Christmas Island is associated in the public mind less with natural beauty than with human misery
LIFE IN WUHAN under lockdown must be bleak and rather frightening. Yet some Australians trapped in the centre of the coronavirus outbreak seem to prefer it to the alternative offered them: a flight out of China followed by two weeks in quarantine on Christmas Island, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. In photographs the island, some 1,600km away from the coast of western Australia, looks rather idyllic—palm-fringed beaches, bright-blue waters, lush jungle and abundant wildlife .
For more than 200 years the crabs on what is now the Australian island were left to their own devices, until, in the late 19th century, they were discovered to be passing the land-based parts of their lives on top of vast phosphate-rock deposits. This was a time when a rapidly rising global population needed to be fed, and demand for high-quality phosphate as a fertiliser had pushed prices up.
Many would die anyway, some from accidents at work, crushed under upset trucks carrying rocks. Decent medical care was lacking and the food poor. So the workers were vulnerable to the disease beri-beri which was especially rife around the turn of the century. In 1901 beri-beri killed 239 people, more than a quarter of the population.
After the war, Christmas Island remained administratively part of Singapore. But in 1948 the Australian and New Zealand governments acquired the CIP. And in 1958 the island became an Australian territory. Many residents were repatriated against their wishes to Singapore, Malaysia or China, before a voluntary resettlement scheme was announced in 1973. The mining wound down in the 1990s, as the deposits were exhausted.
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