Australia's Off-Shore

Islands

Australia is a continent, everyone knows that. It also ha countless off-shore islands ranging in size and usefulness fron Tasmania to those like the Monte Bello Islands off the Wester Australian coast which were used for some of Britain’s firs nuclear experiments. Bill Beatty writes about most of thes> outliers of Australia in a new book, Next Door to Paradise.

ALTHOUGH his publishers have fallen for the out-worn idea that any book about islands must have “Paradise” somewhere in its title, some of the places that Beatty de scribes scarcely qualify. As, for example, the Monte Bello and the Houtman Albrolhos group, off West ern Australia, which have a back ground of murder and mutiny, ship wreck and disaster dating right back to the days of the Dutch East India Company.

It was on one of the Albrolhos that the Dutch ship Batavia ran aground in 1628, to be followed by

the mutiny of the crew and slaughter of over 100 men women for the sake of the trea she carried.

The mutineers were eventi brought to justice, but before coins and valuables could be rem( from Batavia she slipped from reef on which she was perched, b: in two and sank, carrying her trea with her. Skindivers relocated wreck and some of the treasur 1963.

These isolated, uninhabited n islands swarm with seabirds and s carry large numbers of Austn mainland animals, including labies.

Beatty writes also of Cock Island, the 10 square mile, ru; hunk of iron-ore in Yampi So on the far north-west coast of It is an industrial phenomenon hardly a paradise, in the ventional use of the term.

There is little soil on Cock but 500 people live and work the remote island in a townshi] modern homes that have all veniences, ocean views down Sound but problems with fresh w much of which has to be backlo to the island in the ore ships, weather is glorious from Ma; October and like hell with humidity for the rest of the yea]

Nauru

However, Australia’s off-s islands are not all coral rocks burning iron-ore. The islande Torres Strait and the Barrier are as delightful as any in the publicised regions of the Pa Beatty also has something to< about Norfolk Island, Lord H and although it can’t by any stl of the imagination be called air shore island, Nauru.

The short chapter on Naurui evidently written before the N ans had turned down the idee migrating en masse to Curtis I! off the Queensland coast and; author is one of those who doe; have stars in his eyes when he tl

the Nauruans’ nationalistic ibilions.

Dn the question of their demand \ sovereignty on Curtis, he says, he idea that Australia should ate a sovereign nation with a mlation no bigger than that of a intry town, on an island within ht of the mainland, is prepo rous . . . The Nauruans will have right to manage their local affairs, r the rest, they should be grateful what is being offered them. Many lerelict mining community in Aus tia would have been glad to be ited half so well.”

Jill Beatty has specialised in un thing the odd and unusual in the stralian scene and what he has [say about the islands off the itinent will give Australians new its on places they have taken for nted; and provide interesting

ding for non-Australians.-

IT.

Lext Door To Paradise. Cassell.

I).