Tony Wheeler's Dark Lands1 by Tony Wheeler

Author:Tony Wheeler [Wheeler, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Reference, General
ISBN: 9781743601044
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Published: 2013-09-01T23:36:30+00:00

flying to thirty destinations with the aim that Nauru would become a hub connecting the most far-flung airports of the Pacific. Anywhere you wanted to go in the Pacific could be accessed via Nauru.

Great idea – except that just because Air Nauru flew there didn’t mean passengers wanted to. Airlines need seventy, eighty or ninety per cent load factors to break even, or, if they’re lucky and well run, make money. Air Nauru load factors were more like twenty per cent; flights regularly went off to Japan without a fare-paying passenger on board. Any passengers were usually of the non-fare-paying variety: Nauru government officials were keen on commandeering planes for international shopping trips.

An almost complete failure to engage in marketing or advertising didn’t help. The fact that visitors to Nauru were not exactly welcomed with open arms only made matters worse. Eventually, somebody in the government woke up to the idea that the airline alone was going to bankrupt Nauru; they dumped the 727s. One 737 was also returned and then a second one, downsizing Air Nauru to a solitary 737. And still they couldn’t turn a profit.

By this time money was running short so Nauru followed the pattern fearlessly laid out by others heading towards bankruptcy: don’t pay the bills. From 2002 they simply stopped making the payments on their last 737, and at the end of 2005, after repeated offers to renegotiate or come to some sort of agreement, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which hadn’t been paid for three years, repossessed that lonely 737 while it was in Australia, at Melbourne airport.

Chartered aircraft kept the country connected to the outside world for the next few months, but those friendly Taiwanese came to the rescue with another 737. In return, Nauru had to recognise that the Republic of China –

Taiwan’s China – was the real China, not that Beijing lot. After all, there’s no such thing as a free 737.

Nauru’s bird-shit wealth took a century to spend, but millennia to build up. It all comes down to the island’s remote location. You have to head 300

kilometres east to reach Nauru’s nearest neighbour, Ocean Island, also known as Banaba. Part of the Pacific nation of Kiribati, but a long way from all the other islands in that scattered group, Ocean Island is in fact just

Nauru II. It’s only a third of the size of Nauru and was also, once upon a time, one big heap of bird shit. Just like Nauru, it’s been totally mined out.

Ocean Island aside, you have to travel nearly 700 kilometres east to reach the main islands of the Kiribati group, and over 1000 kilometres south-west to the Solomons. It’s no wonder a bird was up for some R&R by the time it reached Nauru. The island still attracts regular avian visitors, it’s just that mining the guano also took the trees and until some vegetation returns the birds won’t be arriving in the vast numbers needed to recreate the island in a few more millennia.

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