Nauru

• 1. Introduction

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  In May 2026, the Parliament of Nauru voted to change the country's English name to Naoero, the spelling used in the Nauruan language. The amendment takes effect only if voters approve it in a referendum.

  Nauru is an island country in the South Pacific, in the Micronesia subregion of Oceania. It covers just 21 square kilometres, which makes it the third-smallest country in the world. It is also the smallest member of the Commonwealth of Nations by both area and population. About 10,800 people live there. The nearest neighbour is Banaba, part of Kiribati, roughly 300 kilometres to the east.

  Why would a place this small attract German traders, Australian administrators, Japanese soldiers and diplomats from Moscow to Beijing? What lay beneath its surface? And what happens to a country when the one thing that made it valuable runs out?

  To begin, picture how little ground there is. Even the highest point on the island, a ridge called Command Ridge, stands only 71 metres above the sea.

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• 2. Reef and Plateau

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  A fringing coral reef circles Nauru, and at low tide it lies exposed, studded with pinnacles. That reef has made it impossible to build a seaport. Channels through the coral let small boats reach the shore instead.

  Inland from the beach runs a fertile coastal strip between 150 and 300 metres wide. Beyond it, coral cliffs rise around a central plateau. Coconut palms thrive on the narrow belt, and the land around Buada Lagoon supports bananas, pineapples, vegetables, pandanus trees and hardwoods such as the tamanu.

  Daytime temperatures run between 30 and 35 degrees Celsius, and nights hold steady near 25. The equator and the surrounding ocean keep the air hot and very humid all year. Monsoon rains fall between November and February. Rainfall swings widely from year to year with the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and several serious droughts have been recorded.

  No stream or river exists anywhere on the island. Households gather water from roof catchment systems. Some has even arrived as ballast in ships that came back to collect cargoes of rock.

  The wildlife is thin. Roughly 60 native vascular plant species have been recorded, and none is found nowhere else. The island has no native land mammals, though it does have native insects, land crabs and birds. One bird, the Nauru reed warbler, lives nowhere else. Ships brought the Polynesian rat, cats, dogs, pigs and chickens. Coconut farming, mining and introduced species have disturbed the vegetation, and many native birds have vanished or become rare.

  The rock beneath all this made the island unusual. Nauru was one of three great phosphate rock islands in the Pacific, alongside Banaba, also called Ocean Island, and Makatea in French Polynesia.

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• 3. Clans and Milkfish

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  Twelve clans traditionally shared the island, and the twelve points of the star on the national flag stand for them. Descent was traced through the mother's line. Micronesians first settled Nauru at least 3,000 years ago, and there is evidence of possible Polynesian influence. Little is known of the earliest centuries. A long period of isolation is believed to explain why the islanders developed their own distinct language.

  Juvenile milkfish, called ibija in Nauruan, were caught, accustomed to fresh water and raised in Buada Lagoon. This gave people a dependable source of food alongside coconuts and pandanus fruit. The name Nauru itself may come from the Nauruan word Anáoero, which means 'I go to the beach.'

  In 1798, the British sea captain John Fearn became the first Westerner to report seeing the island, from his 300-ton trading ship Hunter. He named it Pleasant Island because of its attractive appearance. From at least 1826, whaling and trading ships called regularly to take on provisions and fresh drinking water. The last whaler of the Age of Sail arrived in 1904.

  Deserters from European ships began to settle on the island. Islanders traded food for alcoholic palm wine and for firearms. Those guns were used in the Nauruan Civil War, which began in 1878 and lasted ten years.

  Germany annexed Nauru in 1888, after reaching an agreement with Great Britain, and folded it into the Marshall Islands Protectorate for administrative purposes. The Germans ended the civil war and set up kings as rulers. King Auweyida was the best known. Christian missionaries from the Gilbert Islands arrived that same year. The German settlers called the island "Nawodo" or "Onawero." In 1890, Robert Rasch, a German trader who had married a 15-year-old Nauruan girl, became the first administrator.

  German rule would last almost three decades.

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• 4. Phosphate Rush

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  In 1900, a prospector named Albert Fuller Ellis found phosphate on Nauru. The Pacific Phosphate Company began exploiting the deposits in 1906, under an agreement with Germany, and sent out its first shipment in 1907. The rock lay close to the surface, so strip mining was easy, and it went on for more than a century.

  Australian troops captured and occupied the island in 1914, after World War I broke out. The Treaty of Versailles then placed Nauru under a League of Nations mandate, granted personally to King George V. In 1919, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom signed the Nauru Island Agreement. It kept Australia in charge of administration and handed the digging to an intergovernmental body, the British Phosphate Commission. The mandate's terms were drawn up in 1920. In 1923, the League gave Australia a trustee mandate, with the United Kingdom and New Zealand as co-trustees.

  An influenza epidemic and ongoing colonial strife marked the early twentieth century. Among native Nauruans, the mortality rate reached 18 per cent.

  Meanwhile the mining carved the plateau into a barren landscape of jagged limestone pinnacles, some as tall as 15 metres. About 80 per cent of the island's land area has been stripped and devastated, leaving it uninhabitable. The damage reached the water too. An estimated 40 per cent of marine life in the surrounding exclusive economic zone has been killed by silt and phosphate runoff.

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• 5. War and Aftermath

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  On the 6th and the 7th of December 1940, the German auxiliary cruisers Komet and Orion sank five supply ships near Nauru. Komet then shelled the phosphate mining areas, the oil storage depots and the shiploading cantilever.

  Japanese troops occupied the island on the 25th of August 1942. They built two airfields, which were bombed for the first time on the 25th of March 1943. The raids stopped food supplies from being flown in. The Japanese also deported 1,200 Nauruans to work as labourers in the Chuuk Islands, which Japan likewise held. Allied forces bypassed Nauru as they advanced across the Pacific.

  On the 13th of September 1945, commander Hisayaki Soeda surrendered the island to the Australian Army and the Royal Australian Navy. Brigadier J. R. Stevenson accepted the surrender aboard the warship HMAS Diamantina. He represented Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee, commander of the First Australian Army. Of the Nauruans taken to Chuuk, 745 survived. The British Phosphate Commission ship Trienza brought them home in January 1946.

  Every year on the 26th of October, Nauruans hold Angam Day. It celebrates the recovery of the population after the two world wars and the 1920 influenza epidemic.

  The United Nations established a trusteeship over Nauru in 1947, with Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom as a joint administering authority. In practice, Australia alone exercised administrative power.

  In 1948, Chinese guano mining workers went on strike over pay and conditions. The Australian administration declared a state of emergency and mobilised the Native Police, along with armed volunteers drawn from locals and Australian officials. This force opened fire with sub-machine guns and other weapons. Two workers were killed and sixteen wounded. About 50 were arrested, and two of them were bayoneted to death in custody. The trooper who did it was charged but later acquitted, on the grounds that the wounds were "accidentally received."

  The governments of the Soviet Union and China lodged formal complaints against Australia at the United Nations.

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• 6. Wealth and Ruin

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  In 1962, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies declared that the three mining countries owed the Nauruan people a solution, and he suggested finding them a new island. Decades of extraction had damaged the land so badly that Nauru was thought likely to be uninhabitable by the 1990s. Rehabilitation looked financially impossible.

  In 1963, Australia offered to buy all the land on Curtis Island, off the coast of Queensland and considerably larger than Nauru. The Nauruans would receive freehold title and become Australian citizens. A relocation plan followed in 1964, including housing, infrastructure and new pastoral, agricultural and fishing industries. The Nauruans declined. They did not want Australian citizenship. They wanted sovereignty over Curtis Island, so they could form an independent state, and Australia refused. They chose to stay and run their own mines on Nauru.

  Nauru became self-governing in January 1966. Australia's parliament passed the Nauru Independence Act 1967, and the country became independent on the 31st of January 1968. Hammer DeRoburt, the independence leader, was elected as the first president. In 1967, the new government bought the assets of the British Phosphate Commissioners. In June 1970, control passed to the locally owned Nauru Phosphate Corporation. The mines made Nauruans among the richest people in the world.

  In 1989, Nauru took Australia to the International Court of Justice over its administration of the island, especially its failure to repair the environmental damage. The case, Certain Phosphate Lands: Nauru v. Australia, ended in an out-of-court settlement to rehabilitate the mined-out areas.

  Nauru's GDP peaked in 1981. Mining began to decline in the early 1980s, and the phosphate was exhausted in the 1990s. The remaining reserves are not economically viable. A trust, the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust, was meant to support citizens once the rock ran out. Mismanagement shrank its assets considerably. Among the failed investments was the financing of Leonardo the Musical in 1993. The trust's value is estimated to have fallen from A$1.3 billion in 1991 to A$138 million in 2002.

  The sell-off followed. The Mercure Hotel in Sydney and Nauru House in Melbourne were sold in 2004 to pay debts. Air Nauru's only Boeing 737 was repossessed in December 2005, and a Boeing 737-300 restored normal service in June 2006. In 2005, the corporation sold the vacant Savoy Tavern site in Melbourne for A$7.5 million. The National Bank of Nauru is insolvent.

  In the 1990s, Nauru also turned to being a tax haven and sold passports to foreigners for a fee. A licensed bank could be set up for only US$25,000, with no other requirements. The Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering named Nauru among 15 "non-cooperative" countries. Anti-avoidance legislation arrived in 2003, and the foreign hot money left. The task force lifted the designation in October 2005.

  In July 2017, the OECD upgraded its rating of Nauru's tax transparency to "largely compliant."

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• 7. Aid and Alliances

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  On the 21st of July 2002, Nauru signed an agreement to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, accepting US$130 million. The Republic of China cut its ties two days later. Nauru restored relations with the Republic of China on the 14th of May 2005, and severed those with the People's Republic on the 31st of May 2005. On the 15th of January 2024, it switched again, ending ties with the Republic of China and renewing those with the People's Republic.

  In 2008, Nauru recognised Kosovo as an independent country. In 2009, it became the fourth country, after Russia, Nicaragua and Venezuela, to recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway republics of Georgia. Russia was reported to be giving Nauru US$50 million in humanitarian aid as a result. On the 15th of July 2008, Nauru announced a port refurbishment programme, financed with US$9 million of Russian development aid. The Nauruan government said this aid had no connection to the recognitions.

  In February 2021, Nauru announced it would leave the Pacific Islands Forum. It issued a joint statement with the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia, after a dispute over Henry Puna's election as secretary-general.

  Nauru has no armed forces, only a small police force under civilian control. Under an informal agreement, Australia is responsible for its defence, and the island uses the Australian dollar. A memorandum of understanding signed in September 2005 gave Nauru financial aid and technical help. That included a Secretary of Finance to prepare the budget and advisers on health and education.

  That aid came in return for housing asylum seekers while Australia processed their applications. The arrangement began with the Tampa affair in 2001. The Norwegian ship MV Tampa had rescued 438 refugees from a stranded boat. Australia refused it entry and boarded it with troops. The refugees were eventually taken to Nauru and held in two detention centres, known as State House and Topside, as part of the Howard government's Pacific Solution. By November 2005, only two of those first arrivals remained. More groups came in late 2006 and early 2007.

  Australia closed the centre in 2008. In February 2008, Foreign Affairs Minister Kieren Keke warned of the damage. He said the closure would cost 100 Nauruans their jobs and affect 10 per cent of the island's population. In his words: "We have got a huge number of families that are suddenly going to be without any income." He added: "Literally we have got a major unemployment crisis in front of us."

  The centre reopened in August 2012, after Australia revived the Pacific Solution. Amnesty International has described the conditions there as a "horror," citing children as young as eight who attempted suicide or harmed themselves. In 2018, attention turned to a "mental health crisis," with an estimated thirty children suffering from traumatic withdrawal syndrome, also called resignation syndrome. A few dozen refugees were still held there as of 2024.

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• 8. Life on the Island

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  David Adeang is the president of Nauru, and he heads a 19-member parliament with a single chamber. All 19 seats are filled in elections every three years. Parliament chooses the president from among its members, and the president appoints a cabinet of five or six. Fifteen of the 19 members are independents. Four parties have been active, but alliances often follow extended family ties rather than party lines. A 2021 referendum barred naturalised citizens and their descendants from becoming parliamentarians.

  Land ownership works in an unusual way. Individuals and family groups own the land, and every Nauruan holds certain rights to all of it. Government and corporate bodies own none and must lease from landowners. Non-Nauruans cannot own land at all. On the 12th of March 2018, Nauru unilaterally ended the right to appeal its court rulings to the High Court of Australia.

  Nauruan, a distinct Micronesian language, is spoken at home by 96 per cent of ethnic Nauruans. English is the language of government and commerce. In 2021, the main denominations were the Nauru Congregational Church at 34.3 per cent, the Catholic Church at 33.9 per cent and the Assemblies of God at 11.7 per cent.

  The government employs 95 per cent of those who have jobs, and unemployment is estimated at 23 per cent. Nauru levies no personal taxes. In 2018, the government partnered with the deep sea mining company DeepGreen, now Nauru Ocean Resources Inc, to harvest manganese nodules whose metals can serve sustainable energy technology.

  Loss of 90 per cent of the arable land means all food must now be imported. The diet leans heavily on processed foods such as rice and sugar. The coastal soil where most people live is among the poorest in the world. In 2011, just 13 per cent of households kept a garden or grew crops. Yet a household survey of 2012-13 found a food poverty rate of zero.

  Health tells a harder story. By average body mass index, Nauruans are the most overweight people in the world, with 97 per cent of men and 93 per cent of women overweight or obese. More than 40 per cent of the population has type 2 diabetes. The smoking rate was 48.3 per cent in 2022, the highest in the world. Water is scarce too. The island supplies enough for 32 litres per person per day, against the World Health Organization's recommended 50. Much of the groundwater is contaminated by mining runoff and waste.

  Australian rules football is the national team sport, with a league of eight teams. Weightlifting is regarded as a national pastime, and Nauru has competed at the Summer Olympics in weightlifting and judo. The national rugby sevens team made its international debut at the 2015 Pacific Games. Traditional dances still performed include the frigate bird dance and the dogoropa. The national anthem is "Nauru Bwiema."

  In March 2025, Nauru announced a "golden passport" scheme. Citizenship costs a minimum of $105,000 and requires no residency. The goal is to raise money to move 90 per cent of the population to a new community on higher ground.

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