1.             Plastic Beaches

Tarawa atoll, Kiribati

As a sop to keep me happy after what they had done to me in Timor, the Government sent me to Kiribati. Thirty-three small atolls lying astride the equator in the central Pacific, five thousand kilometres northeast of Brisbane and three thousand kilometres south west of Hawaii. Except for Banaba (formerly Ocean Island) which is of raised coral limestone, all the other islands are atolls. Their highest point above sea level is less than five metres. Few of the islands are more than five hundred metres wide. An exception is Christmas Island. It is the largest atoll in the world with a land area of 388 km².

Composed of coral sand and rubble, the atolls are infertile and have no surface water. There are no known mineral reserves. Coconut palms and pandanus trees dominate the vegetation, with breadfruit trees, papaya and banana clumps about the only trees providing fruit. There are precious few animals. You see some sea birds, some land crabs and a few small lizards. That is it!

If you believe popular wisdom, the tragedy facing Kiribati, along with so many other places I visited in the Pacific — The Mortlocks, Tuvalu and so on — is the threat of global warming. It must be said that the islands seemed to be disappearing before my eyes.

People measured erosion according to how many rows of coconut trees disappear. Having been sent there to help them deal with a lack of potable water I saw that the atolls were rapidly becoming uninhabitable for reasons other than global warming and rising seas.  

I had always intrigued by the Gilbert and Ellice Islands: visions of Robert Louis Stevenson and peaceful days sitting under palm trees lapped by the gentle Pacific: aha!. The reality turned out to be a little different.

When I arrived in 1999 to try and resurrect Australia’s reputation in aid, it took weeks before any government official would even open their door to me. It turned out that the previous Australian aid program had been a disaster. The company managing the project had o cut costs when installing drinking water mains for Tarawa, Kiribati’s main island. Instead of the top class pipes proposed in their submission, they did it on the cheap and scraped together some old lead lined pipes from an irrigation project somewhere along the Murray River.

Lead is not something you should drink in any quantity, as some of the children of the island may or may not have realised just before they died. No wonder I got a cold reception. The fact that the local Australian consulate was not proactive did not help. But then, Kiribati hardly rated the appointment of top class staff in the diplomatic pantheon of desired appointments.

You do not pronounce Kiribati the way it is spelled. Blame missionaries for that. Their missionary position was odd. They decided that the simple natives of the islands did not have the mental capacity to cope with a 26 letter alphabet so they left a few out, like s and j and x and so on. Who needs them anyway? So the sound ’s’ is represented by ‘ti.’ So please say Kiribus, not Kiribateeee. Logical isn’t it? Kiritimati? Christmas.

Christianity had (and probably still has) a grasp over the islanders that bordered on the obscene. Police were deployed each Sabbath to prevent clashes between followers of different faiths.

‘So you are a Catholic? You are of the devil! Get off my turf. I am a Methodist or a Mormon.’

The Mormons were the first ones to arrive and infest the islands, so they had a huge following which was not a good thing for the cigarette sellers. The Seventh Day Adventists rarely clashed with the other supermarkets. It helped that their services were held on Saturday.

My house was situated in a delightful spot. Step off the front verandah and I stepped onto a delightful sandy beach on a small cove. Between my house and the ocean, a small offshore island provided protection. If I went out the front door and walked fifty metres, I was on the beach that faced the Tarawa lagoon.

I woke up one morning and thought: ‘I can hear the sea clearly this morning.’ I looked out. My house was an island. Sea water surrounded my house.

One of the most off putting aspects of living in the country was their waste disposal system: rather, the lack of one. They dumped everything in the ocean. Tides took it out to sea where marine life ate what they could and the rest (most) washed back along the beaches.  But take care. You mentioned it at your peril.

My own stretch of beach I kept clean by going out every second day and collecting the hundreds of cans, bottles, plastic bags and syringes from the hospital up the road that washed up on to it. Many of Tarawa’s beaches were a trash carpet. What did I do with it? I dug a huge pit (no problem in the sand) and buried it.

I mentioned how disgusting this practice was at a function at the president’s bungalow on Independence Day on July 12^th 1999. I asked why the president should have his bungalow on perhaps the most polluted of all of the island’s beaches? Why did he not demand action? No one answered. People walked away from me till the lights fused, which they duly did. Twice!

Next morning, the Australian Consul called me in and told me that if I said anything stupid like that again I would be deported. I had offended the nation’s leaders. So the trash and syringes and plastic bottles and discarded cans destroying the stunning beauty of an ephemeral island paradise do not exist? I was expected to ignore reality? I learn something new every day. The trash never seemed to cause any concern. It was a case of ‘if we ignore it, it might go away.’ It didn’t.

Kiribati had no free press or radio or television. But it did have cheap alcohol. On my weekends I would cycle around the atoll’s islands, carrying my bike across the shallow channels between each of the islands. By eleven o’clock beware: belligerent people sprawled out drunk from kava and arrack.

Belligerence was common. Some villages had a reputation for being hostile drunks. You tiptoed through them pushing your rapidly rusting Chinese made bicycle.

Riding through one village with my daughter Allison I did not see a wire strung across the path. It caught me under the nose and threw me off the bike. Instead of concern and attention I was asked for damages for destroying the clothesline. But that was a rarity. I’d even met a couple of them thirty years earlier in a theological college. I remembered their names: Nehri and Benam and I looked them up. We met often and chatting with them on the long lonely nights was a joy.

Three young Japanese had set up a diving business hoping to attract foreign tourists. They had a small base in a hut next to my house and a guesthouse on Buariki which they used as a base for trips to the outer reef. They ferried their few customers to Buariki by canoe across the lagoon, a distance of about thirty kilometres.

I spent a couple of days in the guesthouse one weekend and though I am no diver, found it amazing. The trip back over the lagoon was the low light! A peaceful Pacific Lagoon. Water as calm as a millpond! No way! Ten minutes after we set off in their flimsy outrigger for the return journey, fierce winds sprung up. The waves were horrifying, huge, humungous — any word that means horrific! I was dead scared. Sugiyoto, my friend from the dive shop, remained stoic as he attempted to steer a path through the maelstrom. Of course we made it, but…

The people of Kiribati were not good custodians of their fragile islands. As well as the garbage everywhere, the beaches were dredged for ‘building and development.’

Maybe the people of Kiribati did precious little to aggravate climate change. They could and did, thank America and China for that. If global warming is what some say it is, Kiribati will be one of its first victims.

But it will also be a victim of its own lack of care for the fragile environment. Whatever the cause and whatever the blame, it makes you wonder about aid and development. No matter how much they develop in the next decades, if they poison themselves beyond redemption or if in fifty years' time they are going to go under, what is the purpose of it all?