The Territory of the Ashmore and Cartier Islands is an external territory of Australia consisting of two groups of small low-lying uninhabited tropical islands in the Indian Ocean situated on the edge of the continental shelf north-west of Australia and south of the Indonesian island of Rote.
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The territory includes Ashmore Reef (West, Middle, and East Islets) and Cartier Island (70 km east) with, a total area of 199.45 km2 (77 sq mi) within the reefs and including the lagoons, and 114,400 m² of dry land. While they have a total of 74.1 km (46 mi) of shoreline, measured along the outer edge of the reef, there are no ports or harbors, only offshore anchorage.
Nearby Hibernia Reef, 42 km (26 mi) Northeast of Ashmore Reef, is not part of the territory, but belongs to Western Australia.[1] It has no permanently dry land area, although large parts of the reef become exposed during low tide.
Cartier Island Marine Reserve includes the entire sand cay of Cartier Island, the reef surrounding it, the ocean for a 7.2 km (4 mi) radius around the island, and 1,000 m (3,300 ft) below the seafloor. It was proclaimed in 2000.
There is an automatic weather station on West Islet.
The territory is administered from Canberra by the Attorney-General's Department[2] (before 29 November 2007[3] administration was carried out by the Department of Transport and Regional Services). The FIPS-10 date code is AT; the territory is bundled along with Australia in ISO 3166. Defence is the responsibility of Australia, with periodic visits by the Royal Australian Navy, Royal Australian Air Force and Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. The islands are visited by seasonal caretakers.
Ashmore Reef is called Pulau Pasir by Indonesians, and considered part of Rote Ndao Regency of East Nusa Tenggara province.[4] In the Rote Island language, it is called Nusa Solokaek. Both names have the meaning Sand Island.[5]
On 21 October 2002 the nature reserve was recognised as a wetland of international importance when it was designated Ramsar Site 1220 under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.[6]
The Ashmore Reef Marine National Nature Reserve was established in August 1983. It is of significant biodiversity value as it is in the flow of the Indonesian Throughflow ocean current from the Pacific Ocean through the Malay archipelago to the Indian Ocean. It is also in a surface current west from the Arafura Sea and Timor Sea.
The Reserve comprises several marine habitats, including seagrass meadows, intertidal sand flats, coral reef flats, and lagoons, and supports an important and diverse range of species, including 14 species of sea snakes, a population of Dugong that may be genetically distinct, a diverse marine invertebrate fauna, and many endemic species, especially of sea snakes and molluscs. There are feeding and nesting sites for Loggerhead, Hawksbill and Green Turtles. It is classified as an Important Bird Area and has 50,000 breeding pairs of various kinds of seabirds. A high abundance and diversity of sea cucumbers, over-exploited on other reefs in the region, is present, with 45 species recorded.[6]
A memorandum of understanding between the Australian and Indonesian governments allows Indonesian fishermen access to their traditional fishing grounds within the region, subject to limits.
There is no economic activity in the Territory. As Ashmore Reef is the closest point of Australian territory to Indonesia, it was a popular target for people smugglers transporting asylum seekers to Australia[7] despite its only wells being infected with cholera or contaminated and undrinkable.[8] Once they had landed on Ashmore, asylum seekers could claim to have entered Australian territory and request to be processed as refugees. The use of Ashmore for this purpose created great notoriety during late 2001, when refugee arrivals became a major political issue in Australia. As Australia was not the country of first asylum for these "boat people", the Australian Government did not consider it had a responsibility to accept them.
A number of things were done to discourage the practice such as attempting to have the people smugglers arrested in Indonesia; the so-called Pacific Solution of processing them in third countries; the boarding and forced turnaround of the boats by Australian military forces, and finally excising Ashmore and many other small islands from the Australian migration zone. Two boatloads of asylum seekers were each detained for several days in the lagoon at Ashmore after failed attempts by the Royal Australian Navy to turn them back to Indonesia in October 2001.
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