Malte-Brun’s “Oceania” covers nine million square kilometres of sea-land
Oceania groups Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia across both hemispheres at the water hemisphere’s centre. Land area runs about nine million square kilometres with roughly 46.3 million people in 2024 if Australia is counted and the Indonesian Malay world excluded.
One account credits Conrad Malte-Brun with coining the name from the Greek for ocean in 1812; another says he wrote of Terres océaniques around 1804 and that cartographer Adrien-Hubert Brué shortened it to Océanie in 1814. Its limits have always been elastic: Malte-Brun in 1824 included the Malay Archipelago, Gustave d’Eichthal in 1844 stretched it across the whole Pacific, and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1879 pushed it to the Aleutians.
Nineteenth-century geographers split it on largely racial lines into Australasia, Malesia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. In 1973 anthropologists Roger Green and Andrew Pawley proposed Near and Remote Oceania instead, with Near Oceania covering New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and most of the Solomons. The UN has used four of the old subregions since 1947, leaving out Hawaii, the Bonin Islands, Clipperton and Easter Island, which Chile annexed in 1888. Australia is the only landmass large enough to be called a continent, while Zealandia counts as a micro-continent.
First settlers reached Australia, New Guinea, and nearby large islands more than 60,000 years ago; Europeans arrived from the sixteenth century, with Portuguese probes between 1512 and 1526 touching Tanimbar and Caroline waters. Aboriginal Australian rock art is regarded as the longest unbroken artistic tradition on Earth.
Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, French Polynesia and New Caledonia have wealthy, high-scoring economies, while others such as Kiribati and Papua New Guinea are far less developed and many small islands depend on tourism. Most Oceanian countries run parliamentary democracies.
Source: Oceania
