From PIM’s pages to the longest

legal case in U.K. history

In two separate articles on the following pages, PIM writers recall the days when the big European powers could do what they wanted in the South Seas. The first, by Robert Langdon, a former Assistant Editor of PIM and now executive officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau of the Australian National University, tells how Britain, in its interests, took Ocean Island and created problems which still exist. And writer and PIM columnist Bengt Danielsson, of Tahiti, who is working on a history of French Polynesia, shows how France arranged to take possession of what was then a Polynesian kingdom.

In December 1976, after legal proceedings lasting 221 days, the British High Court rejected a claim that Britain should pay Banaban land owners £2l million sterling in back royalties and ather damages for phosphate mined on their homeland, Ocean Island, in previous years. The court also rejected a claim that Britain should replant devastated mining areas with coconut and Jther fruit-bearing trees.

On the other hand, the presiding judge, Sir Robert Megarry, ordered the British Phosphate Commissioners, the mining tuthority on Ocean Island, to compensate the Banabans for iamage to their island and for high-handed treatment.

Sir Robert’s judgement was delivered at the end of the longest egal case in British history a case in which hundreds of housands of words of evidence were heard. The case was also exceptional in that, at one stage, Sir Robert travelled from to the other side of the world so that he could see for limself what mining had done to Ocean Island since phosphate vas discovered there at the turn of the century.

By the time the case concluded and the judgement was lelivered, people in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the >a cific Islands had heard a great deal about Ocean Island and its original inhabitants, the Banabans, who now live on Rabi Island, : iji.

But if a poll had been conducted to see if anyone remembered low the extraordinary Banaban case had begun, it seems highly ikely that only two people would have given the correct answer. )ne of these was PI M’s publisher and former editor, Stuart Inder. fhe other was me.

The fact is that Britain’s longest legal case began as a result of tories that Inder and I published in PIM in 1965. The first of hese, of which I was the author, appeared in the issue for August f that year. It is republished in the following pages under its riginal heading, The True (and Wondrous) Story of how Britain ;ot hold of Ocean Island.’

Probably no single story published in PIM during its first 50 ears had such far-reaching repercussions. So on the occasion of 'lM’s 50th anniversary, it seems appropriate to recall how that tory came to be written, how other PIM stories flowed from it, nd how all combined to set the wheels in motion that led the lanabans to sue the British Government for an enormous sum.

The first thing to be noted about the original story is that I tumbled on the details of it by accident. The second thing is that t the time I wrote it, the world in general and PIM in particular new so little about the inhabitants of Ocean Island that I sferred to them throughout my article as Ocean Islanders rather han Banabans. It was not until my second article was published i September 1965 that the word Banaban from Banaba the ative name for Ocean Island was used by PIM for the first me.

The genesis of my original article was a visit I made to Canberra in June 1965 as PI M’s assistant editor. The Nauruans, r ho were not then independent, were in town at the time to

negotiate on phosphate royalties with the Australian Government.

It was my task to find out what was going on.

In the course of my visit, I talked to a variety of people, including several academics in the Department of Pacific history at the Australian National University. One of them happened to mention a bit of a half-remembered history non-history, as it turned out that seemed worth following up.

He said he thought he remembered having read somewhere in the early days of phosphate mining on Nauru, the Pacific Phosphate Company a predecessor company of the British Phosphate Commissioners had signed an agreement with the Nauruans to replant those parts of their island from which food bearing trees were removed during phosphate extraction.

He further stated that to his knowledge, this agreement had not been carried out, and therefore if a copy of the document could be discovered, it would have an important bearing on the negotiations between the Australian Government and the Nauruans. If the agreement did, indeed, exist it was likely to be among the records of the British Colonial Office which were on microfilm in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.

On my return to Sydney, I resolved to make a search for this rather shadowy document, but was somewhat daunted to discover that the Colonial Office records in question filled no less than 110 30-metre reels of film, and that they were unindexed. Neverthe less, I began with the reel for the year 1899 (when phosphate was discovered on Nauru) and gradually ploughed onwards.

By dint of haunting the Mitchell Library night after night for a couple of weeks, I eventually convinced myself that the agreement I was looking for did not exist. On the other hand, my researches did reveal a most astonishing mass of information about the beginnings of the phosphate industry on Ocean Island.

It was information that had lain quietly buried in the Colonial Office files for more than 60 years, and it did little credit to either the original phosphate company or to the British Government.

Having written up my findings as an article, I recalled to my colleague Stuart Inder how, about a year earlier, he and I had visited a secondhand bookshop in the Sydney suburb of Redfern where the proprietor had shown us a collection of old photographs of Ocean Island and Nauru. They included one depicting the raising of the Union Jack at Ocean Island in 1901 by Captain Reginald Godfrey Otway Tupper, RN.

At the time we had seen them, these photographs had not seemed of much interest or value. But in the light of my researches we realised that they were of considerable historical importance and just what we needed to illustrate my article.

Accordingly, I was authorised to go back to the Redfern bookshop, ask for the photographs as casually as possible and, if they were still unsold, offer up to seven pounds for them on PI M’s behalf. The photographs had not, in fact, been sold; and when the bookseller said the price of them was eight pounds, I thought it prudent not to haggle.

The publication of my ‘true (and wondrous) story’ coincided

with an event in Fiji involving PI M’s founder and its then [publisher, R. W. Robson. Mr Robson was holidaying at Korotonga on Viti Levu when he received a visit from the Rev.

Tebuke Rotan, who announced himself as a Banaban Tebuke said that his father was the chairman of the Rabi Island Council; that the Banabans were angry, bitter and frustrated over what they felt was the British Government’s neglect of them over the previous twenty years; and that when they had heard that he (Robson) was in Fiji, the council had sent him (Tebuke) to seek him out in the hope that PIM would publicise the Banabans’ ‘wretched and worsening plight’.

Tebuke unfolded a colourful story of how the Banabans had lived on Rabi since the end of World War II; how the British Phosphate Commissioners were steadily mining the phosphate of their homeland but were depriving the Banabans of their ‘rightful place as sole recipients of all Ocean Island phosphate monies’; and how, in the previous April, Banaban anger and resentment had reached such a pitch that an outbreak of violence on Rabi was only narrowly averted.

The violence had, in fact, only been prevented by the prompt action of the British District Officer at Savusavu who had promised to ask the relevant authorities to treat the Banaban situation as one of urgency and gravity. However, despite the passage of four months, nothing had happened.

Mr Robson took notes of all this with the idea of writing something about the Banaban situation on his return to Sydney shortly afterwards. However, on acquiring a copy of the August PIM at Nadi airport on his way home he found to his surprise that there was much more to the Banaban affair than he had imagined, and when he reached Sydney he typed out his notes in a memorandum to me with a request that I make another story of them. That story, entitled ‘Banabans were ready for violence to get justice’, appeared in PIM for the following month.

It was at this point that Stuart Inder became involved in the Banaban story. Following Mr Robson’s return to Sydney, he had taken off for holidays at a seaside cottage in Fiji with his family, md before long he, too, received a visit from Tebuke Rotan, begging him, as he later wrote, to go over to Rabi and ‘write the truth about how our people have nothing and live on unripe preadfruit and boiled bananas’, etc. Inder cabled the office asking permission to go to Rabi at PI M’s expense. When to his surprise, this request was refused he cabled back:

Rabi People Still Persistent Have Decided

Extend Vacation By Further Week Returning

Sydney Fifteenth Stop Arranged Next Week

TO MAKE THREE DAY EXCURSION TO RABI WITH

Family My Own Expense.

Inder’s cable arrived at the office on my birthday, 3 September 1965, and I still have a copy of a four page single spaced letter that I immediately sat down and wrote to him. It began: T was glad to hear today that you had decided to spend another week in Fiji and to make a trip over to Rabi. The Rabi story is one that most decidedly calls for an on-the-spot investigation, and 1 had been hoping that you might be able to get there. I have done a good deal more research on this subject since you left, and the more I go into it, the more I am convinced that the Ocean Island/ Rabi affair is one of the greatest scandals ever perpetrated on this side of the world. However, there is virtually no information available on the Rabi side of things since 1947, and so without making a first-hand investigation, it is impossible to tell just how things stand now with the Banabans. To put you in the picture with a few things I have found out recently, and to try to make your inquiries more fruitful, I will set out in this letter some details that you will probably find handy, and will also suggest some questions that you might look into .. .’

The information I provided in my letter was used to good advantage. In the October 1965 issue of PIM, Inder published a long article complete with his own photographs entitled ‘Angry Ocean Islanders have no kind words for Britain’. It set out some of the earlier history of the Banabans, described their rather depressed lifestyle on Rabi, and pointed out how they were getting only two shillings and eight pence per ton for their phosphate whereas the Nauruans were getting seventeen shillings and sixpence for theirs.

From that point, the Banaban affair took off and ceased to be the exclusive preserve of PIM. There was newspaper and television coverage In November 1965, PIM reported that the Banabans were having talks with a Sydney firm of economic advisers (the same people who had helped Nauru) in an effort to get a better deal on phosphate royalties. In December, an official from the British Colonial Office visited Rabi and told the Banabans that, henceforth, an extra three shillings per ton in royalties was to be paid on Ocean Island phosphate.

Much of the Banabans’ subsequent history is outlined in PIM.

One day, no doubt, some Ph.D student in search of a topic will make a thesis of it. Meanwhile, one may well wonder how much of that history, if any, would have happened had it not been for ‘The True (and Wondrous) Story of how Britain got hold of Ocean Island’ and the other PIM stories that immediately followed it.

Here is that first story published in August 1965;