Wild cargo: Inside the Solomon Islands' exotic pet industry

Samson Michael has been collecting reptiles for most of his life. In his Tennessee home, an entire room is dedicated to them - a private menagerie filled with snakes, lizards and skinks.
Among them are monkey-tailed skinks from Solomon Islands.
But how did these animals, found in the forest of remote Pacific islands, end up in a glass tank in America's south?
Solomon Islands is the Pacific region's largest legal commercial exporter of wildlife for the exotic pet trade - a little-known but thriving industry that supports a vast network of trappers, village buyers and exporters across the country.
Join journalist Prianka Srinivasan as she investigates the controversial supply chain that takes animals from a jungle in Santa Isabel to end up in an American lounge room.
Presenter: Prianka Srinivasan
*Reporting was supported by the Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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The Age

14 hours ago

• The Age

‘I saw the flash': How US nuclear tests changed life on this Pacific idyll forever

This story is part of the June 21 edition of Good Weekend. See all 15 stories. Kathy Joel* remembers the loud boom and the blaze of orange light. She remembers the giant fireball hanging in the sky like a second sun. She remembers sobbing in her parents' arms, overcome with fear and horror. At five years old, she was inconsolable. What she could not know then is that she had witnessed the Castle Bravo test – the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated by the United States. Seventy-one years later, as we sit on a windswept beach in another part of the Marshall Islands, I feel goosebumps as Joel relives her childhood terror. 'I saw the flash and many different colours – orange and other colours,' she says. 'My parents tried to comfort me, but I could not be comforted.' The glowing mushroom cloud etched on the sky by Castle Bravo became one of the defining images of the 20th century and the fuel of nightmares for Cold War children everywhere. Including me, decades later. The bomb was detonated on March 1, 1954 at Bikini Atoll, just 140 kilometres from Joel's home on Rongelap Atoll, a classic Pacific paradise with an enormous lagoon. What Joel saw was one of 67 nuclear bombs tested in the Marshall Islands, and one of 17 in the megaton range. At 15 megatons – nearly three times bigger than expected and a thousand times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – the size of the blast shocked even the nuclear scientists who created it. Traces of radioactive material from Bravo were later found in parts of Japan, India, Australia, Europe and the US, causing a public outcry that ultimately led to a shift to underground testing and computer simulations. Five hours after the explosion, radioactive pulverised coral was falling in a fine white powder on Rongelap. Joel's parents kept her indoors, but other children rushed out to play in what they thought was snow, putting it in their mouth to taste it; one man rubbed it in his eye to see if it would cure an old ailment. I later meet Loner Tima, 50, whose father was out fishing in his canoe at the time of the blast and suffered radiation burns on his skin. The events of that day and the displacement and disease that followed blighted the lives of Joel, her family, her community and the generations that followed, in an experience echoed throughout the Marshall Islands. The nuclear testing tainted the whole country (and indeed, the world) and other atolls besides Rongelap were heavily contaminated. Now climate change is looming as an existential threat for the low-lying atoll nation, just like in neighbouring Tuvalu and Kiribati. Radiation sickness I'm sitting with Joel and two other women in their 70s who survived Castle Bravo – Mina Titus was a baby and Susan Ned was in utero at the time – on a beach on Mejatto Atoll, a small island to which the Rongelapese were evacuated 40 years ago. All three are wearing Pacific-style cotton dresses with modest hemlines and colourful prints; Ned has a frangipani behind her ear. The setting is picture-perfect – fine white sand, shallow reef waters in impossible shades of aqua, turquoise and teal; a rustic boat with weathered paint – but the conversation is challenging in terms of both logistics and subject matter. The winds make audio recording difficult, but keep us cooler than we would be otherwise in the sweltering centre of the island. The women speak Marshallese and former Marshall Islands senator Abacca Anjain-Maddison interprets. Wisps of hair whip about the women's faces as they sit on plastic chairs brought out from a nearby house. Anjain-Maddison and I perch on makeshift piles of bricks while the survivors share their stories. American observers arrived in Rongelap the day after the blast and walked around with a Geiger counter and worried expressions. On the third day, a ship arrived and moved everyone off the island. More than 230 people from Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik atolls were evacuated, including 28 US military personnel, with those on Rongelap the most exposed. Just three years later, after completing another 55 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, the Americans brought the Rongelapese back to their island and told them it was safe. In reality, radiation poisoning was everywhere. It was in the soil and therefore in the coconuts, breadfruits and pandanus fruits that were their staples. It was in the crabs and fish they ate and the water they drank. We know now, because of declassified US state department papers, that the Rongelapese were test subjects in a secret experiment to study the effects of radiation on humans. The 64 people who were on the island during the blast were the ' exposed group '. A similar number, who had been away at the time but returned in 1957, were the 'control group'. For years, the people of Rongelap – exposed and control groups alike – endured serious health problems. In the four years after Castle Bravo, Rongelap women suffered miscarriages and stillbirths at more than double the normal rate. Three out of four children under 10 at the time of the test needed surgeries to remove thyroid tumours. Joel remembers her aunt being overcome with fatigue in the aftermath of the blast, and not leaving her bed until she died. Her siblings and parents were sick. Titus was evacuated to the US twice as a teenager to have thyroid surgery, travelling with a group of other children with similar problems. When she grew up and started a family of her own, her daughter was born with disabilities and died young. Joel had six miscarriages and seven children who survived. Ned had five surviving children and one stillbirth. The women look stricken. Does it also make them angry? After asking each woman in turn, Anjain-Maddison says, 'Marshallese people are very humble and very kind, and the [sadness] and anger they keep within and seldom say it out loud. But as women and mothers, all three of them just said that they're really angry for what happened.' Over the years, the Rongelapese people pleaded to be moved from their island to somewhere safer but were repeatedly rebuffed. In 1985, Marshallese senator Jeton Anjain, Anjain-Maddison's father, asked environmental charity Greenpeace to evacuate the 320 people on Rongelap to uninhabited Mejatto in Kwajelein Atoll, about 180 kilometres away. Over 11 days and four round-trip sea crossings, the Greenpeace ship transported every person on Rongelap, plus most of the construction material for their houses, to Mejatto. The US government accused Greenpeace of manipulating the Rongelapese into leaving. Greenpeace calls it the 'evacuation'. Many Marshallese call it the 'exodus'. The second book in the Old Testament, Exodus is about Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt to Mount Sinai. I wonder if the biblical overtones are deliberate in this devout Pacific nation or if the connotations have shifted sideways in translation. I ask Jelton Anjain, son of Jeton and half-brother of Anjain-Maddison. 'What else would you call it?' he says. 'They also call my father a modern-day Moses.' Evacuation after evacuation It takes days of travel for photographer Eddie Jim and me to arrive on this remote beach in the tropical Pacific, somewhere north of the Solomon Islands. Our flights are via Hawaii, which means we fly 10 hours north-east and five hours west, crossing the international dateline twice. In Majuro, the Marshall Islands' capital, we join Greenpeace on its flagship, the Rainbow Warrior III. The visit was arranged by Jelton Anjain who, as commissioner of education on the Kwajelein Atoll, sees it as a way to teach the youngsters about their history. There is a vigil planned, and it is also the start of a scientific mission to study radiation throughout the islands. We sail for two days at 9-10 knots an hour – a solid clip, though with constant rocking from the swell. While many of the passengers succumb to seasickness, I avoid it by spending most of the day outside. I arrange to meet Bunny McDiarmid, 68, and Henk Haazen, 71, crew members on the original Rainbow Warrior and part of the evacuation 40 years ago, on the foredeck. Sitting on a bench in front of the bridge behind the billowing jib gives us an exhilarating sense of our rapid progress across the white-tipped blue of the ocean. McDiarmid, a slim New Zealander with freckles, grey hair and an air of quiet authority, joined Rainbow Warrior as a deckhand and went on to run Greenpeace New Zealand then Greenpeace International. She and Haazen are clearly the guests of honour both on the ship and later on the island, but McDiarmid is scrupulous about making sure they shoulder their share of the chores. Haazen is a tall, broad-shouldered Dutchman with an earring, silver hair and matching moustache, and his frequent grin shows flashes of metal caps. It would give him a piratical air if he were not so solicitous and grandfatherly. He reminds me to always have one hand on the ship as it lurches in the open ocean, and when we arrive on Mejatto, he teaches the children the Maori chant ' Kia ka!', which means 'Stay strong!' McDiarmid has sailed on all the Rainbow Warriors; I ask which was her favourite. This Rainbow Warrior is custom-built for sustainability, replacing the Rainbow Warrior II, a converted trawler. McDiarmid has a soft spot for the original Rainbow Warrior – the one used in the evacuation of Rongelap and famously blown up by the French secret service in Auckland Harbour a few months later in July 1985. The blast killed photographer Fernando Pereira, McDiarmid and Haazen's friend and crewmate. ' 'Murdered' is the better way to put it,' says Haazen. The Rainbow Warrior was a target because it planned to sail in a flotilla to Mururoa in French Polynesia, the central site for French nuclear testing from 1966 to 1996. After first denying any involvement, the French eventually admitted to the ship's bombing. In 1987, then president Francois Mitterand called it 'stupid and unacceptable'. If sinking the Rainbow Warrior was intended to cripple Greenpeace, it backfired. The charity filled its fundraising coffers, selling posters with slogans such as 'You can't sink a rainbow', and New Zealand declared itself nuclear-free while pushing for a nuclear-free Pacific, sparking tensions with the US. McDiarmid and Haazen returned to Mejatto a year after the 1985 evacuation, and stayed for three months. When we land this time, there is a joyful reunion between the pair and several locals, including 'aunties' now in their 40s and 50s who were children when they left Rongelap. I hear the couple recount the evacuation from Rongelap three times: the straight version for me on the foredeck; a rollicking tale told to the Greenpeace crew and staff later that evening; and a story for the children of Mejatto that starts with 'a long time ago, when your parents were the same age you are now …' McDiarmid recalls sailing into Rongelap lagoon 40 years ago and finding 'an idyllic Pacific island with a white sandy beach and palm trees', sitting amid a massive lagoon with a string of islands around it. At 80 kilometres wide, Rongelap is one of the largest atolls in the Marshall Islands and food was plentiful, from the food trees and big red land crabs called coconut crabs to the fish in the lagoon. 'There was a very good reason why people lived on that atoll, and it was a very difficult place to leave,' she says. 'Land in the Marshall Islands is like your middle name, it's part of your identity, your inheritance.' When the Rainbow Warrior arrived, women and children paddled out in a boat, singing and holding a banner that said: 'We love the future of our children'. They dismantled their houses, leaving only the church standing in the hope of returning eventually. Most of them left their chickens and pigs and dogs behind, not wanting the contamination to follow them to their new home. Mejatto was a poor replacement for Rongelap – just one small island that the local people were not using, compared with a whole atoll chain. There were barely any food trees when they first arrived and the reef was soon fished out, leaving the Rongelapese dependent on US aid. Grace Abon, a child at the time of the evacuation and now one of the aunties who host us on Mejatto, recalls the sea passage and the hardship that came after. 'I still have that vivid memory of the last glimpse of Rongelap, when everyone started crying,' Abon says. 'We came here with nothing.' Ghosts of the past Swinley Freddy, a compact man in his early 70s with a crinkly, charismatic face, sweeps the dirt outside his house, picking up every leaf that has fallen in the night. He moves on to slice coconut with a machete to feed to his mottled pink and black pigs, which gobble and grunt, while their piglets grab the chance to suckle. After the chores are done, he leads us to the Mejatto graveyard. In contrast to his yard, it is overgrown with weeds. He points out the concrete cross streaked white and grey, engraved 'Rose S. Freddy' and the dates that bookend her life. 'My wife was the first to be buried on the island, in 1986,' Freddy says. He remembers her as a kind person and still comes by to talk to her from time to time. Freddy says the graveyard is cleaned up every time a new burial occurs, but it is bad luck to do this when no one has died. A few days later, someone tempts fate by sprucing it up before a Greenpeace photo shoot. Jeton Anjain, the latter-day Moses, died in 1993 and is also buried here – his daughter Anjain-Maddison says that's because he made a promise not to abandon the people of Rongelap 'in life or death'. Freddy did not know anything about the radiation poisoning when he moved to Rongelap in 1970 to be with his wife, having come from what's now called the Federated States of Micronesia. But once there, he saw a lot of sickness and babies born with birth defects – some so extreme that he describes the babies as 'looking like crepes'. The couple's seventh child, Julie, appeared to be healthy at first, but she didn't start crawling until she was a couple of years old, or walking until she was seven or eight. Now 48, Julie is still child-size and dependent on her family. She clearly has a close bond with her father and big sister Sylvia, and joins in community life, often the first to join any dancing and singing. Rose Freddy died a year after the family's arrival on Mejatto, while giving birth to their eighth baby, who also died. Freddy is uncertain whether the radiation killed his wife, but he is certain it harmed Julie. Professor Timothy Mousseau, a biologist specialising in the effects of radiation at the University of South Carolina in the US and one of the independent scientists brought to the island by Greenpeace, says this is impossible to prove on an individual basis, but quite likely. Mousseau is working with a team of vets to take blood samples from dogs on Mejatto and other islands, while also vaccinating and deworming them, and studying moths and earthworms. Another scientific team is focused on testing the radiation in the soil and taking samples of the fruit from the trees for testing back on the ship. The scientists will travel with Greenpeace on the Rainbow Warrior III on a five-week mission starting from Mejatto, which includes a stop at Enewetak Atoll. Here, nuclear waste is buried under the Runit Dome, which is cracking and threatens to collapse from the effects of climate change. The US has declared it the responsibility of the Marshall Islands. The Rainbow Warrior III will also visit Bikini, where the bombs were detonated, and downwind atolls Rongelap and Wotje. There is no real prospect of finding that places such as Bikini and Rongelap are now safe to inhabit, but there is hope the mission will uncover new evidence in the ongoing fight for better compensation from the US government. Abuse of a kind people Our arrival on Mejatto – via two boats that speed us from the ship to the beach – is a Pacific-style guard of honour. It appears everyone on the island has lined up to greet us, many singing and playing ukuleles. The aunties give us fresh drinking coconuts and place leis made of frangipani around our necks. The fruit is sweet, the flowers are intensely fragrant and starting to brown. We file past a long reception line and shake everyone's hand, from elderly people to babies, then follow a path of dead coral to the centre of the island. This is where the school, community hall, church and several satellite dishes are located, and we set up camp on the floor in several vacated buildings. Our presence is soon clocked by personnel at the nearby US military base of Kwajelein, and our first few days are punctuated by the occasional buzzing of a military plane flying low over the island, out to the ship then back again. The islanders say this is rare. Once an American protectorate, the Marshall Islands is now a sovereign nation in a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the US – essentially, the US gets a base and manages defence while the Marshall Islands gets economic assistance and visa-free immigration for its citizens. The aunties have organised a roster to cook for us and serve our meals at the hall, with a blessing by the pastor before the meals and singing and dancing afterwards. With supplies supplemented by Greenpeace, we eat rice and breadfruit, pork, eggs and fish, coconut and pandanus, a bright orange, fibrous fruit that is usually cooked. They go out of their way to feed us even on the morning when we leave, some of us taking a flight back to Majuro from a nearby island rather than sailing on the Rainbow Warrior. One of the aunties, Grace Abon, rises early and travels to the nearby island to cook eggs and ham by the airstrip, while one of the men climbs a palm to cut down fresh coconuts. In our five days on Mejatto, there is time for exploration, conversation and reflection. Hundreds of Rongelapese – not just those who remain on Mejatto but many others now scattered throughout the Marshall Islands – have gathered for this vigil and the Rainbow Warrior visit. Everyone talks about the kindness and generosity of the Marshallese, and it seems true. In our time there, I do not witness anyone saying a harsh word to another adult, child or even a dog. Angeline Heine-Reimers, the director of the Marshall Islands' National Energy Office, later tells me that this trait has not always served her people well. 'The core of Marshallese culture is being kind and being respectful, and when you have that, you tend to be a doormat and let people from other countries who were taught to be assertive and opinionated walk all over you,' she says. The first COFA, effective from 1986, was negotiated when the Marshall Islands was not yet independent and the US was withholding classified information about the nuclear contamination. It included $US150 million for full and final settlement for the nuclear testing. Some of the money was to compensate for the loss of land. Rongelapese woman Eve Burns, 27, a journalist at The Marshall Islands Journal in Majuro, tells me this currently works out to $US11 a month per person. The money was also meant to cover personal compensation claims, but no one has received their full award. A tribunal set up to process claims awarded $US92 million to direct survivors of the blast. Of that, about $US73 million has actually reached awardees or their heirs. (By contrast, in the US, people who were downwind of nuclear testing in Nevada received full compensation.) Personal compensation does not cover Rongelap's 'control group' – those who returned in 1957 and spent decades living on contaminated land – nor children subsequently born on Rongelap. The free specialist treatment that Mina Titus and other children received when they were evacuated to the US for thyroid treatment in the 1960s does not extend to Abon's generation, who left Rongelap as children. They also suffer a lot of thyroid problems and leukaemia, but receive no compensation and only qualify for free GP access. The COFA was renewed in 2003, when the Marshall Islands' geostrategic bargaining position was at a low ebb due to the end of the Cold War, and again in 2023, when it was somewhat improved thanks to US competition with China in the Pacific. Nuclear claims have not been in the compacts since the original agreement. Loading A changed circumstances petition, asking for extra compensation given the extent of the blast's fallout was wider than first thought, was presented to the US Congress in 2000 and ultimately rejected. To date, the US has insisted it has provided full and final settlement. The UN special rapporteur for internally displaced persons last year called for the US to 'acknowledge that nuclear damages have not been remedied by the paltry past statements and to fully fund payment of the claims assessed by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal'. The UN also asked the US to provide better healthcare, as well as contribute to Marshallese efforts to combat the effects of climate change. A request to interview the US ambassador to the Marshall Islands was declined. The nuclear legacy of the Marshall Islands has echoes around the world. The British tested their bombs near Aboriginal settlements in Maralinga, South Australia, the Montebello islands off Australia's north-west coast and Kiribati in the central Pacific. The Soviet Union tested in Kazakhstan and other remote locations. The French in Algeria and French Polynesia. China in the Uyghur-populated west of the country. Heine-Reimers says it took her people a long time to realise what had been done to them. The Japanese tortured and starved the Marshallese during World War II. When the Americans drove them out, they were welcomed as liberators, Heine-Reimers explains; in the 1960s, that goodwill was cemented by a flood of Peace Corps volunteers teaching US values: 'We ate it up.' . Yet the regard was not always reciprocated. One Atomic Energy Commission scientist in the 1950s, while urging Congress to return the people to Rongelap for the purpose of scientific study, put it this way: 'While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilised people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.' The 1970s-era US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, talking about taking land for military purposes, said of the Marshall Islands: 'There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?' Fulfilling a dying wish When I meet former Marshall Islands senator Abacca Anjain-Maddison again, we are sitting in the lagoon, bathed in the glorious golden light that comes just before sunset. We have decided to escape the day's unrelenting heat by conducting our interview in the water rather than next to it. The water is about 27 degrees and comes up to my chest while I carefully hold my phone up to record. Fortunately, on this corner of the island it is sheltered, and the water is mostly still. All I can hear is the gentle lapping of the water, punctuated by the occasional dog bark and rooster crow. A child runs down to give Anjain-Maddison a white flower, which she tucks behind her ear. 'The only thing missing is the wine,' jokes Anjain-Maddison. Fulfilling her father's dying wish, Anjain-Maddison served as a senator from 2000 to 2007, trying to realise her father's dream of a resettlement project for his people to return to Rongelap. Funded by the US, a contractor undertook rehabilitation work. The Rongelapese people were invited to return in 2011. But the clean-up fell short of expectations, and the funds are now depleted. 'The Rongelapese felt they were lied to again because it was their wish to clean up all the islands they wanted to live and thrive on, not just confined to a small clean-up place on the main island,' Anjain-Maddison says. 'It was written in the plan, but it didn't come through.' Many people still long to return to Rongelap, but others see it as a pipedream. 'Even if they clean the land, how could they clean the ocean?' asks Henritha Kalles, 46, a cousin and neighbour of Grace Abon. If there is a common thread in the Marshallese experience, it is displacement because of environmental forces caused by other people – first, the nuclear legacy and its ripples and, now, climate change. On Mejatto, trees are marooned in the sea as the shoreline shrinks, unripe breadfruit are falling from the trees because of drought, and salty groundwater has made it difficult to grow vegetables except in a small, aeroponic community garden. Burns, the young journalist in Majuro, grew up hearing stories of Rongelap from her grandmother and would love to visit. But for her generation, the exodus is from the entire Marshall Islands. 'A lot of people are moving out of these islands because of climate change – their homes getting disturbed by erosion and water coming on land,' Burns says. 'Everyone's leaving. It's a lot cheaper to go to the States and live there than to stay and rebuild every year.' In 2020, the population of the Marshall Islands was about 42,000; the population of Marshallese living in the US was more than 47,000. I wonder if that diaspora might live in Hawaii to keep a connection with island life – and indeed, that was once the natural destination for emigrating Marshallese. However, the price of real estate and cost of living has made it prohibitive to live there these days. The biggest population of Marshallese is in landlocked Arkansas, where Walmart and chicken processing giant Tyson Foods have their headquarters. Grace Abon's younger sister, Irene, 47, says her parents' generation was too focused on survival to practise and pass on traditional skills like weaving and canoe-making, while her generation has been left unmoored, 'moving from island to island'. 'Our parents are the affected generation and we are the lost generation,' she says. Anjain-Maddison points out that the displacement has particularly affected Marshallese women. 'The Marshall Islands is a matrilineal society and that means that through your mother you own land,' she says. 'If you lose that land, that means women lose their role.' Henritha Kalles says her country's nuclear history was not taught when she was at school and even if the people who did the nuclear testing came to say sorry, she could not accept it. 'They took my heart, my heritage, my hope, and all the things that I should have looked forward to – and I didn't even know the story until I was middle-aged.' * The author and photographer Eddie Jim pay their respects to Kathy Joel, known as 'Aunty Kathy' to those close to her, who died not long after Good Weekend 's visit to Mejatto. The author and photographer travelled to the Marshall Islands as guests of Greenpeace. To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

Sydney Morning Herald

14 hours ago

• Sydney Morning Herald

‘I saw the flash': How US nuclear tests changed life on this Pacific idyll forever

This story is part of the June 21 edition of Good Weekend. See all 15 stories. Kathy Joel* remembers the loud boom and the blaze of orange light. She remembers the giant fireball hanging in the sky like a second sun. She remembers sobbing in her parents' arms, overcome with fear and horror. At five years old, she was inconsolable. What she could not know then is that she had witnessed the Castle Bravo test – the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated by the United States. Seventy-one years later, as we sit on a windswept beach in another part of the Marshall Islands, I feel goosebumps as Joel relives her childhood terror. 'I saw the flash and many different colours – orange and other colours,' she says. 'My parents tried to comfort me, but I could not be comforted.' The glowing mushroom cloud etched on the sky by Castle Bravo became one of the defining images of the 20th century and the fuel of nightmares for Cold War children everywhere. Including me, decades later. The bomb was detonated on March 1, 1954 at Bikini Atoll, just 140 kilometres from Joel's home on Rongelap Atoll, a classic Pacific paradise with an enormous lagoon. What Joel saw was one of 67 nuclear bombs tested in the Marshall Islands, and one of 17 in the megaton range. At 15 megatons – nearly three times bigger than expected and a thousand times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – the size of the blast shocked even the nuclear scientists who created it. Traces of radioactive material from Bravo were later found in parts of Japan, India, Australia, Europe and the US, causing a public outcry that ultimately led to a shift to underground testing and computer simulations. Five hours after the explosion, radioactive pulverised coral was falling in a fine white powder on Rongelap. Joel's parents kept her indoors, but other children rushed out to play in what they thought was snow, putting it in their mouth to taste it; one man rubbed it in his eye to see if it would cure an old ailment. I later meet Loner Tima, 50, whose father was out fishing in his canoe at the time of the blast and suffered radiation burns on his skin. The events of that day and the displacement and disease that followed blighted the lives of Joel, her family, her community and the generations that followed, in an experience echoed throughout the Marshall Islands. The nuclear testing tainted the whole country (and indeed, the world) and other atolls besides Rongelap were heavily contaminated. Now climate change is looming as an existential threat for the low-lying atoll nation, just like in neighbouring Tuvalu and Kiribati. Radiation sickness I'm sitting with Joel and two other women in their 70s who survived Castle Bravo – Mina Titus was a baby and Susan Ned was in utero at the time – on a beach on Mejatto Atoll, a small island to which the Rongelapese were evacuated 40 years ago. All three are wearing Pacific-style cotton dresses with modest hemlines and colourful prints; Ned has a frangipani behind her ear. The setting is picture-perfect – fine white sand, shallow reef waters in impossible shades of aqua, turquoise and teal; a rustic boat with weathered paint – but the conversation is challenging in terms of both logistics and subject matter. The winds make audio recording difficult, but keep us cooler than we would be otherwise in the sweltering centre of the island. The women speak Marshallese and former Marshall Islands senator Abacca Anjain-Maddison interprets. Wisps of hair whip about the women's faces as they sit on plastic chairs brought out from a nearby house. Anjain-Maddison and I perch on makeshift piles of bricks while the survivors share their stories. American observers arrived in Rongelap the day after the blast and walked around with a Geiger counter and worried expressions. On the third day, a ship arrived and moved everyone off the island. More than 230 people from Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik atolls were evacuated, including 28 US military personnel, with those on Rongelap the most exposed. Just three years later, after completing another 55 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, the Americans brought the Rongelapese back to their island and told them it was safe. In reality, radiation poisoning was everywhere. It was in the soil and therefore in the coconuts, breadfruits and pandanus fruits that were their staples. It was in the crabs and fish they ate and the water they drank. We know now, because of declassified US state department papers, that the Rongelapese were test subjects in a secret experiment to study the effects of radiation on humans. The 64 people who were on the island during the blast were the ' exposed group '. A similar number, who had been away at the time but returned in 1957, were the 'control group'. For years, the people of Rongelap – exposed and control groups alike – endured serious health problems. In the four years after Castle Bravo, Rongelap women suffered miscarriages and stillbirths at more than double the normal rate. Three out of four children under 10 at the time of the test needed surgeries to remove thyroid tumours. Joel remembers her aunt being overcome with fatigue in the aftermath of the blast, and not leaving her bed until she died. Her siblings and parents were sick. Titus was evacuated to the US twice as a teenager to have thyroid surgery, travelling with a group of other children with similar problems. When she grew up and started a family of her own, her daughter was born with disabilities and died young. Joel had six miscarriages and seven children who survived. Ned had five surviving children and one stillbirth. The women look stricken. Does it also make them angry? After asking each woman in turn, Anjain-Maddison says, 'Marshallese people are very humble and very kind, and the [sadness] and anger they keep within and seldom say it out loud. But as women and mothers, all three of them just said that they're really angry for what happened.' Over the years, the Rongelapese people pleaded to be moved from their island to somewhere safer but were repeatedly rebuffed. In 1985, Marshallese senator Jeton Anjain, Anjain-Maddison's father, asked environmental charity Greenpeace to evacuate the 320 people on Rongelap to uninhabited Mejatto in Kwajelein Atoll, about 180 kilometres away. Over 11 days and four round-trip sea crossings, the Greenpeace ship transported every person on Rongelap, plus most of the construction material for their houses, to Mejatto. The US government accused Greenpeace of manipulating the Rongelapese into leaving. Greenpeace calls it the 'evacuation'. Many Marshallese call it the 'exodus'. The second book in the Old Testament, Exodus is about Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt to Mount Sinai. I wonder if the biblical overtones are deliberate in this devout Pacific nation or if the connotations have shifted sideways in translation. I ask Jelton Anjain, son of Jeton and half-brother of Anjain-Maddison. 'What else would you call it?' he says. 'They also call my father a modern-day Moses.' Evacuation after evacuation It takes days of travel for photographer Eddie Jim and me to arrive on this remote beach in the tropical Pacific, somewhere north of the Solomon Islands. Our flights are via Hawaii, which means we fly 10 hours north-east and five hours west, crossing the international dateline twice. In Majuro, the Marshall Islands' capital, we join Greenpeace on its flagship, the Rainbow Warrior III. The visit was arranged by Jelton Anjain who, as commissioner of education on the Kwajelein Atoll, sees it as a way to teach the youngsters about their history. There is a vigil planned, and it is also the start of a scientific mission to study radiation throughout the islands. We sail for two days at 9-10 knots an hour – a solid clip, though with constant rocking from the swell. While many of the passengers succumb to seasickness, I avoid it by spending most of the day outside. I arrange to meet Bunny McDiarmid, 68, and Henk Haazen, 71, crew members on the original Rainbow Warrior and part of the evacuation 40 years ago, on the foredeck. Sitting on a bench in front of the bridge behind the billowing jib gives us an exhilarating sense of our rapid progress across the white-tipped blue of the ocean. McDiarmid, a slim New Zealander with freckles, grey hair and an air of quiet authority, joined Rainbow Warrior as a deckhand and went on to run Greenpeace New Zealand then Greenpeace International. She and Haazen are clearly the guests of honour both on the ship and later on the island, but McDiarmid is scrupulous about making sure they shoulder their share of the chores. Haazen is a tall, broad-shouldered Dutchman with an earring, silver hair and matching moustache, and his frequent grin shows flashes of metal caps. It would give him a piratical air if he were not so solicitous and grandfatherly. He reminds me to always have one hand on the ship as it lurches in the open ocean, and when we arrive on Mejatto, he teaches the children the Maori chant ' Kia ka!', which means 'Stay strong!' McDiarmid has sailed on all the Rainbow Warriors; I ask which was her favourite. This Rainbow Warrior is custom-built for sustainability, replacing the Rainbow Warrior II, a converted trawler. McDiarmid has a soft spot for the original Rainbow Warrior – the one used in the evacuation of Rongelap and famously blown up by the French secret service in Auckland Harbour a few months later in July 1985. The blast killed photographer Fernando Pereira, McDiarmid and Haazen's friend and crewmate. ' 'Murdered' is the better way to put it,' says Haazen. The Rainbow Warrior was a target because it planned to sail in a flotilla to Mururoa in French Polynesia, the central site for French nuclear testing from 1966 to 1996. After first denying any involvement, the French eventually admitted to the ship's bombing. In 1987, then president Francois Mitterand called it 'stupid and unacceptable'. If sinking the Rainbow Warrior was intended to cripple Greenpeace, it backfired. The charity filled its fundraising coffers, selling posters with slogans such as 'You can't sink a rainbow', and New Zealand declared itself nuclear-free while pushing for a nuclear-free Pacific, sparking tensions with the US. McDiarmid and Haazen returned to Mejatto a year after the 1985 evacuation, and stayed for three months. When we land this time, there is a joyful reunion between the pair and several locals, including 'aunties' now in their 40s and 50s who were children when they left Rongelap. I hear the couple recount the evacuation from Rongelap three times: the straight version for me on the foredeck; a rollicking tale told to the Greenpeace crew and staff later that evening; and a story for the children of Mejatto that starts with 'a long time ago, when your parents were the same age you are now …' McDiarmid recalls sailing into Rongelap lagoon 40 years ago and finding 'an idyllic Pacific island with a white sandy beach and palm trees', sitting amid a massive lagoon with a string of islands around it. At 80 kilometres wide, Rongelap is one of the largest atolls in the Marshall Islands and food was plentiful, from the food trees and big red land crabs called coconut crabs to the fish in the lagoon. 'There was a very good reason why people lived on that atoll, and it was a very difficult place to leave,' she says. 'Land in the Marshall Islands is like your middle name, it's part of your identity, your inheritance.' When the Rainbow Warrior arrived, women and children paddled out in a boat, singing and holding a banner that said: 'We love the future of our children'. They dismantled their houses, leaving only the church standing in the hope of returning eventually. Most of them left their chickens and pigs and dogs behind, not wanting the contamination to follow them to their new home. Mejatto was a poor replacement for Rongelap – just one small island that the local people were not using, compared with a whole atoll chain. There were barely any food trees when they first arrived and the reef was soon fished out, leaving the Rongelapese dependent on US aid. Grace Abon, a child at the time of the evacuation and now one of the aunties who host us on Mejatto, recalls the sea passage and the hardship that came after. 'I still have that vivid memory of the last glimpse of Rongelap, when everyone started crying,' Abon says. 'We came here with nothing.' Ghosts of the past Swinley Freddy, a compact man in his early 70s with a crinkly, charismatic face, sweeps the dirt outside his house, picking up every leaf that has fallen in the night. He moves on to slice coconut with a machete to feed to his mottled pink and black pigs, which gobble and grunt, while their piglets grab the chance to suckle. After the chores are done, he leads us to the Mejatto graveyard. In contrast to his yard, it is overgrown with weeds. He points out the concrete cross streaked white and grey, engraved 'Rose S. Freddy' and the dates that bookend her life. 'My wife was the first to be buried on the island, in 1986,' Freddy says. He remembers her as a kind person and still comes by to talk to her from time to time. Freddy says the graveyard is cleaned up every time a new burial occurs, but it is bad luck to do this when no one has died. A few days later, someone tempts fate by sprucing it up before a Greenpeace photo shoot. Jeton Anjain, the latter-day Moses, died in 1993 and is also buried here – his daughter Anjain-Maddison says that's because he made a promise not to abandon the people of Rongelap 'in life or death'. Freddy did not know anything about the radiation poisoning when he moved to Rongelap in 1970 to be with his wife, having come from what's now called the Federated States of Micronesia. But once there, he saw a lot of sickness and babies born with birth defects – some so extreme that he describes the babies as 'looking like crepes'. The couple's seventh child, Julie, appeared to be healthy at first, but she didn't start crawling until she was a couple of years old, or walking until she was seven or eight. Now 48, Julie is still child-size and dependent on her family. She clearly has a close bond with her father and big sister Sylvia, and joins in community life, often the first to join any dancing and singing. Rose Freddy died a year after the family's arrival on Mejatto, while giving birth to their eighth baby, who also died. Freddy is uncertain whether the radiation killed his wife, but he is certain it harmed Julie. Professor Timothy Mousseau, a biologist specialising in the effects of radiation at the University of South Carolina in the US and one of the independent scientists brought to the island by Greenpeace, says this is impossible to prove on an individual basis, but quite likely. Mousseau is working with a team of vets to take blood samples from dogs on Mejatto and other islands, while also vaccinating and deworming them, and studying moths and earthworms. Another scientific team is focused on testing the radiation in the soil and taking samples of the fruit from the trees for testing back on the ship. The scientists will travel with Greenpeace on the Rainbow Warrior III on a five-week mission starting from Mejatto, which includes a stop at Enewetak Atoll. Here, nuclear waste is buried under the Runit Dome, which is cracking and threatens to collapse from the effects of climate change. The US has declared it the responsibility of the Marshall Islands. The Rainbow Warrior III will also visit Bikini, where the bombs were detonated, and downwind atolls Rongelap and Wotje. There is no real prospect of finding that places such as Bikini and Rongelap are now safe to inhabit, but there is hope the mission will uncover new evidence in the ongoing fight for better compensation from the US government. Abuse of a kind people Our arrival on Mejatto – via two boats that speed us from the ship to the beach – is a Pacific-style guard of honour. It appears everyone on the island has lined up to greet us, many singing and playing ukuleles. The aunties give us fresh drinking coconuts and place leis made of frangipani around our necks. The fruit is sweet, the flowers are intensely fragrant and starting to brown. We file past a long reception line and shake everyone's hand, from elderly people to babies, then follow a path of dead coral to the centre of the island. This is where the school, community hall, church and several satellite dishes are located, and we set up camp on the floor in several vacated buildings. Our presence is soon clocked by personnel at the nearby US military base of Kwajelein, and our first few days are punctuated by the occasional buzzing of a military plane flying low over the island, out to the ship then back again. The islanders say this is rare. Once an American protectorate, the Marshall Islands is now a sovereign nation in a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the US – essentially, the US gets a base and manages defence while the Marshall Islands gets economic assistance and visa-free immigration for its citizens. The aunties have organised a roster to cook for us and serve our meals at the hall, with a blessing by the pastor before the meals and singing and dancing afterwards. With supplies supplemented by Greenpeace, we eat rice and breadfruit, pork, eggs and fish, coconut and pandanus, a bright orange, fibrous fruit that is usually cooked. They go out of their way to feed us even on the morning when we leave, some of us taking a flight back to Majuro from a nearby island rather than sailing on the Rainbow Warrior. One of the aunties, Grace Abon, rises early and travels to the nearby island to cook eggs and ham by the airstrip, while one of the men climbs a palm to cut down fresh coconuts. In our five days on Mejatto, there is time for exploration, conversation and reflection. Hundreds of Rongelapese – not just those who remain on Mejatto but many others now scattered throughout the Marshall Islands – have gathered for this vigil and the Rainbow Warrior visit. Everyone talks about the kindness and generosity of the Marshallese, and it seems true. In our time there, I do not witness anyone saying a harsh word to another adult, child or even a dog. Angeline Heine-Reimers, the director of the Marshall Islands' National Energy Office, later tells me that this trait has not always served her people well. 'The core of Marshallese culture is being kind and being respectful, and when you have that, you tend to be a doormat and let people from other countries who were taught to be assertive and opinionated walk all over you,' she says. The first COFA, effective from 1986, was negotiated when the Marshall Islands was not yet independent and the US was withholding classified information about the nuclear contamination. It included $US150 million for full and final settlement for the nuclear testing. Some of the money was to compensate for the loss of land. Rongelapese woman Eve Burns, 27, a journalist at The Marshall Islands Journal in Majuro, tells me this currently works out to $US11 a month per person. The money was also meant to cover personal compensation claims, but no one has received their full award. A tribunal set up to process claims awarded $US92 million to direct survivors of the blast. Of that, about $US73 million has actually reached awardees or their heirs. (By contrast, in the US, people who were downwind of nuclear testing in Nevada received full compensation.) Personal compensation does not cover Rongelap's 'control group' – those who returned in 1957 and spent decades living on contaminated land – nor children subsequently born on Rongelap. The free specialist treatment that Mina Titus and other children received when they were evacuated to the US for thyroid treatment in the 1960s does not extend to Abon's generation, who left Rongelap as children. They also suffer a lot of thyroid problems and leukaemia, but receive no compensation and only qualify for free GP access. The COFA was renewed in 2003, when the Marshall Islands' geostrategic bargaining position was at a low ebb due to the end of the Cold War, and again in 2023, when it was somewhat improved thanks to US competition with China in the Pacific. Nuclear claims have not been in the compacts since the original agreement. Loading A changed circumstances petition, asking for extra compensation given the extent of the blast's fallout was wider than first thought, was presented to the US Congress in 2000 and ultimately rejected. To date, the US has insisted it has provided full and final settlement. The UN special rapporteur for internally displaced persons last year called for the US to 'acknowledge that nuclear damages have not been remedied by the paltry past statements and to fully fund payment of the claims assessed by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal'. The UN also asked the US to provide better healthcare, as well as contribute to Marshallese efforts to combat the effects of climate change. A request to interview the US ambassador to the Marshall Islands was declined. The nuclear legacy of the Marshall Islands has echoes around the world. The British tested their bombs near Aboriginal settlements in Maralinga, South Australia, the Montebello islands off Australia's north-west coast and Kiribati in the central Pacific. The Soviet Union tested in Kazakhstan and other remote locations. The French in Algeria and French Polynesia. China in the Uyghur-populated west of the country. Heine-Reimers says it took her people a long time to realise what had been done to them. The Japanese tortured and starved the Marshallese during World War II. When the Americans drove them out, they were welcomed as liberators, Heine-Reimers explains; in the 1960s, that goodwill was cemented by a flood of Peace Corps volunteers teaching US values: 'We ate it up.' . Yet the regard was not always reciprocated. One Atomic Energy Commission scientist in the 1950s, while urging Congress to return the people to Rongelap for the purpose of scientific study, put it this way: 'While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilised people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.' The 1970s-era US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, talking about taking land for military purposes, said of the Marshall Islands: 'There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?' Fulfilling a dying wish When I meet former Marshall Islands senator Abacca Anjain-Maddison again, we are sitting in the lagoon, bathed in the glorious golden light that comes just before sunset. We have decided to escape the day's unrelenting heat by conducting our interview in the water rather than next to it. The water is about 27 degrees and comes up to my chest while I carefully hold my phone up to record. Fortunately, on this corner of the island it is sheltered, and the water is mostly still. All I can hear is the gentle lapping of the water, punctuated by the occasional dog bark and rooster crow. A child runs down to give Anjain-Maddison a white flower, which she tucks behind her ear. 'The only thing missing is the wine,' jokes Anjain-Maddison. Fulfilling her father's dying wish, Anjain-Maddison served as a senator from 2000 to 2007, trying to realise her father's dream of a resettlement project for his people to return to Rongelap. Funded by the US, a contractor undertook rehabilitation work. The Rongelapese people were invited to return in 2011. But the clean-up fell short of expectations, and the funds are now depleted. 'The Rongelapese felt they were lied to again because it was their wish to clean up all the islands they wanted to live and thrive on, not just confined to a small clean-up place on the main island,' Anjain-Maddison says. 'It was written in the plan, but it didn't come through.' Many people still long to return to Rongelap, but others see it as a pipedream. 'Even if they clean the land, how could they clean the ocean?' asks Henritha Kalles, 46, a cousin and neighbour of Grace Abon. If there is a common thread in the Marshallese experience, it is displacement because of environmental forces caused by other people – first, the nuclear legacy and its ripples and, now, climate change. On Mejatto, trees are marooned in the sea as the shoreline shrinks, unripe breadfruit are falling from the trees because of drought, and salty groundwater has made it difficult to grow vegetables except in a small, aeroponic community garden. Burns, the young journalist in Majuro, grew up hearing stories of Rongelap from her grandmother and would love to visit. But for her generation, the exodus is from the entire Marshall Islands. 'A lot of people are moving out of these islands because of climate change – their homes getting disturbed by erosion and water coming on land,' Burns says. 'Everyone's leaving. It's a lot cheaper to go to the States and live there than to stay and rebuild every year.' In 2020, the population of the Marshall Islands was about 42,000; the population of Marshallese living in the US was more than 47,000. I wonder if that diaspora might live in Hawaii to keep a connection with island life – and indeed, that was once the natural destination for emigrating Marshallese. However, the price of real estate and cost of living has made it prohibitive to live there these days. The biggest population of Marshallese is in landlocked Arkansas, where Walmart and chicken processing giant Tyson Foods have their headquarters. Grace Abon's younger sister, Irene, 47, says her parents' generation was too focused on survival to practise and pass on traditional skills like weaving and canoe-making, while her generation has been left unmoored, 'moving from island to island'. 'Our parents are the affected generation and we are the lost generation,' she says. Anjain-Maddison points out that the displacement has particularly affected Marshallese women. 'The Marshall Islands is a matrilineal society and that means that through your mother you own land,' she says. 'If you lose that land, that means women lose their role.' Henritha Kalles says her country's nuclear history was not taught when she was at school and even if the people who did the nuclear testing came to say sorry, she could not accept it. 'They took my heart, my heritage, my hope, and all the things that I should have looked forward to – and I didn't even know the story until I was middle-aged.' * The author and photographer Eddie Jim pay their respects to Kathy Joel, known as 'Aunty Kathy' to those close to her, who died not long after Good Weekend 's visit to Mejatto. The author and photographer travelled to the Marshall Islands as guests of Greenpeace. To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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Wild cargo: Inside the Solomon Islands' exotic pet industry

Samson Michael has been collecting reptiles for most of his life. In his Tennessee home, an entire room is dedicated to them - a private menagerie filled with snakes, lizards and skinks. Among them are monkey-tailed skinks from Solomon Islands. But how did these animals, found in the forest of remote Pacific islands, end up in a glass tank in America's south? Solomon Islands is the Pacific region's largest legal commercial exporter of wildlife for the exotic pet trade - a little-known but thriving industry that supports a vast network of trappers, village buyers and exporters across the country. Join journalist Prianka Srinivasan as she investigates the controversial supply chain that takes animals from a jungle in Santa Isabel to end up in an American lounge room. Presenter: Prianka Srinivasan *Reporting was supported by the Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.