The grim history of Christmas Island

By S.L.

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 . Most of it, in fact, is a national park visited by tourists and famous for an annual phenomenon—the migration of tens of millions of red crabs from forest to sea. But Christmas Island is associated in the public mind less with natural beauty than with human misery.

First spotted by a passing British ship in 1615, the island was christened on Christmas Day 1643 by Captain William Mynors of the British East India company. (It is easily confused with another Christmas Island, named for Christmas 1777 by Captain James Cook. That is now part of Kiribati, and has been in the news as British servicemen who witnessed nuclear-bomb tests there in the 1950s seek compensation for subsequent health problems they blame on the radiation.)