The Black Knight, the Iron Maiden and a Pacific island forever changed by phosphate mining

Updated

Their ancestors were on opposing sides of a lucrative and devastating mining project that changed a Pacific island forever. And yet, their love bloomed.

Ocean Island, or Banaba, is a pinprick in the Pacific Ocean.

Despite its tiny size — just six square kilometres — the island, now part of Kiribati, has played a vital role in Australian history.

During the last century, we effectively ate it.

Banaba was exploded and bulldozed, crunched and exported — all for its phosphate, used to feed Australia's crops and livestock.

Once an oasis of green, Banaba is now a mass of craggy pinnacles — bizarre columns of rock that tower above head height.

People live on fish they catch themselves and water is very scarce.

No crops can grow in the soil since the mining finished.

Only one part of the island was left untouched: a place so sacred some people don't speak its name for fear of being cursed.

It's where the Black Knight and the Iron Maiden learned they had a connection stretching back generations.

And where they fell in love.

A deeply enigmatic place

Te Aka — the "first hamlet" — is the physical home and cultural name for the indigenous people of Banaba.

"The word is, no one goes to te Aka unless you're meant to get there," says Stacey King.

And Ms King, an Australian with a long family link to Banaba, has seen it first-hand.

She remembers "climbing out through all these 20-metre-high, razor-sharp pinnacles" to get there.

"We got there so quickly but getting home was difficult," she says.

Te Aka is a deeply enigmatic place, the site of ancient rituals used to bring rain and communicate with ancestors.

Traditionally, two brothers from the te Aka clan would enter the clearing and perform a hair-cutting ritual. Once their hair touched the ground, rain would fall.

The place is so sacred that Banaban people who belong to other tribes call it by another name: te Ono Ani, or "that place".

Ken Raobeia Sigrah, a descendent of the te Aka clan, has been to his ancestral place a handful of times.

"When you go in, the atmosphere changes," he says.

"All of a sudden, the trees go quiet, there's no breeze, as if you were walking into outer space."

Each time he visits, he experiences a feeling of being surrounded.

"You know people are watching you, they are from somewhere but you can't find them," Mr Sigrah says.

"They are looking at you and they know you, they accept you.

"You have a feeling that you are most welcome and you know you are loved."

It was Mr Sigrah who took Ms King to te Aka, four years after they first met, thousands of kilometres away.

Ms King describes that meeting as "more than fate".

"Our ancestors, they seem to be worlds apart with the discovery of phosphate in 1900," she says.

"But it wasn't just us meeting, we honestly thought there was more behind it."

The 'scandalous document'

Banaba lies 3,000 kilometres north-east of Australia.

Its unprecedented phosphate reserves were discovered in 1900, by a man named Albert Ellis.

He worked for the Pacific Island Phosphate Company (PIPC) in Australia.

On his first visit to the island, he brought a contract with him.

It stipulated the Banabans would lease their land to the PIPC for 999 years, at a cost of 50 pounds per year.

This contract would later be known across the world as the "scandalous document" because of the enormous disparity between the lease price and the profits from the phosphate.

It was Mr Sigrah's great-great-grandfather, Kamaria, who signed the contract.

Ellis mistook Kamaria for a chief, and mistakenly assumed he had the authority to make decisions on behalf of all Banabans.

Kamaria, who was actually an elder of one of the island's four villages, signed a shaky cross as his signature on the scandalous document.

He didn't speak or read English. Ellis had not brought a Banaban translation.

When Ellis discovered the phosphate, the PIPC was a private British company. In 1920 the British, Australian and New Zealand governments each bought a share.

The company became the British Phosphate Commission (BPC).

Australia bought millions of tonnes of phosphate mined from Ocean Island, all at a discount, where it was used as fertiliser by the agricultural sector.

WWII and forced relocation

Mining continued uninterrupted on the island until World War II.

Japanese forces invaded Banaba in 1942 and stayed for three years. The Banabans were sent to various Pacific islands to work in Japanese labour camps.

Mr Sigrah says elders told him the story of the end of the war many times: "Everybody is desperate, anxious, tired, they couldn't take any more."

British officials told them they wouldn't be returning to their home on Banaba. Instead, they would live on a new island, in Fiji.

Unbeknownst to them, the British government had bought Rabi island, in northern Fiji, with money from the Banabans' mining royalties.

The elders were shown photos of large, sturdy houses that were waiting for them on Rabi.

They arrived at their new home, 2,500 kilometres away, during cyclone season.

Mr Sigrah says they were dismayed to find their homes were actually "old army tents from Fiji".

Their new tropical home brought many challenges for the Banabans, who were accustomed to a land of drought.

"They got malaria, dengue fever. Even though they had water, they weren't told that it was contaminated by animals," Mr Sigrah says.

In the first three months on Rabi, 40 elders died.

A long-running case

In 1965 the Banaban elders took the British government and the BPC to court for failing to replant Banaba with fruit trees, as had been the deal, and for insufficient royalty payments.

It became the longest-running British High Court case at the time.

The judge eventually conceded the British government had neglected its moral responsibilities, but ruled that the courts did not have the power to put a dollar figure on the damages caused by such a lapse.

Eventually the British government put 6.5 million pounds into a trust fund for the Banabans, so that they could live off the interest.

By 1979, at the tail end of the court case, all mining on Banaba had ceased.

But the last batch of processed earth remained, ready to be shipped off.

Mr Sigrah was in his early 20s when he got a call from a group of elders who were in London to hear the judge give his verdict.

The elders instructed community members on Rabi to travel to Banaba and stage a protest.

The protest was partly designed to stop the shipment.

Around 100 men, women and children travelled from Rabi to Banaba.

Mr Sigrah remembers about 400 police came from nearby Kiribati to meet the contingent, on the orders of the UK. They were armed with guns.

"The High Commissioner said: 'The day you march, we will put up a barrier and if you cross it, we will shoot to kill,'" he says.

The morning of the protest, Mr Sigrah and his community members formed a line, ready to go.

But half an hour before the march was due to start, the leader on Banaba heard from the elders in London.

The march was stopped before it began.

"Our elders … didn't want to hold the guilt of sending the young ones and children to their death," Mr Sigrah says.

"They said: 'You don't have to die for this, so let it pass.'"

Not all the protesters were protected, though.

Mr Sigrah's cousin, Tabare Biara, was struck on the head with a tear gas canister during a scuffle and died from his injuries.

More than fate

Fourteen years later, Ms King went to Rabi to make a documentary.

Her fixer — a local man who helped with interpretation and setting up meetings — insisted she meet one of the community members.

That man was Ken Sigrah.

She remembers him as a thin man with a "droopy moustache" who "looked like a Mexican".

"A weakness came over me. I thought, 'wow, if I was ever going to fall for a Banaban I could fall for this guy,' and then I thought, 'don't be so stupid'," she says.

Before her trip to Rabi, Ms King had located photographs of her great-great-grandfather, Henry Williams.

He was one of the first engineers employed by the PIPC.

"So here's Ken's great-great-grandfather signing the island away with a cross on documents, and here's my great-great-grandfather blowing the island up, at the same time," Ms King says.

Mr Sigrah and Ms King now live together in Queensland, where they care for Stacey's elderly mother, who grew up on Banaba.

"She's a miner's daughter and I'm the grandson of a landowner. It's like yin and yang getting married," Mr Sigrah says.

Their families have become further entwined, with Stacey's brother marrying one of Ken's cousins.

They make regular trips back to Rabi and write books and make documentaries about the history of Banaba.

Mr Sigrah entertains friends with a story about the first time he met his life partner.

"When she went to the island she was a very strong-minded businesswoman. No hanky panky, no monkey business, she was fully armed as an Iron Maiden," he says, using his nickname for Ms King.

But Mr Sigrah's warmth and generosity won over his stern visitor.

"When the Black Knight came, all her armour fell off!"

Ms King recalls the trip to te Aka was a kind of test, to see if she was worthy of the visit.

"[Ken] had it all planned and so did the elders, the women especially."

A great debt

When the mining on Banaba ended in 1979, the royalty payments did too.

It was a shock to the system on Rabi — school buses, food from the shop and medical care all dried up.

And though it is changing from a reliant community to an enterprising one, the change is happening slowly.

Four generations of Banabans have now been born on Rabi Island.

Around 5,000 people live across four villages: Tabwewa, Uma, Tabiang and Buakonikai.

They have not seen or heard from family on Banaba in years.

Life back on Banaba is difficult: asbestos houses are falling apart; the droughts are longer and more severe; locals speak of not being able to grow food in the soil because there's no more phosphate in the earth.

Mr Sigrah says the governments responsible for the mining owe Banabans an apology and compensation.

"The Australian, New Zealand and British governments have got the key to our problems. But why can't they open their hands and give it a go?"

According to the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics and Sciences, agriculture contributed $58 billion to the national economy last year.

And Ms King suggests the country owes Banaba a great debt.

"How many of Ken's ancestors and their crushed bones ended up here in Australia?" she asks.

"As Ken says: 'Should Banabans call Australia home?'"

Credits

Reporter and photographer: Alice Moldovan

Alice Moldovan Editor: Monique Ross

Monique Ross Digital production: Farz Edraki and Monique Ross

Farz Edraki and Monique Ross Archival photographs supplied by: Stacey King, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia and the Asahi Shimbun via Getty.

Topics: history, mining-environmental-issues, environment, relationships, race-relations, community-and-society, people, human-interest, kiribati, pacific, brisbane-4000, qld, australia, fiji

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