Coming Home To Banaba 1998

Overview

Banaba is a remote and tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, about 50-miles South of the Equator, at the Western limit of the Republic of Kiribati. Once it was known as Ocean Island, named after ship that “discovered” it. Once it was the colonial capital of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and one of the British Empire’s richest sources of phosphate, the raw material for the fertiliser that enriched the soil of Australia and New Zealand. From 1900 to 1979, phosphate mining devastated Banaba, leaving