Vital Air Link

Australia Takes Over Clunies Ross Area

THE Clunies Ross family of Cocos Island (Indian Ocean, 600 miles south by west of Java) have an extraordinary capacity for getting into the news.

When Jap occupation of East Indies and Malaya in 1942-45 ren dered the Darwin-Java-Singapore mr route unsafe, the air liners flew via Perth direct to Colombo, until the RAF put a big air-strip on West Islet, in the Cocos atoll, and then the route, Perth-Cocos- Colombo, was used until the Jap anese were defeated.

Clunies Ross IV died during a Japanese air attack on his prin cipality in 1944.

Then the newspapers started a hullabaloo—said his heir could not be found. Actually, he was at an English school; and he became Clunies Ross V when he was 21, in 1949.

Then Australia and New Zealand paid £2i million for the phosphate rich Christmas Island, 530 miles east of Cocos; and the Clunies Ross family was part-owner of Cocos.

Next, Captain P. G. Taylor ex plored a new Indian Ocean air route between Australia, Africa and Europe—and Cocos was seen to be a vital link.

The creeping advance of the Reds in Asia has again endangered the Java-Singapore air route. The im portance of Cocos Island to Austra lia is apparent.

Britain, this year, agreed to trans fer ownership of Cocos to Australia.

Australia has ageed to respect the grant of occupation-in-perpetuity, made to the Clunies Ross family by Queen Victoria in 1886. Cocos will be administered by the Australian Minister for Territories.

A few weeks ago, a P & O liner picked up a small party in a boat off the atoll. It included young John Clunies Ross. He wanted to go to England to be married; and, of course, he was taken along.

On August 30, John Clunies Ross was married, in Fulham, to 21-

years-old Daphne Parkinson, daughter of a Lancashire manufac turing chemist. They are to fly home to Cocos in October. Even there, they could not keep out of the news. The London papers re ported that the “blonde queen of a coral isle” was distressed when her car broke down en route to the wedding, and she and her father had to beg a lift from a passing motorist.

And, finally, the Australian Minister for Air has announced that 500 men almost immediately will begin the establishment, on West Islet, Cocos Island, of an 8,000 ft. runway of packed coral, to take the biggest planes. Buildings, strip, in stallations of all kinds will cost at least £690,000.

The late Sir Albert Ellis, of Auck land, a member of the British Phosphate Commission, and the actual discoverer of the Nauru phosphate deposits, who died re cently at 81, left £220,000 —£18,000 of it for charities.