Poverty with a smile as Nauru's needy welcome the weary

TO experience the generosity of Nauru, go to Location, a beachside slum of lime and lemon-coloured tenements.

Margaret Agigio

TO experience the generosity of Nauru, go no further than Location, a beachside slum of lime and lemon-coloured tenements that houses one in 10 of the Pacific island's residents. Yesterday, Margaret Agigo, 41, was in her usual spot in the alley, outside a cracked and reeking water tank, plaiting the hair of a niece.

She earns $200 a fortnight as a teacher of disabled children and lives in a crumbling block of flats where the kids play around gaping holes in the concrete floors and chickens scratch for morsels in the dirt and dust outside. The thunder of surf can be heard from the tiny flat she shares with her husband, one-month-old daughter, Ria, and any number of nieces, nephews and grandchildren.

Soon, Location could be home to another group of down-and-outs: asylum-seekers transferred to remote, impoverished Nauru under the terms of the Pacific Solution mark II now being hammered out between Australia and the tiny island state's government.

And that's just fine with Mrs Agigo, who says her troubles are nothing compared with those of people willing to take to a leaky boat to find a new life. "I wouldn't mind at all if they came in here," she said, cradling little Ria in her arms. "It's a privilege for people to do good for others. If they want to live here with us, the asylum-seekers are welcome."

The slum area, which is home to more than 1000 people, came into play after Nauru rejected the option of pressing the largest and most suitable of the Howard-era camps back into service for Julia Gillard's proposed fix to the asylum-seeker crisis.

Nauru's insistence that the former State House site be out of bounds means Australia must fund construction of a third detention centre -- which is where Location comes in -- or rehabilitate a "moonscape" of abandoned phosphate mining fields to extend the only existing alternative, Topside, also used during offshore processing from 2001 to 2008.

A Nauruan government source, party to negotiations at the weekend with an Australian reconnaissance team, confirmed Location was in the mix, though it was probably an outside option.

The attraction for Nauru was that accommodating asylum-seekers there could pave the way for a larger-scale redevelopment of the dilapidated area, one of the island's neediest. The downside was that it would bring the inevitable tensions of a detention camp into its most thickly populated quarter. "It has been looked at but I'm not sure how practical it is," the official said yesterday.

Well-connected local business leader Sean Oppenheimer confirmed he had been told Location had been raised as a possibility when the Immigration Department conducted an audit of mothballed Pacific Solution infrastructure on Nauru earlier this year.

Sandwiched between the island's hospital and port, it was developed helter-skelter to house guest workers from other Pacific islands and Asia to work the phosphate mines that were once the mainstay of Nauru's economy. Originally it was known as the Location Compound.

Mrs Agigo and her family moved in about six years ago, when they went on the waiting list for a state government home. They're still biding their time, with remarkable patience. "We are a bit crowded," she conceded. "But people here are really good. We look after each other."

Candice Jeremiah, 27, agreed. She gave up her own house to her sister-in-law last year and is looking after the two children of her late brother. "We're poor but you can smile. That's Nauru," she said.

For now, all roads lead to the Topside site if the Prime Minister is to achieve the Australian government's stated aim of returning asylum-seekers to Nauru by the end of next month.

MP Mathew Batsiua, a former Nauruan government minister and co-chairman of a parliamentary committee working on reviving offshore processing with Australia, said the initial group would probably be 80-100 strong and housed in tents on the Topside site. "This is something that is unavoidable. We have got to be realistic at this moment," he said.

The State House site is closer to the settled fringe of the island and, according to a departmental submission to Immigration Minister Chris Bowen in January, would have had nearly double the capacity of Topside and was in better repair. But the site also hosts a school and a women's refuge that the Nauruan government is reluctant to move.