Pulau Krismas

Dari Wikipedia Bahasa Melayu, ensiklopedia bebas.

Koordinat: 10° 30′00″S, 105° 40′00″T

Untuk pulau Lautan Pasifik, sila lihat Kiritimati
Wilayah Pulau Krismas

(Bendera)

Lokasi Pulau Krismas

Negeri dan Wilayah Australia yang lain
Ibu negeri dan
bandar terbesar
Flying Fish Cove
("Petempatan")
Bahasa Rasmi Bahasa Inggeris (de facto)
Kerajaan
 • Pentadbir
 • Presiden Shire
Negara raja berperlembagaan
Neil Lucas
Gordon Thomson [1]
Kedudukan
 • (Bukan pemerintahan sendiri)
Wilayah Luar
Akta Pulau Krismas 1958 [2]
Wilayah
 • Jumlah
 • Air (%)
 
135  km²
0%
Jumlah penduduk
 • anggaran 2006 [3]
 • Kepadatan
 
1,493
11.06/km²
Mata wang Dolar Australia (AUD)
Zon Waktu (UTC + 7)
Internet RITT .cx
Kod panggilan +61-891
Pulau Krismas
Pulau Krismas
Pekan Poon Saan pada waktu petang.
Pekan Poon Saan pada waktu petang.


Wilayah Pulau Krismas ialah sebuah wilayah Australia bukan pemerintahan diri yang terletak di Lautan Hindi, 2,360 kilometer (1,466 batu) di barat daya Perth, Australia Barat dan 500 kilometer (310 batu) di selatan Jakarta, Indonesia.

Terdapat kira-kira 1,600 orang penduduk yang menetap di beberapa petempatan di hujung utara pulau tersebut, antaranya Flying Fish Cove, Bandar Silver, Kampong, Poon Saan, dan Drumsite.

Pulau Krismas mempunyai topografi asli yang unik sehingga menjadi perhatian para ahli sains dan geografi, ekoran kewujudan sebilangan spesies tumbuhan dan haiwan endemik yang telah berevolusi secara terpencil tanpa diganggu manusia.

Sedangkan terdapat aktiviti perlombongan di Pulau Krismas sejak bertahun-tahun lagi, 65% dari keseluruhan 135 kilometer persegi (52.1 batu persegi) keluasan pulau ini kini merupakan Taman Negara, selain daripada banyak kawasan hutan dara.


Jadual isi kandungan

[Sunting] Sejarah

Untuk beberapa abad, terpencilan dan lautan kasar Pulau Christmas memberikan batasan natural ke penempatan. penjelajahan British dan Dutch pertama kali memasukkannya ke carta mereka dari awal abad ketujuh belas, dan Kapten William Mynors kapal East India Ship Company, Royal Mary, menamakan pulau tersebut apabila dia tiba pada Hari Krismas, 25hb December, 1643. Pulau ini pertama kali wujud pada peta direka oleh Pieter Goos dan diterbit pada tahun 1666. Goos telah melabelkan pulau tersebut Moni.

Rekod lawatan terawal adalah pada Mac 1688 oleh William Dampier kapal Cygnet British, yang menjumpainya tidak berpenduduk. Sebuah akaun lawatan itu dapat dijumpai di Voyages Dampier, yang describes bagaimana, ketika mencuba untuk tiba Cocos dari New Holland, kapalnya was pulled off course in an easterly direction and after 28 days arrived at Christmas Island. Dampier mendarat di Dales (di Pantai Barat) dan dua orang dari anak kapalnya adalah orang pertama direkodkan menjejak kaki di Pulau Christmas.

Lawatan yang berikut dilakukan oleh Daniel Beekman, yang menerangkan pada buku 1718nya, A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo, in the East Indies.

In 1771 the Indian vessel, the Pigot, attempted to find an anchorage but was unsuccessful; the crew reported seeing wild pigs and coconut palms. However, pigs have never been introduced to the island, so the Pigot may have found a different island.

The first attempt at exploring the island was in 1857 by the crew of the Amethyst. They tried to reach the summit of the island, but found the cliffs impassable.

During the 1872-76 Challenger expedition to Indonesia, naturalist Dr John Murray carried out extensive surveys. At his urging, the British Admiralty annexed the 135 square kilometre island on 6 June 1888. But it was not until 1888 that Christmas Island was settled, when the Clunies-Ross brothers from neighbouring Cocos-Keeling Islands (some 900 kilometres to the south west) established a settlement at Flying Fish Cove to collect timber and supplies for the growing industry on Cocos.

In 1887, Captain Maclear of HMS Flying Fish, having discovered an anchorage in a bay that he named Flying Fish Cove, landed a party and made a small but interesting collection of the flora and fauna. In the next year, Pelham Aldrich, on board HMS Egeria, visited it for ten days, accompanied by J. J. Lister, who gathered a larger biological and mineralogical collection.

Among the rocks then obtained and submitted to Sir John Murray for examination were many of nearly pure phosphate of lime, a discovery which led to annexation of the island by the British Crown in June 1888. Soon afterwards, a small settlement was established in Flying Fish Cove by G. Clunies Ross, the owner of the Keeling Islands, and phosphate mining began in the 1890s using indentured workers from Singapore, China, and Malaysia.

The island was administered jointly by the British Phosphate Commissioners and District Officers from the United Kingdom Colonial Office through the Straits Settlements, and later the Crown Colony of Singapore. Japan invaded and occupied the island in 1942, as the Indian garrison mutinied, and interned the residents until the end of World War II in 1945. At Australia's request, the United Kingdom transferred sovereignty to Australia; in 1957, the Australian government paid the government of Singapore £2.9 million in compensation, a figure based mainly on an estimated value of the phosphate foregone by Singapore.

The first Australian Official Representative arrived in 1958 and was replaced by an Administrator in 1968. Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands together are called the Australian Indian Ocean Territories and since 1997 share a single Administrator resident on Christmas Island.

Since the late 1980s or early 1990s Christmas Island periodically received boatloads of refugees, mostly from Indonesia. These, and the occasional illegal fishing boat, were never a large issue, often welcomed by locals who looked forward to the exploding of the boats once the "boat people" had been processed [petikan diperlukan]. During 2001, Christmas Island received a large number of asylum seekers travelling by boat, most of them from the Middle East and intending to apply for asylum in Australia. The arrival of the Norwegian cargo vessel MV Tampa, which had rescued people from the sinking Indonesian fishing-boat Palapa in international waters nearby, precipitated a diplomatic standoff between Australia, Norway, and Indonesia. The vessel held 420 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, 13 from Sri Lanka, and five from Indonesia. In response to requests from the captain of the ship for Canberra to waive the Laws of the Sea and the Refugee Convention 1951, and have the refugees disembarked at Christmas Island, the Australia SAS boarded and took effective control. The standoff eventually led to the asylum seekers being redirected to Nauru for processing. Another boatload of asylum seekers was taken from Christmas Island to Papua New Guinea for processing, after it was claimed that many of the adult asylum seekers threw their children into the water, apparently in protest at being turned away. This was later proven to be false. Many of the refugees were accepted by New Zealand.

John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, later passed legislation through the Australian Parliament which excised Christmas Island from Australia's migration zone, meaning that asylum seekers arriving there could not automatically apply to the Australian government for refugee status, allowing the Australian navy to relocate them to other countries (Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, and Nauru) as part of the Pacific Solution. As of 2005, the Department of Immigration has begun construction of an "Immigration Reception and Processing Centre", due for completion in late 2006. The facility is estimated to cost $210 million, and will contain 800 beds.

Rencana utama: Daerah di Australia

[Sunting] Geografi

Ketam merah yang terkenal di Pulau Krismas
Ketam merah yang terkenal di Pulau Krismas

Located at 10°30′ S 105°40′ E, the island is a quadrilateral with hollowed sides, about 19 km (12 miles) in greatest length and 14.5 km (9 miles) in extreme breadth. The total land area is 135 km² (52.1 square miles), with 138.9 km (86.3 miles) of coastline. The island is the flat summit of a submarine mountain more than 4,572 m (15,000 feet) high, the depth of the platform from which it rises being about 14,000 feet (4267 m) and its height above the sea being upwards of 305 m (1,000 feet).

The climate is tropical, with heat and humidity moderated by trade winds. Steep cliffs along much of the coast rise abruptly to a central plateau. Elevation ranges from sea level to 361 m (1,184 feet) at Murray Hill. The island is mainly tropical rainforest, of which 65% is National Park.

The narrow fringing reef surrounding the island can be a maritime hazard.

Christmas Island is 500 km south of Indonesia and about 2600 km north west of Perth.

[Sunting] Demografi

Dari Julai 2005, ada sekurang-kuranya 1600 penduduk Pulau Krismas. (The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports a population of 1508 as of the 2001 Census.) Terdirian etniknya adalah 70% Cina, 20% Eropah dan 10% Melayu. Agama-agama yang diamalkan di Pulau Krismas termasuk Buddha 36%, Islam 25%, Kristian 18%, Taoisme 15%, lain 6%. Bahasa Inggeris adalah bahasa kebangsaan, tetapi bahasa Cina dan bahasa Melayu juga ditutur.

[Sunting] Kerajaan

Christmas Island is a non-self governing territory of Australia, administered by the Australian Department of Transport and Regional Services. The legal system is under the authority of the Governor General of Australia and Australian law. An Administrator (Neil Lucas, since 28 January 2006) appointed by the Governor-General of Australia represents the monarch and Australia.

The Australian Government provides Commonwealth-level government services through the Christmas Island Administration and DOTARS (CI).

There is no State Government; instead, state government type services are provided by contractors, including departments of the Western Australian Government, with the costs met by the Australian (Commonwealth) Government.

A unicameral Christmas Island Shire Council with 9 seats provides local government services and is elected by popular vote to serve four-year terms. Elections are held every two years, with half the members standing for election.

Christmas Island residents who are Australian citizens also vote in Commonwealth (federal) elections. Christmas Island residents are represented in the House of Representatives through the Northern Territory electorate of Lingiari and in the Senate by Northern Territory Senators.

In early 1986, the Christmas Island Assembly held a design competition for an island flag; the winning design was adopted as the informal flag of the territory for over a decade, and in 2002 it was made the official flag of Christmas Island.

[Sunting] Ekonomi

Phosphate mining had been the only significant economic activity, but in December 1987 the Australian Government closed the mine. In 1991, the mine was reopened by a consortium which included many of the former mine workers as shareholders. With the support of the government, a $34 million casino opened in 1993. The casino closed in 1998 and has not re-opened. The Australian Government in 2001 agreed to support the creation of a commercial spaceport on the island, however this has not yet been constructed, and appears that it will not proceed in the future. The Australian Government built a temporary immigration detention centre on the island in 2001 and plans to replace it with a larger, modern facility, in 2006.

Christmas Island has the top-level Internet DNS domain ".cx".

[Sunting] Komunikasi dan pengangkutan

Perkhidmatan telefon dibekalkan oleh Telstra dan merupakan sebahagian rangkaian Australia, dengan awalan yang sama dengan Australia Barat. Sebuah sistem telefon bimbit GSM menggantikan rangkaian analog lama pada bulan Februari 2005. Empat buah stesen televisyen siaran bebas dari Australia disiarkan (ABC, SBS, GWN, dan WIN) di dalam zon waktu yang sama dengan Perth. Siaran radio dari Australia termasuk Radio Nasional ABC, Radio Wilalayah ABC, dan FM Merah. Semua perkhidmatan dibekalkan melalui hubungan satelit dari tanah besar. Internet jalur lebar dari Australia disediakan untuk pelanggan di kawasan bandar mulai dari pertengahan tahun 2005 melalui CIIA (dahulunya dotCX), pembekal perkhidmatan internet.

Pelabuhan kontena terletak di Flying Fish Cove, dengan titik pemunggahan kontena alternatif di selatan pulau di Norris Point untuk kegunaan pada bulan-bulan Disember hingga Mac yang merupakan musim laut bergelora. Terdapat dua penerbangan mingguan ke Lapangan Terbang Pulau Krismas dari Perth, Australia Barat- (melalui RAAF Learmonth) yang dikendalikan oleh Sistem Jet Nasional pada setiap hari Isnin dan hari Khamis, serta satu penerbangan carter yang dikendalikan oleh Silk Air pada setiap hari Khamis.

Terdapat perkhidmatan bas di Pulau Krismas yang kerap dari Flying Fish Cove ke pusat rekreasi baru di Bukit Fosfat, serta juga perkhidmatan teksi. Rangkaian jalan raya meliputi kebanyakan kawasan pulau dan secara umumnya bermutu, walaupun kenderaan pemacu empat roda diperlukan untuk mencapai bahagian-bahagian hutan hujan dan pantai yang lebih terpencil.

[Sunting] Lain-lain

  • Setem pos dan album sampul hari pertama telah diterbitkan oleh Pulau Krismas sejak dari tahun 1958.
  • Sonic si Landak Kecil, watak rekaan, dikatakan dilahirkan di Pulau Krismas.

[Sunting] Bibliografi

  • Buku Fakta Dunia CIA 2002
  • Charles. W. Andrews, A Description of Christmas Island (Indian Ocean). Geographical Journal, 13(1), 17-35 (1899).
  • Charles W. Andrews, A Monograph of Christmas Island, London,1900.
  • National Library of Australia, The Indian Ocean: a select bibliography.. 1979 ISBN 0-642-99150-2
  • W. J. L. Wharton, Account of Christmas Island, Indian Ocean. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, 10(10), 613-624 (1888).

[Sunting] Rujukan

  • Rencana ini mengandungi bahan-bahan daripada Buku Fakta Dunia CIA. Sebagai sebuah terbitan kerajaan Amerika Syarikat, terbitan in berada di domain awam.


[Sunting] Pautan luar


Negeri dan wilayah Australia