Cocos Islands: Nature and Water Lover’s Paradise
What comes first in your mind when you think of paradise? No one in our earth at this moment can correctly describe how the paradise looks like, though our wild imagination power can help us to create a vague image in our mind about it. Beautiful lakes, attractive flowers, magnificent greenery, crystal clear water and white sand beaches are some necessary components which, we believe, will defiantly exist in the God’s paradise.
If you agree with the aforementioned statement, we will take you to one such paradise, which has all these elements in abundance, in this edition.
The Cocos Islands or the Keeling Islands is a small group of islands located near Sri Lanka and Australia. The territory, though enjoys certain autonomy, is regarded as the external territory of Australia. It comprises nearly twenty-seven coral islands. Of these islands, only two of the islands –West Island and Home Island- are inhibited by the human beings. The surprising fact is that there are only six hundred inhabitants.
The island, which was discovered by William Keeling in the year 1609, was initially a private fiefdom of John Clunies-Ross, who was one of the first settlers. In fact, Scottish merchant Clunies-Ross was the one who brought in the Malay workers, which, now, constitute the major part of the island’s population. These workers were made to work in the copra plantations of the merchant. The Clunies-Ross’s family members controlled the island until it was officially annexed by the British government. Noteworthy, when the territory was handed over to Australia in the year 1955, some of the prime real estate properties were under the ownership of the Scottish merchant’s family. Neither the merchant’s family nor the, then, governments of Australia and British tried to invest in the infrastructure, health and education sectors, so no development was achieved in these sectors.
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