Nauru

Nauru was settled by Micronesian and Polynesian peoples who lived in clans on the small island for thousands of years. Annexed by Germany in the late nineteenth century, it later came under Australian administration, and during the Second World War it was occupied by Japan, which deported many islanders. The discovery of vast phosphate deposits transformed its fate. Nauru gained independence in 1968 and took control of its phosphate, which for a time brought immense wealth, before mismanagement and the exhaustion of the deposits plunged the country into crisis.

Nauru is a single small island of raised coral, an oval just 21 square kilometres in area, ringed by a narrow coastal belt of beaches and fertile land where the population lives, around a central plateau. That plateau, known as Topside, was once rich phosphate rock, and a century of mining has stripped it bare, leaving a desolate moonscape of jagged limestone pinnacles where little can grow. The island is surrounded by a reef, has no natural harbour, and possesses a single lagoon, the Buada, inland. The environmental devastation of the interior is among the most extreme of any nation.

The flag of Nauru is blue with a narrow horizontal yellow stripe across the centre and a white twelve-pointed star below it near the hoist. The blue represents the Pacific Ocean, the yellow stripe the equator, and the white star Nauru's position just south of it, the star sitting below the line as the island sits below the equator. The twelve points of the star stand for the twelve original tribes of the island. The simple, map-like design thus locates the tiny nation precisely in its ocean setting.

Nauru is a predominantly Christian country, the legacy of missionary activity, with the population belonging mainly to Protestant churches, especially a Congregationalist tradition, alongside a Roman Catholic minority. The church is an important part of community life on the small island, and Christianity is woven into Nauruan culture and the calendar. Older traditions and the clan structure of Nauruan society endure beneath the now firmly Christian character of the island, whose tight-knit community has been shaped by both its isolation and its turbulent recent history.

Nauruan cuisine traditionally centred on the resources of the sea and the island's limited produce: fish and seafood from the surrounding reef and ocean, coconut, pandanus, and a little fruit. A distinctive traditional practice was the rearing of fish, including the noddy bird and ikan, in the inland Buada Lagoon. In modern times, however, the loss of agricultural land to mining and the wealth of the phosphate era brought a heavy reliance on imported and processed foods, which, combined with changing lifestyles, has contributed to serious public health problems on the island.

Agriculture has always been minimal on Nauru and is now almost impossible across much of the island, where phosphate mining has destroyed the soil of the interior, leaving the barren pinnacles of Topside. Only the narrow coastal fringe and the area around the Buada Lagoon support coconut palms, pandanus, and a little fruit and vegetable growing. The island produces almost no food and imports nearly everything it eats. Its economy was built entirely on phosphate; with the deposits largely exhausted, the country has sought other income, including, controversially, hosting an offshore immigration detention centre.

The defining story of Nauru is its phosphate: the mining that made it briefly one of the richest nations per person, the squandering and collapse of that wealth, and the environmental ruin left behind, a stark parable of resource dependence. Independence came in 1968. In later decades the desperate search for revenue led Nauru into ventures including offshore banking and, since the early 2000s, the operation of a detention centre for asylum seekers on behalf of Australia, which has become central to the island's economy and a subject of international controversy.

Nauru has a population of only around 12,000 people, making it one of the least populous countries in the world, predominantly the indigenous Micronesian Nauruans, with minorities of other Pacific islanders, Chinese, and Europeans. Nauruan is the national language, with English widely used. Almost the entire population lives on the narrow, fertile coastal strip, since the mined-out interior is largely uninhabitable, with the largest settlement and the seat of government in the Yaren district, for Nauru has no official capital city. The small, close community continues to live with the consequences of its singular history.