West Island Mosque
mosque in Cocos Islands, Australia
The West Island Mosque (Cocos Islands Malay: Masjid Pulu Panjang) is a heritage-listed mosque at Alexander Street, West Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an external territory of Australia. The mosque was added to the Australian Commonwealth Heritage List on 22 June 2004.
History
Island history
Nineteenth century
By the end of 1827 there were two groups of European settlers on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and there was antagonism between the two settlement leaders, John Clunies Ross and Alexander Hare. Clunies Ross and his party first visited the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in 1825 but did not settle there until the end of 1827. A former business partner of Clunies Ross, Alexander Hare, and his party settled on the Islands early in 1827, months before Ross' return, with a party of 40, including many women reputedly taken to the Islands against their wishes.
John Clunies Ross was desirous of establishing a supply depot on the Islands for spices and coffee for shipment to Europe. He imposed an imperialist social and political regime on the Islands and managed them as a coconut plantation using non-European labour which gave the Clunies Ross family great power. He established a contractual arrangement between his family and the Malay and later Banlamese people, who would provide labour for the plantations and for copra production. The Clunies Ross family provided a house and land for each family. Rates of pay were fixed at half a Java rupee for 250 husked nuts per day or reasonable services for labour.
“West Island Mosque” enters the record as mosque in Cocos Islands, Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what West, Island and Mosque can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65070339. Authority coordinates are -12.186, 96.828. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 1827 and 1825.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Island Mosque” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.