The history of Nauru

Nauru is a single raised coral island of 21 square kilometres in the central Pacific, just south of the equator, and one of the smallest independent states in the world. Micronesian settlers made it home about three thousand years ago and lived in twelve clans on its fertile coastal fringe. In the twentieth century the island's interior was found to be almost solid phosphate, and German, British, Australian and New Zealand interests strip-mined it for fertiliser, leaving most of the land a wasteland of coral pinnacles. Independent since 1968, Nauru was briefly one of the richest countries per head on earth before its phosphate wealth ran out, and since 2001 it has hosted an Australian offshore centre for asylum seekers. In 2026 it formally took the name Naoero, its name in the Nauruan language.

Nauru was settled by Micronesian voyagers around 1000 BCE, with signs of later Polynesian influence. The island has no lagoon or harbour, and its people lived on a narrow strip of land between the reef and the high limestone plateau known as Topside. They grew coconuts and pandanus, fished from canoes on the reef, sometimes using tamed frigatebirds, and practised an unusual form of aquaculture, catching young milkfish, called ibija, at sea and raising them in the brackish Buada Lagoon. Drought was a constant danger. Society was organised in twelve matrilineal clans, remembered today in the twelve-pointed star of the national flag, with descent and land passing through the mother's line.

In 1798 the British captain John Fearn of the whaler Hunter sighted the island and, impressed by the friendly canoes that came out to meet him, named it Pleasant Island. From the 1820s whalers and traders called for water and food, trading alcohol and firearms in return, and deserters and escaped convicts settled ashore. One of them, John Jones, made himself the island's petty tyrant in the 1830s until the Nauruans expelled him in 1841.

Guns and drink made old feuds lethal. In 1878 a pistol shot at a wedding feast killed a chief's son and began a war that divided the island into northern and southern factions for a decade. The population fell from about 1,400 in the 1840s to about 900 by 1888, and visitors reported that almost every man and boy carried a rifle.

An Anglo-German agreement of 1886 placed Nauru in the German sphere, and the German Empire annexed it in April 1888, attaching it to the Marshall Islands protectorate. On 1 October 1888 marines from the gunboat Eber landed, held the twelve chiefs under arrest, raised the German flag and demanded the surrender of all weapons; some 765 guns were handed in within a day, ending the war. Missionaries from the Gilbert Islands arrived the same year, and Christianity spread quickly.

In 1900 the prospector Albert Ellis, working for a British company in Sydney, identified rock from Nauru as high-grade phosphate. The Pacific Phosphate Company began mining under a German concession in 1906 and shipped its first cargo in 1907. Labourers were brought from China and the Caroline and Gilbert Islands, while Nauruans received tiny royalties for land that was dug away beneath them.

Australian troops occupied Nauru in 1914, early in the First World War. After the war the League of Nations made it a mandate held jointly by Britain, Australia and New Zealand and administered by Australia, and the three governments bought out the company in 1920 and formed the British Phosphate Commissioners, who sold phosphate to their farmers at cost. Mining expanded steadily across Topside. An influenza epidemic in 1920 and 1921 killed about 230 Nauruans, and when the population returned to 1,500 with a birth in 1932, the event was celebrated as Angam, or homecoming, now a national day.

The Second World War devastated the island. German raiders shelled the phosphate works in December 1940, and forces of the Empire of Japan occupied Nauru in August 1942 and executed seven Europeans, including the Australian administrator. People with leprosy were reportedly taken out to sea and drowned. In 1943 the Japanese deported 1,200 Nauruans to Chuuk in the Caroline Islands as forced labourers, where many died of hunger, disease and bombing. Australian forces accepted the Japanese surrender on 13 September 1945, and the 745 survivors in Chuuk were brought home in January 1946.

After 1947 Nauru was a UN trust territory under the same three governments. As the mined-out area grew, Australia proposed in the early 1960s to resettle the whole Nauruan people on Curtis Island off Queensland, but Nauruan leaders refused to give up their homeland or their identity. Led by the head chief Hammer DeRoburt, Nauru won self-government in 1966 and full independence on 31 January 1968, becoming the world's smallest republic. In 1967 it agreed to buy the phosphate industry, and in 1970 the Nauru Phosphate Corporation took control.

The 1970s and early 1980s brought great wealth. Royalties were invested through the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust in property abroad, including Nauru House in Melbourne, and Nauruans paid no taxes and received free health care and education. In 1989 Nauru took Australia to the International Court of Justice for failing to restore the mined lands, and in 1993 Australia settled out of court, with Britain and New Zealand also contributing. By then poor investments, an expensive national airline and mismanagement were eroding the trust, and as the phosphate ran out the economy collapsed. In the 1990s Nauru became an offshore banking centre and sold passports, and it was listed by the Financial Action Task Force as a money-laundering risk until reforms in the 2000s. Governments changed frequently through no-confidence votes, and Nauru joined the United Nations only in 1999.

In 2001, after Australia refused to let the Norwegian freighter Tampa land asylum seekers it had rescued at sea, Nauru agreed under the Pacific Solution to host a detention centre for people trying to reach Australia by boat, in return for aid. Most of the early detainees were Afghans and Iraqis, and most were eventually resettled in Australia or elsewhere before the centre closed in 2008. Australia reopened it in 2012. At its peak in 2014 it held more than 1,200 people, and Australian policy was that none would be settled in Australia. Doctors, the United Nations, journalists and human rights organisations reported self-harm, hunger strikes, sexual abuse and severe mental illness among detainees, including children, while Nauru restricted media access and Australian governments defended the policy as a deterrent to people smuggling. Several hundred refugees were later resettled in the United States. The centre emptied in 2019, but a new agreement in 2021 kept it open, and new transfers resumed in September 2023. The arrangement became a major source of the island's revenue.

Nauru has alternated diplomatic recognition between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, switching to Beijing in 2002, back to Taipei in 2005 and again to Beijing in January 2024. David Adeang became president in October 2023 and was re-elected unopposed by the new parliament on 14 October 2025. Australia provides budget support and policing aid in exchange for an effective veto over Nauru's security agreements with other countries, and in 2025 the two governments agreed that Nauru would grant long-term visas to former Australian immigration detainees in return for A$408 million up front and A$70 million a year, a deal criticised by refugee advocates. Planning for climate change includes a scheme to move most of the population to higher ground on the old mined land. In 2026 parliament approved a constitutional amendment restoring the indigenous name, the government informed the United Nations in June, and the country is now officially the Republic of Naoero.