Nauru

Nauru was settled about three thousand years ago by people of Micronesian and Polynesian descent, organised into twelve matrilineal clans — the twelve points of the star on the flag. A British whaler named it "Pleasant Island" in 1798. In the 1870s a decade of clan warfare, worsened by imported guns and alcohol, killed around a third of the population and ended only when Germany annexed the island in 1888.

Phosphate rock — the product of millennia of seabird droppings over coral — was identified in 1900, and mining began at once, with most of the profit going to the companies and the countries that ran the island: Germany, then Australia, New Zealand, and Britain under a League of Nations mandate. The Japanese occupation of 1942–45 was brutal: over a thousand Nauruans were deported to Chuuk as forced labour, and hundreds died there or of starvation at home.

Nauru became independent in 1968 and soon bought out the foreign phosphate operation. Through the 1970s and 80s the royalties gave it one of the highest incomes per head in the world, but the money was lost to bad investments, mismanagement, and extravagance, and by 2000 the phosphate was nearly exhausted and the country bankrupt. Since then Nauru has relied on a tax-haven phase, the sale of diplomatic recognition, and, above all, hosting Australia's offshore asylum-processing centre, opened in 2001 and reopened in 2012.

Nauruan society is built on the twelve clans, traced through the mother's line. Christianity — Congregational and Catholic — is the dominant faith, and church and extended family are the centre of social life on an island where everyone knows everyone.

Many older traditions were lost during the phosphate decades, but some are remembered: the catching and taming of frigatebirds, kept as pets and fishing aids; navigation and fishing by the stars; and the raising of milkfish in brackish ponds. Angam Day marks the two occasions — after the 1920 influenza and after the Second World War — when the population recovered to 1,500, the number once thought necessary for the community to survive.

The national sport is weightlifting, Nauru's main source of Commonwealth Games medals; one champion lifter, Marcus Stephen, went on to become president. Australian Rules football is widely played and followed.

Everyone lives on the narrow coastal strip, because the interior — "Topside", about four-fifths of the island — is a wasteland of jagged limestone pinnacles left by mining. A single ring road circles the island in about twenty minutes by car, and Nauruans drive it constantly despite the short distances, one factor in a health crisis: Nauru has among the world's highest rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes, driven by the loss of the traditional diet and of land to grow food on.

The government and the detention centre are the main employers. Almost all food and fuel is imported by ship — the island has no natural harbour, though a new port opened in 2021 — and electricity comes mostly from diesel generators. An undersea internet cable finally reached the island in 2023.

The latest resource gamble is deep-sea mining: Nauru has pushed hard for international rules that would let a Nauru-sponsored company harvest metal-rich nodules from the Pacific floor, a plan environmental groups strongly oppose.

Traditional Nauruan food was limited by the size of the island: coconut, pandanus, reef and ocean fish, and milkfish raised in ponds. Today the diet is overwhelmingly imported — white rice, tinned corned beef and fish, instant noodles, fried chicken, and sugary drinks — and that shift is the direct cause of the country's diabetes epidemic.

Fresh fish and coconut are still eaten, and families cook for church events and celebrations, but there is little in the way of a restaurant scene beyond the hotels and a few takeaways. Almost everything on a shop shelf has come a long way by sea.

Nauru is not set up for tourism, and the interest in visiting is partly the curiosity of reaching the least-visited country on Earth. Anibare Bay, on the east coast, is the one real beach, with turquoise water and coral pinnacles offshore, though swimming is limited by the reef.

Command Ridge, the island's highest point at about 65 metres, has rusting Japanese anti-aircraft guns, bunkers, and a lookout with a view across the whole island and the pinnacle fields. Buada Lagoon, a palm-ringed brackish lake in an inland hollow, is one of the few green places left.

The mined-out Topside itself is the island's strangest sight — a moonscape of coral spires where the phosphate was cut away — alongside scattered wartime relics and the frigatebirds that still wheel along the coast.