Christmas Island

• 1. Introduction

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  Christmas Island lies about 350 km south of Java and Sumatra, a small piece of Australia set down in the Indian Ocean. The closest point on the Australian mainland is about 1550 km away. The island covers only 135 km2. That long isolation, together with very little human disturbance, has produced a high level of endemism. Endemism means that many of its plants and animals exist nowhere else on Earth. Scientists and naturalists have been drawn to it for that reason. But the island has also been a prize for its mineral wealth, a battleground in a world war, the subject of a handover between governments, and a flashpoint in Australian politics. How did such a remote place come to belong to Australia? Who lives there, and how are they governed? And what draws the island's famous red crabs to the sea each year?

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• 2. Mountain Under the Sea

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  Beneath the water, Christmas Island is the flat summit of an underwater mountain more than 4500 m high. The mountain rises from about 4200 m below the sea, and only about 300 m of it stands above the surface. It began as a volcano, and some basalt is still exposed at The Dales and at Dolly Beach. Most of the surface rock, however, is limestone that built up from coral growth. This karst terrain, a landscape shaped by dissolving rock, supports numerous anchialine caves, which are caves with an underground link to the sea.

  The island measures about 19 km in greatest length and 14.5 km in breadth, with 138.9 km of coastline. Steep cliffs along much of that coast rise abruptly to a central plateau. The highest point is Murray Hill, at 361 m above sea level. A narrow fringing reef surrounds the island and is a hazard to ships.

  Flying Fish Cove, Lily Beach, Ethel Beach and Isabel Beach are among the few places on the shoreline that are easy to reach. Greta, Dolly, Winifred, Merrial and West White beaches are much harder. Each one needs a four wheel drive vehicle and a difficult walk through dense rainforest. Perth in Western Australia is 2600 km to the south-east of the island, and Darwin in the Northern Territory is 2748 km to the east. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are 975 km away, and the nearest mainland town is Exmouth in Western Australia.

  The tsunami that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, centred off the western shore of Sumatra, caused no reported casualties here. Some swimmers were swept about 150 m out to sea for a time, before the water carried them back in.

  From July to October the island has its dry season, with only occasional showers. Even then the sky is rarely clear. From 1972 to 2010 the airport weather station averaged just 7.9 clear days a year, against 188.0 cloudy ones. Temperatures vary little through the year in this tropical monsoon climate, and the real change is in the rain. The wet season runs from November to June, with downpours at random times of day. Tropical cyclones can arrive too, bringing very strong winds, heavy rain, wave action and storm surge. The airport sits at around 261 m, which makes it about 2 degrees Celsius cooler than the coast.

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• 3. Finding and Mining

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  Richard Rowe, aboard the Thomas, was the first European known to sight the island, in 1615. The name arrived later. On Christmas Day in 1643, Captain William Mynors of the East India Company vessel Royal Mary sailed past and named it for the holiday.

  Pieter Goos, a Dutch cartographer, published a map in 1666 that finally included the island, even though English and Dutch navigation charts had shown it since early in the 17th century. He labelled it 'Mony' or 'Moni', and the meaning of that label is unclear.

  In March 1688 the English navigator William Dampier made the earliest recorded visit to the sea around the island. He sailed aboard the Cygnet, the ship of the privateer Charles Swan. Dampier had been trying to reach the Cocos Islands from New Holland, but his ship was blown off course to the east and arrived 28 days later. He landed on the west coast at a place called the Dales and found the island uninhabited. Two of his crewmen became the first Europeans to set foot on it.

  Captain Daniel Beeckman of the Eagle passed the island on the 5th of April 1714. He described the voyage in his 1718 book, A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo, in the East-Indies.

  Captain Sidney Grenfell made the first attempt to explore the island in 1857. His landing party had orders to reach the summit of the plateau, but they could not find a route up the inland cliff and turned back. Between 1872 and 1876 the Challenger expedition to Indonesia brought the naturalist John Murray, who carried out extensive surveys.

  In 1886 Captain John Maclear found an anchorage in a bay and named it Flying Fish Cove. His party landed and made a small collection of plants and animals. The next year Pelham Aldrich spent 10 days on the island with J. J. Lister, who gathered a larger biological and mineralogical collection. Some of the rocks, sent to Murray for examination, were nearly pure phosphate of lime. That discovery led the British Crown to annex the island on the 6th of June 1888.

  Soon afterwards G. Clunies-Ross, the owner of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, set up a small settlement at Flying Fish Cove. It gathered timber and supplies for the growing industry on Cocos. In 1897 Charles W. Andrews visited on behalf of the British Museum and did extensive research on the island's natural history.

  Commercial phosphate mining began in 1899, using indentured workers from Singapore, British Malaya and China. The Phosphate Mining and Shipping Company sent John Davis Murray to run the operation. He was a mechanical engineer and a recent graduate of Purdue University. Islanders called him the 'King of Christmas Island' until 1910, when he married and settled in London. The British Phosphate commissioners and district officers from the Colonial Office governed the island jointly, first through the Straits Settlements and later through the Crown Colony of Singapore. A historian named Hunt published a detailed account of the Chinese indentured labour of those years in 2011.

  In 1914 builders finished an 18 km standard gauge railway from Flying Fish Cove to the mine. In 1922 scientists travelled to the island in late September to watch a solar eclipse and test Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Their attempt was unsuccessful.

  The Australian government closed the mine in December 1987, and the railway shut the same month. It has since been recovered as scrap, leaving only earthworks in places. In 1991 Phosphate Resources Limited reopened the mine. This consortium included many of the former mine workers as shareholders, and it is now the largest contributor to the island's economy.

  In 2001 the Australian government agreed to support a commercial spaceport on the island. It has not been built, and it appears it will not proceed.

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• 4. War and Mutiny

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  When the war in South-East Asia began in December 1941, Christmas Island became a target for Japanese occupation because of its rich phosphate deposits. Its defence was a naval gun, a British officer, four non-commissioned officers and 27 Indian soldiers.

  The first attack came on the 20th of January 1942, when the Norwegian freighter Eidsvold was torpedoed. The ship drifted and eventually sank off West White Beach. Most of the European and Asian staff and their families were evacuated to Perth.

  Two aerial bombing raids followed in late February and early March. On the 7th of March shelling from a Japanese naval group led the district officer to hoist the white flag. Once the Japanese ships sailed away, the British officer raised the Union Flag again.

  During the night of the 10th to the 11th of March, mutinous Indian troops, helped by Sikh policemen, killed an officer and the four British non-commissioned officers in their quarters as they slept. The mutineers then lined up all the Europeans, including the district officer, and told them they were going to be shot. After a long discussion between the district officer and the mutineers' leaders, the executions were postponed. The Europeans were instead confined under armed guard in the district officer's house.

  At dawn on the 31st of March 1942, a dozen Japanese bombers destroyed the radio station. The same day a fleet of nine vessels surrounded the island. About 850 men of the Japanese 21st and 24th Special Base Forces and the 102nd Construction Unit came ashore at Flying Fish Cove. They rounded up the workforce, most of whom had fled into the jungle. Sabotaged equipment was repaired and preparations began to resume mining and export. Only 20 men from the 21st Special Base Force remained as a garrison.

  Very little phosphate ever reached Japan. Isolated acts of sabotage, and the torpedoing of a cargo ship at the wharf on the 17th of November 1942, kept exports small. In November 1943 over 60% of the population was evacuated to prison camps at Surabaya. That left just under 500 Chinese and Malays and 15 Japanese to survive as best they could. The island was reoccupied in October 1945.

  Seven of the mutineers were later traced and prosecuted by the Military Court in Singapore. In 1947 five of them were sentenced to death. After representations from the newly independent Government of India, those sentences were reduced to penal servitude for life.

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• 5. Handover and Governance

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  A payment of $20 million from the Australian government to Singapore sealed the transfer of Christmas Island in 1958. The United Kingdom handed over sovereignty at Australia's request, and the money compensated Singapore for the lost phosphate earnings.

  Queen Elizabeth II gave royal assent to the United Kingdom's Christmas Island Act on the 14th of May 1958. That allowed Britain to move authority from Singapore to Australia by an order-in-council. Australia passed its own Christmas Island Act in September 1958, and the island was officially placed under the Commonwealth on the 1st of October 1958. The local population took no part in the process. They could remain Singaporean citizens or obtain Australian citizenship. Links with Singapore have occasionally resurfaced in Singaporean politics and in relations between Australia and Singapore.

  Under Commonwealth Cabinet Decision 1573 of the 9th of September 1958, D.E. Nickels became the first official representative of the new territory. On the 5th of August 1960 the minister for territories, Paul Hasluck, said Nickels's knowledge of the Malay language and local customs had proved 'invaluable in the inauguration of Australian administration'. John William Stokes succeeded him and served from the 1st of October 1960 to the 12th of June 1966. When he left, all sectors of the island community praised him. The official secretary was retitled administrator in 1968. Since 1997, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands have been called the Australian Indian Ocean Territories, and they share a single administrator who lives on Christmas Island.

  Christmas Island is a non-self-governing external territory. An administrator appointed by the governor-general represents the monarch and Australia. The territory falls under no formal state jurisdiction, yet the federal Christmas Island Act 1958 applies Western Australian laws to it and gives Western Australian courts judicial power over it. The federal government decides whether those laws apply in full, in part or not at all. Constitutionally the island remains distinct from Western Australia. The services a state government usually provides come from Western Australian departments and contractors, with the federal government paying the costs.

  A Shire of Christmas Island with nine seats provides local government. Voters elect its members to four-year terms, and elections come every two years, with four or five members standing each time. Its second president was Lillian Oh, who served from 1993 to 1995. The most recent local election took place on the 18th of October 2025, alongside elections on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Tracey Krepp, Stephanie Lai and Gordon Thomson won seats, while Hafiz Mazli and Kee Heng Foo lost theirs. The Unity Party lost its overall majority for the first time in many years. At a special meeting on the 20th of October, Steven Pereira was elected president and Swee 'Mel' Tung deputy president.

  Residents of Christmas Island who are Australian citizens vote in federal elections. They are represented in the House of Representatives by the Division of Lingiari in the Northern Territory, and in the Senate by Northern Territory senators. At the 2019 federal election, island voters gave the Labor Party majorities in both houses.

  Many islanders find this system frustrating. The island is run by federal bureaucrats, subject to Western Australian laws and policed by federal police. There is a feeling of resignation that confusing governance holds back progress on local issues. A number of islanders support self-governance, including a former shire president, who also believes that a lack of news media covering local affairs has fed political apathy. The only regular local publication is The Islander, a fortnightly newsletter from the Shire, and there are no independent newspapers.

  In early 1986 the Christmas Island Assembly held a competition to design an island flag. The winning design served as the informal flag for over a decade and became the official flag in 2002. At its centre is a yellow roundel showing the island in green.

  No permanent Australian military force is stationed on Christmas Island. Instead the Royal Australian Navy and Australian Border Force send patrol boats to watch nearby waters and to counter migrant smuggling. The Navy's Armidale-class boats are being replaced by larger vessels. The island is increasingly seen as a strategic spot for monitoring Chinese submarine activity in the Indian Ocean. The Australian Federal Police provide community policing, handle immigration enforcement and coordinate emergency operations.

  The airfield on Christmas Island has a runway 2100 m long. The airfield on Cocos (West Island), 1000 km to the west, has a 2400 m runway. The Australian Defence Force is upgrading the Cocos airfield to serve as a forward operating base for surveillance and electronic warfare aircraft.

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• 6. A Detention Island

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  In 2001 the Australian government stopped the Norwegian ship MV Tampa from disembarking 438 rescued asylum seekers, and Christmas Island became the site of the Tampa controversy. The standoff and the political reaction to it were a major issue in the 2001 Australian federal election.

  Boats carrying asylum seekers, mainly departing from Indonesia, had been landing on the island since the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Howard government built a temporary detention centre there in 2001. It ran the 'Pacific Solution' from 2001 to 2007, excising the island from Australia's migration zone so that asylum seekers there could not apply for refugee status. Asylum seekers were relocated from Christmas Island to Manus Island and Nauru. The government planned a larger, modern facility at North West Point, but those plans ended with Howard's defeat in the 2007 election.

  In 2006 builders completed an immigration detention centre with approximately 800 beds for the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. The final cost was over $400 million. In 2007 the Rudd government decommissioned the Manus Regional Processing Centre and the Nauru detention centre. Processing would now happen on Christmas Island itself.

  In December 2010-48 asylum seekers died just off the coast when their boat hit the rocks near Flying Fish Cove and then smashed against nearby cliffs. The event became known as the Christmas Island boat disaster.

  The High Court of Australia ruled in Plaintiff M61/2010E v Commonwealth of Australia, in a 7-0 joint judgment, that asylum seekers detained on Christmas Island were entitled to the protections of the Migration Act. The Commonwealth therefore had to give them a minimum of procedural fairness when assessing their claims.

  Pressure on the island's facilities later grew sharply. After the interception of four boats in six days, carrying 350 people, the Immigration Department stated that 2,960 'irregular maritime arrivals' were being held in the island's five detention facilities. That figure exceeded the regular operating capacity of 1,094 and also the contingency capacity of 2,724.

  The Christmas Island Immigration Reception and Processing Centre closed in September 2018. In February of the following year the Morrison government announced it would reopen the centre, after parliament passed legislation giving sick asylum seekers easier access to mainland hospitals. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government used parts of the centre as a quarantine facility for Australian citizens who had been in Wuhan. The evacuees arrived on the 3rd of February and left for their homes on the mainland 14 days later.

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• 7. Villages and Faiths

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  The 2021 Australian census counted 1,692 people on Christmas Island, most of them living in settlements along the northern edge. The largest ancestry group was Chinese, at 22.2% of residents, up from 18.3% in 2001. Another 17.0% had generic Australian ancestry, 16.1% Malay, 12.5% English and 3.8% Indonesian. The island's population is also estimated to be around two-thirds of Straits Chinese origin. In 2021-40.8% of residents were born in Australia, and Malaysia was the next most common birthplace at 18.6%.

  English was the family language for 29.3% of residents in 2021, followed by Malay at 18.4%, Mandarin at 13.9%, Cantonese at 3.7% and Southern Min at 2.1%. English is the lingua franca, yet many people do not speak it. In the 2016 census only 14% of residents said they spoke English 'not well or at all'. Just 59% said they spoke only English or spoke it well or very well, and 27% did not answer the question.

  The 2016 census recorded a population that was 40.5% female and 59.5% male, compared with 29.3% female and 70.7% male in 2011. Across Australia in 2021 the split was 50.7% female and 49.3% male. Since 1998 the island has had no provision for childbirth. Expectant mothers travel to mainland Australia about a month before their due date to give birth.

  The main settlement, Flying Fish Cove, is known simply as The Settlement. The others include Poon Saan, Drumsite and Silver City. Builders put up Silver City in the 1970s, with aluminium-clad houses that were supposed to be cyclone-proof. Europeans have mainly kept to The Settlement, where there is a small supermarket and several restaurants. The Malays live in their coastal kampong. The Chinese live in Poon Saan, a name that is Cantonese for 'in the middle of the hill'.

  In the 2021 census, Islam was the largest single religious group at 22.1%, or 374 people. Irreligion followed at 19.7%, or 333 people, then Buddhism at 15.2%, or 258 people. Catholics made up 7.3%, or 123 people, and Protestants 6.7%, or 112 people. Faith follows geography. The Settlement has a strong Anglo-Celtic influence, which has contributed to a strong Catholic presence, and recent Filipino arrivals have reinforced it.

  Poon Saan functions like the island's Chinatown, and Buddhism is commonplace there. Its temples include seven Buddhist temples, such as Guan Yin Monastery on Gaze Road, and ten Taoist temples, such as Soon Tian Kong at South Point and the Grants Well Guan Di Temple. Shrines to Na Tuk Kong or Datuk Keramat also appear around the island. The Malays of the shoreline kampong tend to follow Sunni Islam. Their mosque is in a state of decay, with rotting timbers and cracks.

  Christmas and Easter are the only official religious holidays, as in the rest of Australia. The island also marks the Spring Festival, the Lantern Festival, the Qingming Festival, the Zhong Yuan Festival, Hari Raya Puasa and Hari Raya Haji.

  The Christmas Island Women's Association, founded in 1989, belongs to the Associated Country Women of the World. The volunteer-run community station Christmas Island Radio, known as 6RCI, broadcasts on 102.1 FM and 105.3 FM and began streaming online in 2025. Its building holds a large collection of old Chinese and Malay records, and the station also broadcasts emergency messages. In 2022 a 4,600 kilometre submarine cable linked the island to Australia, replacing a satellite-based 2G mobile network with 4GX technology.

  The Christmas Island Cricket Club was founded in 1959 and celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2019. In 2020 it entered its first representative team in the WACA Country Week and finished as runner-up in the F-division. The first rugby league game on the island was played in 2016. A local committee, supported by NRL Western Australia, hopes to organise matches with the nearby Cocos Islands and build a rugby league competition across the Indian Ocean region.

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• 8. Crabs, Birds and Visitors

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  Around November each year, after the wet season starts and in step with the cycle of the moon, the red crabs of Christmas Island march to the sea to spawn. Once they reach the ocean, the mothers release their embryos, which can survive and grow there until they are able to live on land. This mass migration has been called one of the wonders of the natural world.

  Twenty terrestrial and intertidal crab species have been described on the island. Thirteen of them are true land crabs, dependent on the ocean only for larval development. Robber crabs, known elsewhere as coconut crabs, also live there in large numbers.

  BirdLife International has identified Christmas Island as both an Endemic Bird Area and an Important Bird Area. It supports five endemic species and five subspecies, and over 1% of the world population of five other seabirds. Eight species or subspecies of seabird nest there. The red-footed booby is the most numerous and nests in colonies in trees on the shore terrace. The brown booby nests on the ground near the edge of the sea cliffs. Abbott's booby is listed as endangered and nests on tall emergent trees in the plateau rainforest, which is the only remaining nesting habitat for the bird anywhere in the world.

  Of the ten native land birds and shorebirds, seven are endemic species or subspecies, including the Christmas Island thrush and the Christmas imperial pigeon. About 86 migrant bird species have been recorded as visitors. The Christmas frigatebird nests on the north-eastern shore terraces. The golden bosun, a subspecies of the white-tailed tropicbird, is found nowhere else.

  The mammals have fared badly. Two species of native rat, Maclear's rat and the bulldog rat, have become extinct since the island was settled. The Christmas Island shrew has not been seen since the mid-1980s and was recently declared extinct, and the Christmas Island pipistrelle, a small bat, is presumed extinct. The flying fox Pteropus natalis, found only here, is probably the last native mammal. It pollinates plants and spreads rainforest seeds, but it produces just one pup a year and suffers high infant mortality. Its status is critically endangered. The introduced yellow crazy ant has formed supercolonies, which authorities have tried to destroy by spraying the insecticide Fipronil from the air.

  The dense rainforest grows in the deep soils of the plateau and the terraces. It is dominated by 25 tree species, with ferns, orchids and vines growing on branches in the humid air below the canopy. Of the island's 135 plant species, at least 18 are endemic. They include the tree Arenga listeri, the vine Hoya aldrichii and the orchid Dendrobium nativitatis. Despite a century of mining, the rainforest is in great condition, and damaged areas are part of an ongoing rehabilitation project.

  Christmas Island National Park covers 63% of the island and is managed through Parks Australia. Within it, The Dales is a rainforest of seven deep valleys formed by spring streams, and Hugh's Dale waterfall is a popular attraction. The island has approximately 30 caves, and Lost Lake Cave, Daniel Roux Cave and Full Frontal Cave are the best known. Hosnies Spring Ramsar, one of many freshwater springs, has its own mangrove stand.

  The reefs near the island have healthy coral and several rare marine species. Together with the Cocos (Keeling) Islands reefs, they have been described as 'Australia's Galapagos Islands'. In the 2021 budget the Australian Government committed A$39.1 million to create two marine parks off Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. After months of consultation with local people, both parks were approved in March 2022, covering 744,000 km2 in total. They will help protect the spawning of bluefin tuna from illegal international fishers, while locals may still fish sustainably inshore.

  Two operators now offer SSI and PADI diving courses, try dives and boat trips, and most dive sites lie on the northern coastline. The sites include Flying Fish Cove, the Eidsvold wreck, Thundercliff Cave, Perpendicular Wall, Million Dollar Bommie, Chicken Farm and Coconut Point.

  The $34 million Christmas Island Casino and Resort opened in 1993 with government support and closed in 1998. A guidebook published in 1996 said visitor numbers had once been countable on two hands, but after the casino opened at the end of 1993 they soared to approach 30,000 a year. The British businessman Alistair McAlpine visited in 1996 and flew in on the mining company's plane. He later hoped that tourism had not altered the atmosphere he found 'uniquely powerful'.

  Today, the peak periods for tourism are the red crab migration from October to December and bird and nature week in August and September. A University of Queensland study released in May 2025 found that 77% of the island's population wanted to see more tourists. It also found that 84% of residents believed tourism development was crucial to the island's economic future.

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