No more drinking water, little food: our island is a field of bones

Some years ago, an Australian friend gave me a necklace with a beautiful and distinct pendant.

- Katerina Teaiwa

The pendant had been in Helen Pilkinton's family for decades. It was made from a phosphate rock brought back from my homeland of Banaba an island in the central Pacific about 3,000km from Australia - by her parents in 1935. It came from an ancestral place that many in Kiribati and Fiji understand to be taboo and haunted.

Dozens of Australian families have jewellery and decorations similarly made out of Banaban rock. They are passed down along with family stories of a distant life on a tropical island in the centre of the Pacific. The rock is beautiful, but I cannot bring myself to wear it.

Helen's father had worked for the British Phosphate Commissioners, a mining company jointly owned by the UK, Australia and New Zealand, on a place the Europeans called Ocean Island. This island was a 6 sq km raised coral atoll, 80 metres above sea level and almost completely made of high-grade phosphate rock. Its Indigenous people called it Banaba. The rock was a critical ingredient in manufactured superphosphate fertilisers that were being spread across thousands of farms in New Zealand and Australia.