Clunies-Ross family

From 1827 to 1978, the family ruled the previously uninhabited islands as a private fiefdom, initially as terra nullius and then later under British (1857–1955) and Australian (1955–1978) sovereignty.

[3][4][5] Only Joshua Slocum used different dates, when he wrote that "John Clunis-Ross, who in 1814 touched [the island] in the ship Borneo on a voyage to India", nailed up a Union Jack with plans to settle in the future and "[...] returned 2 years later with his wife and family".

[7] He planted hundreds of coconut palms and brought in Malay workers to the islands to harvest the nuts, building a business by selling copra.

[8] In the beginning, Javanese convicts were used as labourers and "crime of all kinds was rife", before "getting rid of the criminal class and obtaining a better type of Malay coolie.

"[3] According to a 1903 article in The Timaru Herald, Ross "[ran] his little colony on model lines and succeeded beyond expectation" and Charles Darwin mentioned after his 1836 visit with HMS Beagle that he "found the natives in a state of freedom".

[10] In 1857 British Captain Stephen Grenville Fremantle visited aboard HMS Juno who "took possession of the islands in the name of the Britannic Majesty's Government".

The connection to Britain changed nothing in Ross's autonomous administration, and it was not until fifteen years later another British ship arrived for a complete survey of the island.

[3] John George Clunies-Ross received the Malay title of Tuan Pandai ('the learned one') due to his amateur medical knowledge and research into the natural history of the islands.

[8] Representatives of the Government of the Straits Settlements were sent to the island each year and reports reflected that "members of the Clunies-Ross family are to-day in every sense of the word proprietors of the islands, for Mr George Clunies-Ross makes his own laws and interprets them, polices his little domain, provides his own coinage [...] controls the entire trade and acts as 'the universal provider' to satisfy the wants of the community".

Known as Tuan Ross, he inherited an economic disaster after a cyclone destroyed almost every house and coconut palm on Home Island in November 1909.