 For all Pacific Islanders, your ancestral lands are your motherlands. That is where you imagine all your genealogy going back over generations and generations is rooted. So my grandfather is Barnabon and his father and his mother were all Barnabon. Growing up in Fiji, since we were very little the community around Suva would gather and we would celebrate the arrival of Barnabons to Fiji on December 15th in 1945 and all the families, all the kids would get together. We would have to learn dances. We would have to have costumes made. Then they would give these speeches about how the Barnabons were moved from Barnaba to Rambi by the British phosphate commissioners and by the British, Australian and New Zealand governments in 1945 and how we had lost a lot of the land due to phosphate mining and how we were surviving in this really creative way in Fiji ever since. I was lucky enough in 1997 to make a trip to Barnaba. It's a very difficult place to get to in contrast to the hundreds of ships that used to pass through between 1900 and 1980 when phosphate mining was happening. I was doing my Masters at the time and my Masters thesis was on Barnabon history. So I was very excited to be visiting this place that I'd heard about since I was a child. It was like looking at a post-apocalyptic zone. So basically the landscape of Barnaba is this field of really stark grey pinnacles kind of poking out of the earth. What happened was the mining removed the soil from in between the pinnacles that was the valuable phosphate fertilizer and that was removed and shipped off to Australia and New Zealand to be converted into super phosphate for agriculture, for farming. So the landscape kind of looks like people have taken bites out of it and it's a very small island, it's six square kilometres so about 22 million tonnes of land was removed which is a significant portion of that landscape. A lot of it was taken from places where villages used to be and that's what really hit me about it was the very materiality of the impacts of phosphate mining on a landscape. A landscape that for Barnabons had been a home, had been a source of livelihood, a source of culture, a source of inspiration for a whole range of cultural practices, dances, songs, chants and a source of food obviously. I've been through all the archival records in the National Archives of Australia in particular and at the time and all the way until 1980 phosphate was seen as a matter of national security for Australia and New Zealand in particular. It was food security, it was agricultural security, it was national security, every major government office had a file and had personnel who were keeping an eye on Barnabon that's how important it was to them. We live in a society today where we're pretty comfortable getting our food from the shop, getting our coffee, getting all kinds of amazing different kinds of food and not always having to think about how they've come to be in the store in the first place. So super phosphate was an absolute key input for the production of things like lamb, beef, cheese, milk, wheat, grain, all the basics of our current diet today. So one of the things I definitely want to get for people to get out of the book is this importance of phosphate for that whole agricultural commodity change but to think about the ethics and the politics of that.