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Flags of Nauru

A single raised-coral island of about eight square miles, Nauru was home for centuries to an Indigenous community organized into twelve distinct tribes — a number still commemorated in the modern flag's star — before German annexation in 1888 drew it into a colonial, then mandate, then trust-territory chain of administration spanning three different foreign powers across eighty years.

Independence in 1968 made Nauru one of the smallest sovereign states on Earth, and for a stretch in the 1970s–80s, thanks to rich phosphate deposits built up over millennia from seabird guano, one of the wealthiest per capita as well — a fortune that has since largely receded along with the phosphate itself.

Scope of this page: the island of Nauru, pre-1888 to present, four entries. No internal partition at any point in Nauru's history, so this page carries no internal-split map. Part of a larger atlas — see the linked pages at the bottom.

Nauru's own coastline, four rulers

Nauru's own real coastline, traced whole — a single 21-square-kilometer island that changed rulers without ever being administratively split. Press play, or drag the slider, to watch who held it, era to era.

This is a single-region page — there has never been more than one government on Nauru at a time. At barely 21 square kilometers, with no neighboring land for hundreds of kilometers, Nauru has no internal region to genuinely split apart.

1968–present

Republic of Nauru (independent)

Real traced coastline (a small island, shown enlarged), no internal partition — see the rule box above for why.

blue field, gold equator stripe, white 12-pointed star — adopted at independence

1968 – present

Republic of Nauru (independent)

Independent stateHammer DeRoburtSecular (no state religion)

Migration & conquest:Immigration: Australian offshore asylum-seeker centre (2001–)

Who & why: Nauru becomes fully independent of Australian, British, and New Zealand trusteeship on 31 January 1968, still celebrated as Angam Day's companion national holiday and the island's founding date as a sovereign republic. With a land area of about 21 square kilometers and a population that has never much exceeded 10,000–13,000, it ranks among the smallest countries in the world by both measures. Phosphate royalties briefly made it, per capita, one of the wealthiest nations on Earth through the 1970s and into the 1980s, before decades of heavy mining exhausted much of the easily worked reserve and left the interior badly degraded.

What it represents: the narrow gold stripe across the blue field marks the equator, which Nauru sits just south of; the white star, with its twelve points, stands for the island's twelve original tribes, and its position below the stripe and toward the hoist marks Nauru's own location just beneath the line.

Paint guide

Proportions1:2.

LayoutBlue field, narrow horizontal gold stripe at mid-height, white 12-pointed star below the stripe, offset toward the hoist.

Blue#002B7F

Gold#FFC61E

White#F4EFE1

Blue Ensign of the administering power — Britain, Australia, New Zealand jointly

1920 – 1968

Mandate and trust territory of Nauru

Mandate / trust territoryBilly HughesNo official state religion

Migration & conquest:Occupied by: Imperial Japan (1942–45)Immigration: Chinese & Pacific Islander phosphate laborers

Ruling house:House of Windsor

Who & why: after Germany's defeat in the First World War, the League of Nations assigns Nauru in 1920 as a C-class mandate held jointly by Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, with Australia serving as the de facto administering power on the ground. Japanese forces occupy the island militarily from 1942 to 1945, deporting much of the population to Chuuk and interrupting Australian administration outright, before Australia resumes control at war's end. The mandate is converted into a United Nations trust territory in 1947 under the same three-power arrangement, and phosphate mining, begun under German rule, continues and expands throughout under joint British-Australian-New Zealand commercial interests, until independence in 1968.

What it represents: no separate Nauruan flag exists in this period; the Australian Blue Ensign, flown as the administering power's own flag, stood in practice for the mandate and later trust administration, with the Union Jack in the canton marking the ultimate imperial authority behind the arrangement.

Paint guide

Proportions1:2.

LayoutBlue field, Union Jack canton (simplified, without the fly-side stars carried on Australia's own ensign).

Blue#00247D

White#F4EFE1

Red#A4302A

German colonial flag — white field, black-white-red canton with imperial eagle

1888 – 1920

German Nauru

ColonyOtto von BismarckLutheran Christianity (imperial state church, no colonial establishment)

Migration & conquest:Immigration: Chinese phosphate laborers (from 1906)

Ruling house:House of Hohenzollern

Who & why: Germany formally annexes Nauru in 1888, incorporating it into the German protectorate administration covering German New Guinea, drawn in part by the island's rich phosphate deposits, whose commercial value is confirmed and exploited from the early 1900s onward. German rule brings the island's first written contact with a colonial legal and administrative system, alongside missionary activity that introduces Christianity and a Latin orthography for the Nauruan language. German administration ends with the island's occupation by Australian forces in 1914, early in the First World War, though formal German sovereignty is not extinguished until the postwar settlement.

What it represents: the German imperial colonial ensign — a white field with the black-white-red colors of the German Empire and its eagle device set in the fly — flew over German New Guinea's protectorate administration, including Nauru, marking German rather than any locally distinct authority.

Paint guide

Proportions2:3.

LayoutWhite field, black-white-red horizontal canton in the fly, black imperial eagle centered on the canton.

White#F4EFE1

Black#1A1A1A

Red#A4302A

placeholder — pre-annexation era, no flag survives

pre-1888

Indigenous Nauruan community

Indigenous nation, pre-contactNo single ruler documentedTraditional Nauruan animist beliefs

Who & why: for centuries before German annexation, Nauru's Indigenous population maintained a distinct island community organized into twelve original tribes or clans, sustained by fishing, coconut and pandanus cultivation, and the island's inland Buada Lagoon. Contact with European ships from the late 18th century onward — the island earned the nickname "Pleasant Island" from early British visitors — brought sporadic trade and, later, firearms that fed a period of internal conflict among the tribes, but no single unifying political authority or outside colonial claim existed over the island before 1888.

What it represents: no flag or comparable territorial emblem is documented for pre-annexation Nauru; heraldic flags were not part of Indigenous Nauruan custom, and the twelve-tribe structure of this era is instead commemorated symbolically, decades later, in the twelve points of the star on the modern national flag. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

Paint guide

ProportionsN/A — no attested flag.

Reading the tags

Indigenous nation, pre-contact — twelve tribes, no outside colonial claim

Colony — under a foreign power's direct administration

Mandate / trust territory — administered under League of Nations or UN oversight

Independent state — sovereign under its own government

Leader — the named ruler most associated with the era's start

State religion — the official/established faith, not the population's

Find the records

Family history research for Nauru lives in a different project, Record Atlas, which maps which archive actually holds the paper for a given place and era.

Search Record Atlas for Nauru →

More of the atlas

This page is one lineage in a larger set. See the region-wide hub and the other countries here:

Flags Atlas indexSearch every country and hub Pacific hubFourteen countries, Oceania