Oceania’s past has been shaped by its ancient settlement and by the more recent populating of Australia and New Zealand by Europeans. By contrast, its present is increasingly being influenced by economic and geographic considerations, particularly its physical proximity to Asia.

The Peopling of Oceania

The longest-surviving inhabitants of Oceania are Australia’s Aborigines, whose ancestors (the Australoids) migrated from Southeast Asia 50,000 to 70,000 years ago (Figure 11.13; see also Figure 11.14A), at a time when sea level was somewhat lower. It ispossible that some memory of this ancient journey may be preserved in Aboriginal oral traditions, which recall mountains and other geographic features that are now submerged under water. At about the same time that the Aborigines were settling Australia and Tasmania, related groups were settling nearby areas.

Melanesians, so named for their relatively dark skin tones, a result of high levels of the protective pigment melanin, migrated throughout New Guinea and other nearby islands, giving this area its name, Melanesia. Archaeological evidence indicates that they first arrived more than 50,000 to 60,000 years ago from Sundaland (see Figure 10.5), a now-submerged shelf exposed during the Pleistocene epoch. They lived in isolated pockets, which resulted in the evolution of hundreds of distinct yet related languages. Like the Aborigines, the early Melanesians survived mostly by hunting, gathering, and fishing, although some groups—especially those inhabiting the New Guinea highlands—eventually practiced agriculture.

Much later, between 5000 to 6000 years ago and as recently as 1000 years ago, linguistically related Austronesians (a group of skilled farmers and seafarers from southern China who migrated to Southeast Asia; see Chapter 10) settled Micronesia and Polynesia, sometimes mixing with the Melanesian peoples they encountered. Micronesia consists of the small islands that lie east of the Philippines and north of the equator (see the Figure 11.1 map). Polynesia is made up of numerous islands situated inside the large, irregular triangle formed by New Zealand, Hawaii, and Easter Island. (Easter Island, also called Rapa Nui, is a tiny speck of land in the far eastern Pacific, at 109° W 27° S, not shown in the figures in this chapter.) Recent experiments run by Polynesians (see the voyaging vignette above) have provided evidence that ancient sailors could navigate over vast distances using seasonal winds, astronomic calculations, bird and aquatic life, and wave patterns to reach the most far-flung islands of the Pacific. The Polynesians were fishers, hunter-gatherers, and cultivators who developed complex cultures and maintained trading relationships among their widely spaced islands.

In the millennia that have passed since first settlement, humans have continued to circulate throughout Oceania. Some apparently set out because their own space was crowded and full of conflict or because food reserves were declining. It is also likely that Pacific peoples were enticed to new locales by the same lures that later attracted some of the more romantic explorers from Europe and elsewhere: sparkling beaches, magnificent blue skies, aromatic breezes, and lovely landscapes.

The earliest recorded contact between Pacific peoples and Europeans took place in 1521, when the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (exploring for Spain) landed on the island of Guam in Micronesia. The encounter ended badly. The islanders, intrigued by European vessels, tried to take a small skiff. For this crime, Magellan had his men kill the offenders and burn their village to the ground. A few months later, Magellan was himself killed by islanders in what later became the Philippines, which he had claimed for Spain. Nevertheless, by the 1560s, the Spanish had set up a lucrative Pacific trade route between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico. Explorers from other European states followed, first taking an interest mainly in the region’s valuable spices. The British and French explored Oceania extensively in the eighteenth century (Figure 11.14C).

The Pacific was not formally divided among the colonial powers until the nineteenth century. By that time, the United States, Germany, and Japan had joined France and Britain in taking control of various island groups. As in other regions, the European colonizers of Oceania emphasized extractive agriculture and mining. Because native people were often displaced from their lands or exposed to exotic diseases to which they had no immunity, their populations declined sharply.

Although all of Oceania has been under European or U.S. rule at some point, the most Westernized parts of the region are Australia and New Zealand. The colonization of these two countries by the British has resulted in Australia and New Zealand having many parallels with North America. In fact, the American Revolution was a major impetus for “settling” Australia because once the North American colonies were independent, the British wanted somewhere else to send their convicts. In early nineteenth-century Britain, a relatively minor theft—for example, of a piglet—might be punished with 7 years of hard labor in Australia (see Figure 11.14D).

A steady flow of English and Irish convicts arrived in Australia until 1868. Most of the convicts chose to stay in the colony after their sentences were served and are given credit for Australia’s rustic self-image and egalitarian spirit. They were joined by a much larger group of voluntary immigrants from the British Isles who were attracted by the availability of inexpensive farmland. Waves of these immigrants arrived until World War II. New Zealand was settled in the mid-1800s, somewhat later than Australia. Although its population also derives primarily from British immigrants, New Zealand was never a penal colony.

Another similarity among Australia, New Zealand, and North America was the treatment of indigenous peoples by European settlers. In both Australia and New Zealand, native peoples were killed outright, annihilated by infectious diseases, or shifted to the margins of society. The few who lived on territory the Europeans thought undesirable were able to maintain their traditional ways of life. However, the vast majority of the survivors lived and worked in grinding poverty, either in urban slums or on cattle and sheep ranches. Today, native peoples still suffer from discrimination and maladies such as alcoholism and malnutrition. Even so, some progress is being made toward improving their lives (see pages 475–476). In 2008, the newly elected prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, officially apologized to Aboriginal people for the treatment they have received since the land was first colonized.

Closely related to attitudes toward indigenous people were attitudes toward immigrants of any color other than white. By 1901, a whites-only policy (called the “White Australia policy”) governed Australian immigration, with favored migrants coming from the British Isles and (after World War II) from southern Europe. This discrimination persisted until the mid-1970s, when the White Australia policy on immigration was ended. In New Zealand, where similar racist attitudes prevailed, there was never an official whites-only policy, and by the 1970s, students and immigrants were arriving from Asia and the Pacific islands. Controversy over immigration in Australia and New Zealand has recently centered on the arrival of refugees by boat from various parts of Asia (see Figure 11.17A).

During the twentieth century, Oceania’s relationship with the rest of the world went through three phases: from a predominantly European focus, to identification with the United States and Canada, and finally to the currently emerging linkage with Asia.

Until roughly World War II, the colonial system gave the region a European orientation. In most places, the economy depended largely on the export of raw materials to Europe (see Figure 11.14E). Thus, even when a colony gained independence from Britain, as did Australia in 1901 and New Zealand in 1907, people remained strongly tied to their mother countries. Even today, the Queen of England remains the titular head of state in both countries. During World War II, however, the European powers provided only token resistance to Japan’s invasion of much of the Pacific and its bombing of northern Australia. This European impotence began a change in the region’s political and economic orientation. 244. VETERANS REMEMBER TRAGEDY OF WAR IN PACIFIC

After the war, the United States, which already had a strong foothold in the Philippines, became the dominant power in the Pacific and U.S. investment became more important to the economies of Oceania. Australia and New Zealand joined the United States in a Cold War military alliance, and both fought alongside the United States in Korea and Vietnam, suffering considerable casualties and experiencing significant antiwar activity at home. U.S. cultural influences became strong, too, as North American products, technologies, movies, and pop music penetrated much of Oceania.

By the 1970s, another shift was taking place as many of the island groups were granted self-rule by their European colonizers, and Oceania became steadily drawn into the growing economies of Asia. Since the 1960s, Australia’s thriving mineral export sector has become increasingly geared toward supplying raw materials to Asian manufacturing industries (primarily Japan in the 1960s and China since the 1990s). Similarly, New Zealand’s wool and dairy exports have gone mostly to Asian markets since the 1970s. Despite occasional backlashes against “Asianization,” Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of Oceania are being transformed by Asian influences. Many Pacific islands have significant Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian minorities, and the small Asian minorities of Australia and New Zealand are growing in population (see Figure 11.14F). On some Pacific islands, such as Hawaii, Asians now constitute the largest portion (42 percent in Hawaii, for example) of the population.