A recently discovered secret cache of British Foreign Office documents appears to include a lot of information about New Zealand and parts of the South Pacific. The vast archive of 1. The Foreign Office had not answered questions about the papers and historians said it was difficult to be sure of their significance without examining them.
Historic papers about the slave trade were among the papers dating back to and wre thought to contain information about England's involvement in slavery, while others were created in the 19th century and detailed British attempts to suppress the trade.
Under the Public Records Acts, the slavery papers should have been handed over to the National Archives, the paper reported. Every country appeared to have a file and the Confidential Print; New Zealand had "annual reports; diplomatic reports; leading personalities" over the period between and The cache included documents about one of the South Pacific's biggest scandals, the destruction last century of Banaba or Ocean Island, now part of Kiribati. New Zealand farmers were the major beneficiary of the phosphate strip-mining which rendered it unliveable.
New Zealand and Australia each held stakes of a third of BPC, which was much later exposed for double bookkeeping showing the local people and Nauruans had been robbed of royalties.
About islanders left on Banaba were massacred by the Japanese, who pushed them off a cliff days after the war had ended. The British refused to return the survivors to Banaba at the end of the war, placing them instead on a coconut plantation on Rabi in Fiji, where they remain today. About Banabans live on Rabi and just on Banaba, which has only a narrow coastal strip that is inhabitable.
