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Christmas Island
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Christmas Island is a dependency of Australia, in the Indian Ocean, south of the western tip of Java. The island is mainly a plateau about 300 m (about 1000 ft) above sea level. The chief industry is the mining of phosphate rock. However, as the phosphate reserves begin to dwindle, the government is encouraging the development of tourism. The population is made up of Chinese, Malays, and a lesser number of Europeans. The island was annexed by Britain in 1888 and was incorporated in the Straits Settlements colony the following year.
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Christmas Island is a tiny speck of land located 360 km south of Java, in the north-eastern Indian Ocean. The island has been an external territory of Australia since 1958, and even as recently as the late 1980's, it was relatively unknown to most Australians. It is a high limestone island rising from the depths of Java Trench, densely cloaked in thick forest, and supporting a unique assemblage of plants and animals. The island came to prominence during the 1990's with the release of several nature documentaries, most of which show-cased the island's amazing red crabs and their annual seaward migration. More recently... the Tampa debacle has focussed media attention on the island and its role in the refugee situation.
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The flora and fauna assemblage in Christmas Island has developed largely due to the influences of warm temperatures. However the flora is highly rich due to this warm temperatures, high rainfall, isolation and geological history. However the natural vegetation of the island can be categorized into three types viz primary rainforest, marginal forest and scrub forest. The scrub is ... known as or referred to as open forest and vine forest. There are about 411 plant species on Christmas Island and out of those 18 are common. The vegetation that is present in the island is very unique as it doesnt occur anywhere else in all over Australia.
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Christmas Island has a very unique population with a blend of ethnic Chinese, Malay & Caucasians from the Australian mainland. A visit here is a diverse cultural experience with a christian church, a mosque and numerous buddhist temples on the island. The locals are receptive and friendly to newcomers and that is a trait among all Christmas Islanders no matter the culture.
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Since the late 1980s or early 1990s Christmas Island periodically received boatloads of refugees, mostly from Indonesia. These, and the occasional illegal fishing boat, were never a large issue, often welcomed by locals who looked forward to the exploding of the boats once the "boat people" had been processed . During 2001, Christmas Island received a large number of asylum seekers travelling by boat, most of them from the Middle East and intending to apply for asylum in Australia. The arrival of the Norwegian cargo vessel MV Tampa, which had rescued people from the sinking Indonesian fishing-boat Palapa in international waters nearby, precipitated a diplomatic standoff between Australia, Norway, and Indonesia. The vessel held 420 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, 13 from Sri Lanka, and five from Indonesia. In response to requests from the captain of the ship for Canberra to waive the Laws of the Sea and the Refugee Convention 1951, and have the refugees disembarked at Christmas Island, the Australia SAS boarded and took effective control. The standoff eventually led to the asylum seekers being redirected to Nauru for processing.
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Christmas Island (Australia) should not be mixed up with Christmas Island (Kiritimati), part of the republic of Kiribati, an atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. One of the Line Islands, Kiritimati is the largest atoll in the world. The chief economic activity is the raising of coconuts. Explored in 1777 by Captain James Cook, it was annexed by Britain in 1888 and after 1919 was included in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands dependency. The atoll was an air base of the United States during World War II (1939-1945) and served as a base for British nuclear tests in 1957 and 1958 and for U.S. nuclear tests in 1962. It was included in the Gilbert Islands dependency from 1976 to 1979, when the dependency became independent, as Kiribati.
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Christmas Island