Vanuatu means land that stands after a Franco-British condo
Vanuatu’s volcanic Melanesian archipelago lies about 1,750 kilometres east of northern Australia. Melanesians settled first; Fernandes de Queirós claimed Espíritu Santo for Spain in 1606. France and Britain carved claims in the 1880s and in 1906 invented the New Hebrides condominium.
The islands had no single Indigenous name. James Cook called them the New Hebrides in 1774 after Scotland’s Hebrides, naming New Caledonia on the same voyage after Scotland’s Latin name. A few years earlier Louis Antoine de Bougainville had chosen Archipel des grandes Cyclades, but French speakers later switched to Nouvelles-Hébrides, a translation of Cook’s label.
Human history before Europeans is poorly known: there are no early written sources, archaeology has been limited, and volcanoes and storms have likely buried or destroyed many sites. Evidence gathered since the 1980s indicates that people of the Lapita culture first settled the islands roughly 3,000 years ago, between about 1100 and 700 BCE. Discoveries stretching from Aneityum in the far south up to the northern Banks Islands have overturned the old idea that Lapita influence here was marginal.
The first European claim came in 1606, when the navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós took possession of the largest island in Spain’s name. During the 1880s Britain and France both asserted claims to the islands, and from 1906 they ran it jointly as the Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebrides. An independence movement grew in the 1970s.
The first locally coined name was Vanuaaku, my land or our land, taken up in 1977 by the New Hebrides National Party, a pro-independence group that renamed itself the Vanua’aku Pati, and used in a 1978 independence proclamation. Because that word was tied so closely to one party, a national-symbols subcommittee proposed Vanuatu instead, credited to Tom Tipolomata of Tongoa, and in February 1980 the Representative Assembly adopted it by 26 votes to 2. The republic founded that year joined the UN, the Commonwealth, the Francophonie and the Pacific Islands Forum.
Source: Vanuatu
