Nauru phosphate.....

On Nauru, the last vestiges of a once thriving phosphate industry fall apart.  

Phosphate was discovered here by albert Ellis, who recognised a doorstop at the Pacific Islands Company office in Sydney as being pure phosphate.  By the late 1980s over 40 million tones of phosphate had been exported, and the island had been shaved.  The population were the richest people per capita in the world in the late 1970s, but by the mid 1990s the money had all gone, wasted and stolen by greed, corruption and foolish investments. 

Now the island looks like a lunar landscape, and is littered with old machinery and equipment.  This islanders hope for another miracle, but it wont happen.