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  • Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba by Katerina Martina Teaiwa
  • Anne Perez Hattori
Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba, by Katerina Martina Teaiwa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. isbn cloth, 978-0-253-01444-3; paper, 978-0-253-01452-8; e-book, 978-0-253-01460-3; xvii + 202 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us $80.00; paper, us $28.00; e-book, us $27.99.

Pacific Islands studies, long the domain of Euro-American writers and researchers, has for decades challenged its practitioners to tell different kinds of stories—localized stories that shed light on the daily lives of its native inhabitants—while at the same time remaining mindful of the global contexts of these local experiences. How to achieve this, given the dearth of written accounts that convey Islander perspectives, has itself been a topic of thoughtful commentary and lingers as a worthy and worthwhile goal. In Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba, Katerina Martina Teaiwa displays artfully the powerful potential of interdisciplinarity as an approach toward gaining a richer and deeper understanding of Pacific pasts and peoples. She matches her deep digs into the historical archives with a reflexive and reflective care of collected oral testimonies, as well as a nuanced treatment of a variety of films, poems, songs, dances, photographs, and memoirs. A chapter on the chemistry and history of phosphorus perhaps best exemplifies this work’s interdisciplinarity, spanning centuries and continents to reveal an interwoven mix of scientific, agricultural, geological, and cultural issues before firmly grounding the narrative on the two-and-a-half square mile island of Banaba.

At the most basic level, Consuming Ocean Island tells the history from 1900 to 1980 of the land and people of Banaba, formerly part of the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony and presently within the national boundary of the Republic of Kiribati. Named Ocean Island by early nineteenth-century European voyagers, Banaba was profoundly exploited by Australian, New Zealand, and British mining companies for its 22 million tons of phosphate reserves. As an essential ingredient in fertilizer, phosphates played a key role in the success of Australia’s and New Zealand’s agricultural industries, while at the same time their extraction destroyed the land from which they were mined.

Teaiwa’s account of Banaban history includes the oft-repeated, almost comical story of a large rock that was being used as a doorstop in the Sydney office of Albert Ellis. An official in the Pacific Islands Company, Ellis and company manager Henry Denson tested the rock in 1899 and found it to be made of pure phosphate. Because the rock had been procured from Nauru, then a German territory beyond the reach of his mining company, Ellis headed out to Banaba, a nearby island, which he thought would be of similar geological formation. Consuming Ocean Island retells the history of Ellis’s Banaba negotiations and of questionable contracts and other egregious misdeeds by colluding mining and colonial officials from Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. The forced relocation of Banabans to Rabi after World War II is but briefly described, as are details [End Page 492] of the court cases heard in London, lodged by the Banaban people against the British Empire. The work continues to present-day Rabi, a contested space because of two peoples who call it home—the displaced Banabans and the indigenous Fijian Rabeans who had lost their island in a regional war involving Tongan chief Ma‘afu several decades prior to Banaban settlement there (18).

This is a story of the political and corporate machinations that fueled the mining project, a story of lucrative profit making alongside ecological destruction, and cultural resilience and revitalization amid oppressive dispossession and grief. Yet, as Teaiwa notes, much of the earlier scholarship on mining in Banaba reads like a “celebratory account” of the British Phosphate Commissioners, with much less attention given to Pacific Islander actors, particularly after the phosphate supply ran out. While never losing sight of the histories and identities of Banabans, the author also attends to a plethora of other actors and their contributions to the “multiple...

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