Roderick MacLean was the civil servant who presided over the evacuation of the inhabitants of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands — an archipelago of 27 small coral islands in the Indian Ocean — for a new life in Australia and North Borneo in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He had been appointed administrator to oversee the islanders’ departure which would be voluntary. He was to carry it out “by local custom”. And in general he believed it was done without the bitter aftermath of enforced British evacuations elsewhere. The once uninhabited islands were first recorded by a Captain William Keeling in 1609, but had been governed and developed only since 1829, under one family, the Clunies-Ross from the Shetland Islands. The Cocos became a British colony in 1856 and latterly a part of Singapore. The staple food, rice, had to be shipped...
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