4. Islands. Colonialism and Geopolitics

... a small insignificant speck, set in the midst of a vast expanse of water, Banapa [sic], or Ocean Island, as it is generally called, is one of Britain’s most valued possessions of its size in the Pacific. From it approximately 70,000 tons of Phosphate is taken annually.

What remains in the aftershocks of empire? Such effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes ... The question is pointed: How do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives?

Like earlier Australian depictions of the Pacific Islands, the new doomsday- ism provides an interesting sounding of how Australians see themselves. At the center of such conceptions has been an unquestioned, and often unacknowledged, belief that Australia has a right, or even a duty, to speak for the inhabitants of this region, to represent them to themselves and to others, to lead, and to manage them. This belief was asserted long before Australia had the power to enforce it, indeed even before Australia was formally established in 1901 ... Australian policymakers continued to assert this belief over the next century, particularly at the end of the two world wars, and even more strongly from the mid-1970s, when Australia saw itself as the natural leader of the postcolonial South Pacific ... Although a familiar tendency in white Australia’s approach to Aborigines (the parallels are striking), the islands region has been the only area outside the continent where Australians have imagined themselves as colonizers and civilizers.

Every time anyone opened his mouth on Ocean Island the word "phos- phate" came out. In no time, and much against my will, I knew all about it ... Everyone knows how a coral atoll is formed ... To turn a coral atoll into a phosphate island a few more centuries must pass. Very likely it sinks into the sea, once or several times...Sea water percolates through the birds’ deposits, carrying phosphoric acid into the rocks beneath...the acid is automatically converted into phosphate of lime. You have only to treat this with sulphuric acid and, hey presto! Superphosphate!...The British Phosphate Commissioners had added their contribution of weird- ness to ugliness. In the trail of their craggy diggings in the limestone bedrock they had left behind them strange shapes, ragged bumps, columns and protuberances of every sort. Row upon row of gnarled pinna- cles of porous rock as tall as trees gave the place a look as of some mediaeval inferno ... For hundreds of thousands of years the slow process of making an island like this had gone on. Then one day a man struck his foot against a "coral" door-stop in a Sydney office, and phosphate was discovered. The life of a Pacific island was changed before the inhabitants knew anything about it. The natives became rich, and the island was destroyed.

... was a rock lying over earth and rooted in the deep places of the sea. All the lands of the ancestors were embedded in the rock and stood out like hills atop it. Banaba was the buto, the navel, and all the multitude of lands and ancestors in Te Bongiro, the darkness, lay around it. Tabakea, the turtle lived on Banaba with Nakaa, his brother, Auriaria the giant, Tabuariki the shark and thunder, their sister, Tituabine, the stingray and lightning, and many others...Auriaria became the lord of Te Bongiro and he pierced the heavens with his staff. The rock fell into the sea, upside down with its roots in the air, burying Tabakea underneath. Auriaria then traveled southward until his foot struck a reef-rock. There he stayed and made a great land which he called Samoa. He met a razor clam called Katati which he flung into the East and that was the Sun. And again he took a shellfish called Nimatanin, and that was the Moon. Then he took the body of Riki, the eel, and laid it across the sky ... it is now the Milky Way. Then Auriaria planted a tree on Samoa, from which sprang a host of ancestors.

I arrived on Banaba on a government boat filled with all manner of cargo: women and children ... freely wandering chickens, ducks and dogs, tinned food of various sizes, sacks of rice, kilograms of pounded, paper-bagged kava ... In the absence of light of any kind, we somehow managed to dis- embark clutching our bags, and ascend slippery invisible steps ... I was placed on the back of a...motorbike which...sped up a bumpy, dark road to a grand but dilapidated house ... the building was ... named after Sir Albert Ellis, the man who had discovered phosphate on Ocean Island and Nauru in 1900. After a night mostly devoid of sleep I awoke to an extraordinary view. Banaba was a desiccated field of rocks and jagged limestone pinnacles jutting out of a grey earth with patches of dark green foliage. Roofless concrete buildings, rusted machines and corrugated iron warehouses littered the vista punctuated here and there by startling red flame trees and coconut trunks devoid of fronds ... The combination of jagged rock, rusted iron, and vast blue sea signaled not an idyllic island scene, but an industrial, oceanic wasteland.

My wife and I were happy to meet ... members of the Rabi Island Council on our last visit to Suva, when we were given an official dinner to thank me for having bought such a lovely island for them and to assure us that after many vicissitudes they were all happily settled in their new home, with only a handful of unimwane and unaine [male and female elders] still desirous to return to Banaba to have their bones buried beside those of their forebears.

The whole reason for Banaban displacement is colonial agriculture. I like to say "agriculture is not in our blood, but our blood is in agriculture". if Banabans think of blood and land as one and the same, it follows then that in losing their land, they lost their blood. in losing their phosphate to agriculture, they have spilled their blood in different lands. their essential roots on ocean island are now essentially routes to other places. places like Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia.