No More Drinking Water, Little Food: Our Island Is A Field Of Bones

[hatrack]

Some years ago, an Australian friend gave me a necklace with a beautiful and distinct pendant. The pendant had been in Helen Pilkinton’s family for decades and there were two more from a set of three that were given to each of her sisters. It was made from a phosphate rock brought back from my homeland of Banaba – an island in the central Pacific about 3,000km from Australia – by her parents in 1935. It came from an ancestral place that many in Kiribati and Fiji understand to be taboo and haunted.

Dozens of Australian families have jewellery and decorations similarly made out of Banaban rock. They never appear in op shops or online marketplaces. They are passed down along with family stories of a distant life on a tropical island in the centre of the Pacific. Helen’s father had been working as a medical officer for the British Phosphate Commissioners, a mining company jointly owned by the UK, Australia and New Zealand, on a place the Europeans called Ocean Island. This island was a 6 sq km raised coral atoll, 80 metres above sea level and almost completely made of high-grade phosphate rock. Its Indigenous people called it Banaba. The rock was a critical ingredient in manufactured superphosphate fertilisers that were being spread across thousands of farms in New Zealand, Victoria, South Australia, parts of New South Wales, and Western Australia.

But while Australians were trying to get “the best” out of lands stolen from Aboriginal communities, they were extracting, chemically transforming, and then spreading the lands of Indigenous Banabans and Nauruans across settler pastures. Our island is now, and has been for many decades, severely damaged. The mines turned the island into a forest of pinnacles and most Banabans were moved to Rabi in Fiji after the second world war. On Rabi, their rights, livelihoods, and cultural and political institutions have been precarious, and at times, tumultuous. The people of Rabi have no elected leaders and thus little representation for our needs in Fiji or Kiribati.

EDIT

Today, the 300 or so people who still live on Banaba as caretakers, face more crises. The island of pinnacles, still filled with industrial debris, has run out of fresh drinking water. The bangabanga – the underground water caves that were once the only natural source of drinking water – were polluted by the removal of topsoil and 80 years of mining. Before displacement, only Banaban women could enter and collect water from these caves. Earlier this year, after a period of drought, there were serious food shortages. The island that had “fed” so many hungry farms for most of the 20th century, no longer had enough for its own residents.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/03/no-more-drinking-water-little-food-our-island-is-a-field-of-bones

[femmedem]

1. A heartbreaking history I knew nothing about. Thanks for sharing it. n/t