All manner of rubbish - from buoys and fishing nets, to toothbrushes, shampoo bottles, cigarette lighters, bottle tops and plastic toys - washes up on the white sands of the two atolls and 27 coral islands that form Australia's northern-most territory in the Indian Ocean.

But in the face of the relentless tide, artist Emma Washer is making whimsical treasure from trash.

''The themes I have running through my work constantly change but the core idea of being mesmerised by using these colourful fragments of other people's lives washed up after travelling across the whole ocean to be reworked to create another story I have never tired of,'' Ms Washer said.

''I love that the flotsam and jetsam materials in their worn state after being used by the previous owner, then exposed to the oceans elements and the sun, start to degrade and ironically represent the environment they end up in.''

The rubbish comes from Lombok, Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi - winding its way through the islands to wash up on these otherwise pristine shores.

Oceanic references are everywhere in her works: multi-hued blue fish made from dozens of scraps of blue thongs, wood block prints of sweetlips fish, blue and green printed cushions and jewellery made from found objects given new life.

In 2009 Washer opened The Big Barge Art Centre, no mean feat on West Island, home to about 140 people. The centrepiece is an old Malaysian teak fishing boat, which Washer, her friends and father Terry dragged from the rainforest covering much of the interior of 14 kilometre-long West Island. After eight painstaking years restoring the boat, it is now a warm exhibition space. Weddings and concerts are held in the grounds surrounding the boat.

In the grounds of her studio is a shelf lined with plastic tubs of rubbish she and her friends have collected from the beaches of Cocos: in one are blue thongs, in another pink thongs, and in another, little children's thongs. There are rubber tyres, fishing twine reels, bottle caps - sorted into blues, yellows and reds - plastic dinosaurs, children's balls and a doll's arm.

But sometimes more than rubbish comes aground. No one on Cocos wants to talk much about the asylum boats that have again begun to come to this tiny Australian outpost in the Indian Ocean, but with Cocos lying halfway between Sri Lanka and Australia, they are never far from people's thoughts.

Terry Washer says two boats have washed up in the past two years at the islands increasingly used as an asylum route from Sri Lanka. ''One washed up at the bottom of Home Island and it still had food inside,'' Terry says. ''And no one on board. It had food and nappies on board. It was a strange one. You think, where did the people go?''