8/11/2019 Rot and Reinvention in the Nation Formerly Known as Pleasant Island

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Rot and Reinvention in the Nation formerly known as Pleasant Island

In the 1970s, newly independent Nauru basked in its status as the second wealthiest country per capita in the world. NewZealand and Australia, once Naurus colonial Protectors fleecing the island of phosphate to supercharge antipodean farms, hadnow become paying customers. As mining royalties flooded into the worlds smallest island state, no extravagance was off limit.The President splashed out on yachts and a fleet of Boeings, which he commandeered at whim. Luxury cars crowded theislands single paved road. The police chief imported a yellow Lamborghini only to discover he was too fat to fit behind thewheel. The leaders of Nauru happily flaunted their riches to their former colonial overlords. In Melbourne, they constructed afifty-two-story skyscraper, the tallest building in the downtown, and humbly christened it Nauru House.

As a child, Nick Mangan watched enormous bulk carriers dock at Geelong port, laden with raw phosphate heading for a localprocessing plant. But by the 90s, the phosphate had been mined to near exhaustion. Eighty percent of the island had beenstripped of topsoil and turned into uncultivable badlands dominated by craggy limestone pinnacles. Lavish spending,embezzlement and fanciful investing had propelled Nauru to bankruptcy. The government resorted to selling passports andlaundering money for the Russian mafia to make ends meet. When such dubious ventures attracted international sanction, theleaders of Nauru canvassed for new moneymaking industries. One proposal, described by then President Dowiyogo,presumably sarcastically, advocated that the pinnacles be cross-sectioned, polished and sold as coffee tables. Instead of pinningNaurus future on wasteland repurposed as home furnishings, Dowiyogos successor enthusiastically brokered a deal to hostAustralias asylum seekers. Still, the debts piled up. The government of Nauru rapidly acquired and defaulted on loans, and wasevicted from its namesake Melbourne tower by a furious creditor.

As usually caricatured, Naurus rise and fall from capitalist grace is a study in human folly and pathos. In his film Nauru: Notesfrom a Cretaceous World , Nick Mangan shifts the focus to terrestrial characters. He reveals the ancient cycles of life, excretionand fossilised death that formed Naurus pinnacle rocks, embedding alluvial and rock phosphate in the process. In Mangansmythmaking, the absurdity of human intervention on Nauru diminishes to a thin time slice in the islands geologic evolution.Mangan recounts the collapse of Naurus fortune through the shifting fates of three pinnacle rocks shipped to Australia fromNauru and erected at the entryway to Nauru House as totemic swagger. When the creditor moved in, the rocks wereunceremoniously deposed. The Australian spokeswoman for Nauru claimed them as garden ornaments for her holiday house.Mangan spied the rocks, convinced her to sell one, and fashioned it into three small tables, realising Dowiyogos vision.

Mangans fascination with geology dates back to the rock collection of his grandfather who worked in Geelong quarry: He keptthem on a set of shelves in his garage. All of the rocks were about the size of a lemon. They would fit in the palm of my hand.One scene of Mangans film features a lump of rock mounted on an ornate pedestal. A plaque proclaims it to be the originalrock that launched Naurus phosphate industry. Foraged by a trader as possible raw material for manufacturing childrensmarbles, the rock was abandoned for many years to a homely though functional life as a doorstop, until a new employeenoticed it and tested its chemical make-up. A fragment of that original rock now languishes somewhere in the catacombs ofMassey University, donated by the family of former Prime Minister Farmer Bill Massey, who had acquired it as a memento ofhis finest achievements. A 1926 article in NZ Truth, captioned Helping the Green Grass to Grow All Around praises the soundstatesmanship of Massey, who, it will be remembered, secured for New Zealand 16 per cent of the output of wonderful Nauru

Island.The awkwardness of postcolonial relations has been a recurring target for Mangan, as described in a monograph, also calledNotes from a Cretaceous World. In the book, Mangan includes a reference image from Dennis ORourkes documentary TheCannibal Tours, which trails a group of ecotourists cavorting through Papua New Guinea. In the image, a grinning man sportsa sunhat with a leopard print band. Another has a camera slung around his neck, primed to photograph primitive customs.Two women have their faces painted in native fashion. In his film, Mangan presents contemporary Nauru through exquisite,depopulated scenes: clusters of palm trees, concrete ruins, rusting equipment. Despite the obvious decay, the footage mimics aholiday slideshow: exotic corrosion as the neo-colonial grand tour. So what distinguishes Mangans cinematic aestheticisationof Naurus ruinous landscape from the predatory snapping of the Cannibal tourists? And how does the artists materialisation ofDowiyogos rock-as-coffee-table proposal differ from the tourists mimicry of tribal customs? I posed these questions in an emailto Nick Mangan. His response ran something like this:

Its hard to escape aestheticisation through the lens. I am a tourist. After all that has happened, the landscape of Nauruis still for sale, still bound to western capital for survival. The tables arent really coffee tables. They are more likeoversized Petri dishes. Cutting through the rock reveals a time capsule. And slicing through the pinnacles echoes what

has happened to Nauru. Through the process of strip-mining, its top has been chopped off. My depiction of Nauru is awork of fiction but Nauru's history is stranger then fiction. Its like a J G Ballard novel.

Certainly, Ballards sci-fi tales of diseased beauty, impulsive self-destruction and corrupted utopias offer parables for events onNauru. But Mangans pinnacle tables, with their jagged edges exposing layers of fossils, remind me more of a passage fromBallards autobiography "Miracles of Life". Wandering through a deserted casino with his father, Ballard cast his eye over brokenglass, discarded betting chips and fallen chandeliers. In that moment, he had the sense "that reality itself was a stage set thatcould be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into thedebris of the past."