Oceania
Oceania is a geographical region including Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Outside of the English-speaking world, Oceania is generally considered a continent, while mainland Australia is regarded as its continental landmass. Spanning the Eastern and Western hemispheres, at the centre of the water hemisphere, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of about and a population of around 46.3 million as of 2024. Oceania is the smallest continent in land area and the second-least populated after Antarctica. It is home to Earth’s third-largest remaining area of tropical rainforest, which covers much of the island of New Guinea.
Oceania has a diverse mix of economies from the highly developed and globally competitive financial markets of Australia, French Polynesia, Hawaii, New Caledonia, and New Zealand, which rank high in quality of life and Human Development Index, to the much less developed economies of Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Western New Guinea. The largest and most populous country in Oceania is Australia, and the largest city is Sydney. Puncak Jaya in Indonesia is the highest peak in Oceania at.
The first settlers of Australia, New Guinea, and the large islands just to the east arrived more than 60,000 years ago. Oceania was first explored by Europeans from the 16th century onward. Portuguese explorers, between 1512 and 1526, reached the Tanimbar Islands, some of the Caroline Islands, and west New Guinea. Spanish and Dutch explorers followed, then British and French. On his first voyage in the 18th century, James Cook, who later arrived at the highly developed Hawaiian Islands, went to Tahiti and followed the east coast of Australia for the first time. The arrival of European settlers in subsequent centuries resulted in a significant alteration in the social and political landscape of Oceania. The Pacific theatre saw major action during the First and Second World Wars.
The rock art of Aboriginal Australians is the longest continuously practiced artistic tradition in the world. Most Oceanian countries are parliamentary democracies, with tourism serving as a large source of income for the Pacific island nations.
Definition
Characteristics
Definitions of Oceania vary. The broadest definition encompasses the islands between mainland Asia and the Americas. The island nation of Australia is the only piece of land in the area which is large enough to typically be considered a continent. The culture of the people who lived on these islands was often distinct from that of Asia and pre-Columbian America. Before Europeans arrived in the area, the sea shielded Australia and south central Pacific islands from cultural influences that spread through large continental landmasses and adjacent islands. The islands of the Malay Archipelago, north of Australia, mainly lie on the continental shelf of Asia, and their inhabitants had more exposure to mainland Asian culture as a result of this closer proximity.The geographer Conrad Malte-Brun coined the French expression Terres océaniques . In 1814 another French cartographer, Adrien-Hubert Brué, coined from this expression the shorter Océanie, which derives from the Latin word, and this from the Greek word , 'ocean'. The term Oceania is used because, unlike the other continental groupings, it is the ocean that links the parts of the region together. John Eperjesi's 2005 book The Imperialist Imaginary says that Since the mid-19th century, Western cartographers have used the term Oceania to organize and classify the Pacific region.
File:1852 Bocage Map of Australia and Polynesia - Geographicus - Oceanie-bocage-1852.jpg|thumb|1852 map by Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage. Includes regions of Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia and Malesia
In the 19th century, many geographers divided Oceania into mostly racially based subdivisions: Australasia, Malesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. The 2011 book Maritime Adaptations of the Pacific, by Richard W. Casteel and Jean-Claude Passeron, states that Oceania has traditionally been considered a continent in anthropological studies, similar to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Bartholomew described Oceania as one of six major world divisions, including Australia and Pacific islands. American author Samuel Griswold Goodrich wrote in his 1854 book History of All Nations that, some 19th-century geographers classified the Pacific islands as a third continent called Oceania, alongside the New and Old Worlds. In this book, the other two continents were categorized as being the New World and the Old World. In his 1879 book Australasia, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace commented that, geographers commonly used Oceania to refer to the Pacific islands, with Australia as its central landmass. He did not explicitly label Oceania a continent in the book, but did note that it was one of the six major divisions of the world. The Oxford Handbook of World History describes the Oceania is often treated as a secondary topic in world history, appearing at the end of global narratives as a marginal region.
In most non-English-speaking countries, Oceania is treated as a continent in the sense that it is "one of the parts of the world", and Australia is only seen as an island nation. In other non-English-speaking countries Australia and Eurasia are thought of as continents, while Asia, Europe, and Oceania are regarded as "parts of the world". Nevertheless, various writers from English-speaking countries have described Oceania as a continent over the years. Prior to the 1950s, before the popularization of the theory of plate tectonics, Antarctica, Australia, and Greenland were sometimes described as island continents, but none were usually taught as one of the world's continents in the English-speaking countries.. In his 1961 book The United States and the Southwest Pacific, American author Clinton Hartley Grattan commented that, by 1961, the term Oceania to describe Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands was considered somewhat outdated. Australia is a founding member of the Pacific Islands Forum in 1971, and at times has been interpreted as the largest Pacific island. Some geographers group the Australian tectonic plate with others in the Pacific to form a geological continent. National Geographic defines Oceania as a continent based on its connection to the Pacific Ocean rather than landmass. Others have labelled it as the "liquid continent". The Pacific Ocean itself has been labelled as a "continent of islands", and contains approximately 25,000, which is more than all the other major oceans combined. In a 1991 article, American archeologist Toni L. Carrell wrote, The vast size and distances within the Pacific Basin make it challenging to view it as a single geographical unit.
Oceania's subregions of Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia cover two major plates; the Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate, in addition to two minor plates; the Nazca Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate. The Australian Plate includes Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and parts of New Zealand. The Pacific Plate covers the Solomon Islands and parts of New Zealand, as well as Micronesia and Polynesia. The Nazca Plate, which includes Easter Island, neighbours the South American Plate, and is still considered to be a separate tectonic plate, despite only containing a handful of islands.
Oceania's subregions of Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia cover two major plates; the Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate, in addition to two minor plates; the Nazca Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate. The Australian Plate includes Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and parts of New Zealand. The Pacific Plate covers the Solomon Islands and parts of New Zealand, as well as Micronesia and Polynesia. The Nazca Plate, which includes Easter Island, neighbours the South American Plate, and is still considered to be a separate tectonic plate, despite only containing a handful of islands.
File:Map of Near and Remote Oceania and location of Efate Island, Vanuatu.tif|thumb|upright=1.3|Map displaying parts of Near Oceania and Remote Oceania with a focus on Efate
The new terms Near Oceania and Remote Oceania were proposed in 1973 by anthropologists Roger Green and Andrew Pawley. By their definition, Near Oceania consists of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands, except the Santa Cruz Islands. They are designed to dispel the outdated categories of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; many scholars now replace those categories with Green's terms since the early 1990s, but the old categories are still used in science, popular culture and general usage.