In a lot of ways, Nauru is something like a canary in a coal mine: It's a tiny place with more than its share of troubles, most of them the kind that might have been prevented.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If the Pacific took Nauru, it'd wash away one of the strangest and most troubled places on Earth.
There are people all over Australia who use their homes as hubs that they travel from, and they encourage their indigenous people to continue to stay there.
Niger is not an isolated island of desperation. It lies within a sea of problems across Africa - particularly the 'forgotten emergencies' in poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal.
I come from a country that lives and breathes rugby, and I didn't think there would be anywhere else in the world that could be the same. But New Zealand takes it to another dimension. It's extraordinary how much passion Kiwis have for the game.
This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed, but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become.
Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude.
Shaped like Texas, but twice as big, Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. It exports almost nothing - mostly just cotton, gold and livestock - and doesn't have enough money to import much of anything, either.
And I believe that it becomes a troubled continent because there are those who must always cause confusion so that we do not keep these natural resources.
There is no place in the world like Australia. Not even its beautiful neighbor New Zealand.
Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution - warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain - are even more deadly here.