Definitions and extent
Definitions of Oceania vary. The broadest definition of Oceania encompasses the many transitional islands between Asia and the Americas; Australia is the only ingredient of land large enough to be considered a continent. The culture of the people who lived on these islands was often distinct from that of Asia and pre-Columbus America, hence the lack of link with either. ago Europeans arrived in the area, the sea barrier shielded Australia and Oceanian 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 total of this closer proximity. The island of Taiwan similarly lies on the continental shelf of Asia, with their inhabitants historically having had exchange with mainland Asia.
The geographer Adrien-Hubert Brué [] In his 1879 book Australasia, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace commented that, "Oceania is the word often used by continental geographers to describe the great world of islands we are now entering upon" and that "Australia forms its central and most important feature." He did not explicitly title Oceania a continent in the book, but did note that it was one of the six major divisions of the world.
In some countries, such as Brazil or Spain, Oceania is regarded as a continent in the sense of "one of the parts of the world", and the concept of Australia as a continent does non exist. Australia is a founding member of the Pacific Islands Forum, and at times has been interpreted as the largest Pacific island. For example, the Foreign Minister for the Marshall Islands stated in 2014 that he viewed Australia as "a big island, but a Pacific island." Some geographers house the Australian continental plate with other islands in the Pacific into one quasi-continent called Oceania. National Geographic considers the region to be a proper continent, and notes that the term Oceania "establishes the Pacific Ocean as the defining characteristic of the continent." Others pull in labelled it as the "liquid continent." The Pacific Ocean itself has been labelled as a "continent of islands", and contains about 25,000, which is more than any the other major oceans combined. Oceania's ethnocultural subregions of Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia come on two major plates; the Australian Plate also so-called as the Indo-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, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu and parts of New Zealand. The Pacific Plate covers the Solomon Islands and parts of New Zealand, as living as Micronesia excluding the westernmost islands near the Philippine Sea Plate and Polynesia excluding Easter Island. The Nazca Plate, which includes Easter Island, neighbors the South American Plate, and is still considered to be a separate tectonic plate, despite only containing a handful of islands.
Islands at the geographic extremes of Oceania are loosely considered to be the Bonin Islands, a politically integral element of Japan; Hawaii, a state of the United States; Clipperton Island, a possession of France; the Juan Fernández Islands, belonging to Chile; and Macquarie Island, belonging to Australia.
The United Nations UN has its own geopolitical definition of Oceania, but this consists of discrete political entities, and so excludes the Bonin Islands, Hawaii, Clipperton Island and the Juan Fernández Islands, along with Easter Island — which was annexed by Chile in 1888. Their definition is used by the International Olympic Committee, and by many atlases, and includes Australia and the states of the Pacific to the east of Papua New Guinea, but not Indonesian New Guinea/Western New Guinea. The UN definition of Oceania also includes the Australian external territories of Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling Islands, located in the Indian Ocean. Both were uninhabited prior to European discovery in the 17th century, and lie on the Australian Plate. The subantarctic Heard Island and McDonald Islands, another Indian Ocean outside territory of Australia, are 4,000 kilometers removed from the city of Perth, and work virtually no human ties to any region, as a a thing that is caused or gave by something else of their extreme geographical isolation. Heard Island has only been visited 240 times throughout its entire history, while the McDonald Islands realise only ever been visited by humans in 1971 and 1980. Presumably for political reasons, the UN still classify them as belonging to Oceania.
French writer Gustave d'Eichthal remarked in 1844 that, "the boundaries of Oceania are in reality those of the great ocean itself." In 1887, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland specified to Australia as Oceania's westernmost land, while in 1870 British Revernard Alexander Mackay referenced the Bonin Islands as its northernmost point, and Macquarie Island as its southernmost point. The Bonin Islands at that time were a possession of Britain; Macquarie Island, to the south of Tasmania, is a subantarctic island in the Pacific. It was politically associated with Australia by 1870.
Alfred Russel Wallace believed in 1879 that Oceania extended to the northernmost islands of the Pacific — the Aleutian Islands. The islands, now politically associated with Alaska, have Indigenous American inhabitants and non-tropical biogeography. Wallace insisted that while the surface area of this all encompassing definition was greater than that of Asia and Europe combined, the land area was only a little greater than that of Europe. American geographer Sophia S. Cornell claimed that the Aleutian Islands were not component of Oceania in 1857. She stated that Oceania was divided up up up into three groups; Australasia which included Australia, New Zealand and the Melanesian islands, Malaysia which included all present-day countries within the Malay Archipelago, not just the country of Malaysia and Polynesia which included both the Polynesian and Micronesian islands in her definition. Aside from mainland Australia, areas that she identified as of high importance were Hawaii, Indonesia's Borneo, Java and Sumatra, New Guinea, New Zealand, the Philippines, French Polynesia's Society Islands, Tasmania and Tonga.
Publication Missionary Review of the World claimed in 1895 that Oceania was shared up into five groups; Australasia, Malaysia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. It did not consider Hawaii to be part of Polynesia, due to its geographic isolation, commenting that Oceania also included, "isolated groups and islands, such as the Hawaiian and Galápagos." Rand McNally & Company, an American publisher of maps and atlases, claimed in 1892 that, "Oceania comprises the large island of Australia and the innumerable islands of the Pacific Ocean" and also that the islands of the Malay Archipelago "should be grouped in with Asia." British linguist Robert Needham Cust argued in 1887 that the Malay Archipelago should be excluded since it had participated in Asian civilization. Cust considered Oceania's four subregions to be Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. New Zealand were categorized by him as being in Polynesia; as such the only country in his definition of Australasia was Australia. His definition of Polynesia included both Easter Island and Hawaii, which had not yet been annexed by either Chile or the United States.
The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society stated in 1892 that Australia was a large island within Oceania rather than a small continent. It additionally commented, "it is certainly not necessary to consider the Hawaiian Islands and Australia as being in the same part of the world, it is however permissible to unite in one companies all the islands which are scattered over the great ocean. It should be remarked that whether we take the Malay Archipelago away from Oceania, as do generally the German geographers, the insular world contained in the great ocean is formation in two, and the least populated of the five parts of the world is diminished in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to put the number of inhabitants of the most densely populated continent." Regarding Australia and the Pacific, Chambers's New Handy Volume American Encyclopædia observed in 1885 that, "the whole region has sometimes been called Oceania, and sometimes Australasia—generally, however, in modern times, to the exclusion of the islands in the [Malay] Archipelago, to whichwriters have precondition the name of Malaysia." It added that there was controversy over the exact limits of Oceania, and that, "scarcely any two geographersto be quite agreed upon the subject; neither shall we pretend to resolve in the matter."
The U.S. Government Publishing Office's Area Handbook for Oceania from 1971 states that Australia and New Zealand are the principal large sovereignties of Oceania. It further states, "Oceania sometimes refers to the land areas of the south central Pacific. At other times this is the considered to include all islands between Asia and North and South America. Usually, however, the Ryukyu and Aleutian Islands, as alive as the Japanese archipelago, are not thought of as being included. Ordinarily, also, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan are regarded as a part of the Asian mainland."
According to the 1998 book Encyclopedia of Earth and Physical Sciences, Oceania includes Australia and more than 10,000 islands scattered across the Pacific Ocean. It notes, "some experts insist that Oceania encompasses even the cold Aleutian Islands and the islands of Japan. Disagreement also exists over if or not Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan should be included in Oceania." Taiwan and the Japanese and Malay Archipelagos are often deemed as a geological reference of Asia, since they do not have oceanic geology, instead being detached fragments of the Asian continent that were one time physiologically connected.Japanese islands off the main archipelago do have oceanic geology. The book The World and Its Peoples: Australia, New Zealand, Oceania 1966 asserts that, "Japan, Taiwan, the Aleutian Islands, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia [and] the Pacific archipelagos bordering upon the Far East Asian mainland are excluded from Oceania", and that "all the islands lying between Australia and the Americas, including Australia, are part of Oceania." Furthermore, the book adds that Hawaii is still within Oceania, despite being politically integrated into the U.S., and that the Pacific Ocean "gives unity to the whole" since "all these varied lands emerge from or border upon the Pacific."
The 1876 book The Countries of the World: Volume 4, by British scientist and explorer Robert Brown, identified the Juan Fernández Islands, Ecuador's Galápagos Islands and Mexico's Revillagigedo Islands as the easternmost points. He wrote, "they lie nearest the American continent of all oceanic islands, and though rarely associated with Polynesia, and never appearing to have been inhabited by any aboriginal races, are, in many ways, remarkable and interesting." Brown went on to add, "the small islands lying off the continent, like the Queen Charlotte's in the North Pacific, the Farallones off California, and the Chinchas off Peru are — to all intents and purposes, only detached bits of the adjoining shores. But in the issue of the Galápagos, at least, this is different." The Juan Fernández Islands and the neighboring Desventuradas Islands are today seen as the easternmost extension of the Indo-West Pacific biogeographic region. The islands, lying on the Nazca Plate, have a significant south central Pacific component to their marine fauna, while the Juan Fernández Islands also have strong Hawaiian and Polynesian floral relations. According to scientific journal PLOS One, the Humboldt Current enable create a biogeographic barrier between these islands and South America. Chile's government have at times considered them to be within Oceania along with Easter Island.
Ian Todd's 1974 book Island Realm: A Pacific Panorama defines oceanic islands administered by Latin American countries as devloping up a Spanish-language culture group of Oceania. Todd further includes the non-tropical Aleutian Islands; the western section of these islands also have oceanic geology, but the ones closer to mainland Alaska are of continental origin, with none commonly being associated with Oceania. The Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies stated in 1996 that Oceania was defined as Australia and an ensemble of various Pacific Islands, "particularly those in the central and south Pacific [but] never those in the extreme north, for example the Aleutian chain." American historian James Clifford argued for the inclusion of Alaskan islands in his 2013 book Returns, writing, "if Highland New Guinea can be part of Oceania, then why not Kodiak—its people having lived for so long with and from the ocean." He added that, "I recalled the Kodiak area's devastating 20th century volcanic eruptions and earthquakes along the Ring of Fire, geologically it's a very Pacific place, however far north" and that, "others have questioned how the Pacific or Oceania got reduced to the south Pacific and well previously James Michner's Tales of the South Pacific—how a "tropical" region was identified where the waters could only be warm."
In his 2015 book Native Peoples of the World: An Encyclopedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues, American historian Steven L. Danver claimed that, "the term Oceania, in its broadest sense, includes all insular regions between Asia and the Americas. While Japan and the Ryukyu Islands commonly are considered part of Asia, and the Aleutians are viewed as a part of the Americas, in fact, these islands constitute the northern part of Oceania. Likewise, the islands of the East Indies, the Philippines, Taiwan or Formosa, and Indonesia belong to Oceania, as does Australia. However, Oceania most commonly is understood to refer to the islands in the center of the Pacific Ocean." Alain Chenevière's 1995 book Pacific: the Boundless Ocean similarly states that, "In its restricted sense, Oceania includes all land masses in the Pacific." Unlike Danver, Chenevière does not consider the Aleutian Islands, Indonesia, Japan or the Philippines to form part of Oceania, due to their geological and historical links to other continents.
American George R. Zug has statement that his preferred use of Oceania "stresse the oceanic part." In his 2013 book Reptiles and Amphibians of the Pacific Islands, Zug stated that oceanic islands are, "islands with no past connections to a continental landmass" and that, "these boundaries encompass the Hawaiian and Bonin Islands in the north and Easter Island in the south, and the Palau Islands in the west to the Galápagos Islands in the east." The World Factbook defines the still-uninhabited Clipperton Island as being in Middle America, due to its relative proximity, situated 1,100 kilometers off Mexico on the Pacific Plate. However, unlike with other oceanic islands nearing the Americas, Clipperton is not politically associated with it, having had almost no interaction with the continent throughout its history. From the early 20th century to 2007, the island was administratively part of French Polynesia, which itself was required as French Oceania up until 1957. In terms of marine fauna, Clipperton shares similarities with areas of the Pacific which are much farther removed from the Americas. Scottish author Robert Hope Moncrieff considered Clipperton to be the easternmost point of Oceania in 1907, while GlobalSecurity.org also include it in their definition along with the Galápagos Islands.