thumb|right|200px|[[Oceania House, residence of the Clunies-Ross family]]The Clunies-Ross family were the original settlers of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small archipelago in the Indian Ocean. 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. The head of the family was usually recognised as the resident magistrate and was sometimes styled as the "King of the Cocos Islands", a title given by the press.
History
John Clunies-Ross
John Clunies-Ross was a merchant born in Weisdale, Shetland on 23 August 1786. In 1813 he was at Timor as Third Mate on board the whaler Baroness Longueville when he received the opportunity to become captain of the brig Olivia, which he took. He reportedly first cruised the waters of the then uninhabited Cocos (Keeling) Islands in 1825. After surveying them he moved his family to live on one of the islands in 1827. 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".
In 1823 an English adventurer, Alexander Hare, had settled on another of the islands with some runaway slaves. Hare soon departed, and Clunies-Ross alone obtained permanent rights by settlement. He planted hundreds of coconut palms and brought in Malay workers to the islands to harvest the nuts, building a business by selling copra. 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." Ross traded with Dutch vessels en route to Dutch ports on Java and Sumatra, and became a naturalised Dutch subject;
George Clunies-Ross
Born on 20 June 1842 in the Cocos Islands to John George Clunies-Ross and S'pia Dupong, George Clunies-Ross was sent to Scotland where he studied engineering at Glasgow. sold them to the Commonwealth of Australia for £2.5m ($4.75m) under threat of expropriation, with the exception of his house on Home Island, which was eventually purchased by the government in 1993. The Commonwealth had already been administering the islands since November 1955, with the proclamation of the Cocos (Keeling) Island Act 1955.
Legacy
, John "Johnny" George Clunies-Ross (born 1957), the son of John C. Clunies-Ross, lived on the West Island, breeding clams. He stated that he was initially frustrated with the 1978 transfer of the islands to Australia, but that he had changed his mind since then: "I was 21 and I'd been brought up to do the job. But even in the old man's time, it had become anachronistic. It had to change".
!Native title