NauruNaoero

Nauru was settled around three thousand years ago by people whose language and customs blend Micronesian and Polynesian elements. They lived around the fertile coastal fringe and Buada Lagoon, fishing the reef, farming milkfish in ponds and climbing for coconuts and pandanus. Society was organised into twelve clans, traced through the mother's line, and the twelve-pointed star on today's flag stands for them.

The island had a sporting tradition of catching noddy birds and taming frigatebirds, which were kept on perches and flown in contests. Songs and dances marked these seasons, and bird-catching still happens at dusk along the Topside cliffs.

A British whaler named the island Pleasant Island in 1798. Beachcombers, traders and guns arrived in the 19th century, and from 1878 a ten-year war among the clans, fuelled by firearms and palm toddy, killed a large share of the population. Germany annexed the island in 1888, confiscated weapons, banned alcohol and brought missionaries; the Congregational church became the centre of island life.

In 1900 a company geologist, Albert Ellis, realised that a rock used as a doorstop in Sydney came from Nauru and was rich phosphate, formed over millennia from seabird droppings on the old coral. Mining began in 1906. After the First World War the island became a League of Nations mandate under Australia, Britain and New Zealand, and the British Phosphate Commissioners shipped the plateau to fertilise farms in all three countries.

Mining stripped the soil and left the Topside plateau, about four-fifths of the island, as a maze of grey coral pinnacles up to several metres tall. Nauruans received small royalties at first; after independence in 1968 the Nauru Phosphate Corporation took over, and in the 1970s and 1980s the income made Nauru one of the richest countries per head in the world. Families had cars, imported food and free services, and the government invested abroad.

Bad investments, corruption and falling reserves ended the boom by the 1990s. The trust fund lost most of its value, the state bank failed, and Nauru turned to offshore banking and passport sales that drew money-laundering blacklists. In 1989 Nauru took Australia to the International Court of Justice over the damage done before independence; Australia settled in 1993. Some secondary mining continues, and the idea of rehabilitating Topside for farming or housing remains mostly a plan.

Japan occupied Nauru in August 1942 and built an airstrip, now the international airport, using forced labour. In 1943 the occupiers deported about 1,200 Nauruans to Truk (Chuuk) in the Caroline Islands to work and to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Hunger, bombing and disease killed hundreds of them; those who stayed on Nauru also suffered, and lepers were taken out to sea and killed.

The survivors came home on 31 January 1946, the date later chosen for independence day in 1968. Guns and pillboxes remain on Command Ridge, the island's highest point, and along the coast.

Nauruans have long feared their numbers falling too low to survive as a people. When the population reached 1,500 in 1932, a figure seen as the minimum for survival, the island celebrated Angam, meaning homecoming. The war cut numbers again, and the milestone was reached a second time in 1949. Angam Day, 26 October, is still a national holiday.

In 2001 Australia opened a centre on Nauru to hold asylum seekers intercepted at sea, part of what became known as the Pacific Solution. It closed in 2008, reopened in 2012 and has been used on and off since, with long stays, reports of self-harm and protests from rights groups. Payments linked to the centre became one of the largest parts of Nauru's economy, and the topic is sensitive on the island.

Fishing licences for tuna fleets, sold through the Parties to the Nauru Agreement system that is named after the island, are the other main income. Most food is imported, and diets heavy in processed food have given Nauru some of the world's highest rates of obesity and diabetes, a public-health crisis the government now works to reverse with gardens and school programmes.

In January 2024 Nauru switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, and later that year signed a treaty with Australia that ties new funding and security support to Australian consultation on security deals with other countries (check details). For a visitor, the modern republic shows in small ways: Chinese-run shops, Australian dollars and plugs, and one airline that links the island to the world.