Christmas Island

Christmas Island is an Australian external territory in the Indian Ocean, about 350 km (220 mi) south of Java. It lies much closer to Indonesia than to the Australian mainland. Flying Fish Cove, known locally as The Settlement, is its capital, and English, Malay and several Chinese dialects are spoken.

Richard Rowe of the ship Thomas sighted the island in 1615, and Captain William Mynors of the East India Company named it after sailing past on Christmas Day 1643. Two crewmen of William Dampier made the first recorded landing in 1688 and found nobody living there. Rocks collected by J. J. Lister in 1887 proved to be almost pure phosphate, and Britain annexed the island on 6 June 1888. Mining started in 1899 with workers from Singapore, Malaya and China, and the island was run through the Straits Settlements and later the colony of Singapore.

Japanese forces held the island from 31 March 1942 for its phosphate. Britain transferred the island to Australia on 1 October 1958, and Australia paid Singapore for its lost phosphate income. The government closed the mine in 1987, and former workers helped reopen it in 1991. From 2001 Australia used the island to detain asylum seekers, and 48 people died when their boat struck rocks near Flying Fish Cove in December 2010.

About 63% of the island lies within Christmas Island National Park, which protects primary monsoon forest. Long isolation left many plants and animals found nowhere else, and the naturalist John Murray surveyed them during the Challenger expedition of the 1870s. Each year millions of red crabs leave the forest and cross roads and beaches to release their eggs in the sea, the busiest season for visitors from October to December. In 1922 astronomers tried without success to watch a solar eclipse from the island to test Einstein's theory of relativity.