in the British Empire, savs the “Sunday Express.’’ Her name is'Rose Clunies-Ross. Twelve years ago she was a. cashier in a Loudon office. To-day she is virtually a “queen," the only white woman among a population of 1,500 Malays and twelve Britons.

Her husband, 60-year-old John Sidnev Clunies-Ross. is sole ruler of the Cocos Islands, a little-known part of the Straits Settlements, which are his by inheritance. To the “Sunday Express,” she told what it is like to be a “queen” of a “kingdom" where steamers call only once every lour months, and where pieces of bone are currency:—

The maps call them the Cocos or Keeling Islands to distinguish them from the Cocos treasure island off Costa Rica, she said. You will find them tucked away in a corner of the Indian Ocean, 1,280 miles south-west of Singapore. There are three of them, ringing a lovely lagoon seven miles across. My husband’s great-grandfather, who worked with Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore, discovered them 110 years ago. They were uninhabited then, and he brought forty Malays to the islands from Java. Ever since then the Rosses have been “kings” of the islands—“tuan governor,” as the natives call my husband. There are nearly 1,500 of them now, simple people, living happily, undisturbed by the outer world. I had my first, sight of them eleven years ago, as a. bride. I had never travelled far before, and I had no idea what to expect. Our home is on Home Island, and it is only about a mile long. On one of the other islands, Direction Island, there are ten other British men, employees of a cable company. My first baby was born on the island, but it died. Thereafter I came home to have my next three children born. The fifth, Charles, was born on Cocos three years ago, and I have brought him with me to Britain now He can speak no English, as he has had only native boys as his playmates. Life-passes very peacefully on Cocos. Our only trouble is the slump in the price of copra. It has dropped from £33 to £lO a ton. Once it was as low as £4 a ton.

It costs by husband about £4OOO a year to run the people and the island. They all depend on him. Crime is practically non-existent. We have our own laws. One of them is that anyone who commits a crime shall be banished to civilisation. It is the happiest little “kingdom” in the world.

Excitement and adventure are rare things. Occasionally natives who go fishing on the barrier reef, which protects the lagoon from the sea, have narrow escapes, but there have been no sudden deaths. Once two natives went fishing for crayfish in the rocks, and one of them, who inserted his arm in a rock crevice. was almost killed by an eel. The eel wound itself round the man’s arm, and was drawing him fast against the rock. If his companion had not been there the man would have been held a prisoner until the tide came in and drowned him. As it. was, the other man had to cut. the eel away.

All the natives are Mohammedans. My husband encourages them to marry, and gives a new house as a wedding present to each couple. All our supplies have to be imported, once every four months —which is as often as we see a ship, unless some passing liner slows down to drop us a cask of food.