Sally McInerney is an established photographer based in Sydney. She travelled on two occasions over the last 12 months to the tiny remote Pacific island. “My first visit to Nauru was in November 2014,” she says. “I had a friend who was working there at the time and a $50 tourist visa. I booked the most flexible plane ticket of all, in case it was a nightmare landscape riddled with phosphate dust, with perhaps a few seabirds clinging to life among the pinnacles of the hinterland.
“So many things were being said about Nauru and most of them were derogatory. It was called a barren moonscape, a pile of birdshit, a hellhole, a failed state, a decrepit country, a clapped-out quarry, even ‘Scott Morrison’s wretched island’.
Yet 12,000 humans were living there: about the same population as, say, Cowra, my hometown. Two thousand of them are refugees, 10,000 are Nauruan. How do they live on such a small remote island, 21 square kilometres shaped like a kidney bean? I wanted to wander about in my usual way, in accord with my ‘artistic practice’, looking at everyday things, talking to strangers: the grainy texture of being there, the odd scraps that the senses gather to puzzle the mind; besides, I had always wanted to see the pinnacles in the mined-out phosphate fields.
“I stayed on Nauru for six days. I took photographs, kept a sort of diary. There were many mysteries …
“Small strategically-placed islands often become the plaything of bigger forces intent on their own battles. Nauru was cut off from the rest of the world during the war in the Pacific and little was known about how it was faring. Its unique people nearly died out. They celebrate their survival each year on Angam Day, October 26. Much can be said about the effects of war on a country’s civilian population, displaced by war in their own country, exiled on remote islands.”
