Australia & Oceania
Pre-historic to Pre-modern Times

One of the most mysterious regions of the world is the South Pacific. Biologically, Australia’s marsupials are strange and unique. The “Ring of Fire”, a giant chain of volcanoes both extinct and active makes the region an exciting place for geologists. But most mysterious is the area’s historical past, and the mysteries of the settlers’ origin. Historians can sketchily trace the origins of Oceania’s inhabitants to a migratory movement from Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Islands further east and south and further from the point of origin, like Hawaii and Easter Island, are believed to have been settled later. Some also speculate that lower sea levels provided land bridges and facilitated travel, though it cannot be denied that the settlers were magnificent sailors.

The history of these widely separated islands would diverge in widely different ways. Some settlements are much older than others – Pitcairn Island, at the far east of Oceania, was not inhabited until approximately 1100 A.D. A few factors united these peoples, though. All were Polynesian, and had a common parent language, though through time their dialects would diverge. The economies and sources of food varied as settlers adapted to individual islands. On Easter Island, for example, there were no coral reefs, and consequently, few fish. Archaeological evidence shows that the islanders adapted, and adopted porpoise as a main diet item. The tribes remained basically in the stone age. Generally, food and shelter were so easy to obtain that there was little incentive to develop higher elements of civilization such as improved tools or more complex sociopolitical structure. Perhaps this is why most of the islands remained extremely isolated after their initial settlement. This laid-back, or to the more critical, lazy, attitude was often harshly criticized by the European explorers and opposed by the missionaries.

Much has been said about a possible link between South American peoples and Oceania. However, the evidence is against it. Genetically, the Polynesians show no connection to any South American peoples. The presence of the sweet potato (native to the Americas) throughout Oceania, as well as the stone statues and walls on Easter Island, suggest that perhaps some Polynesians reached South America and brought back goods and ideas with them. But the settlers of the Oceania islands were definitely not South American in origin.

In the 1500s, the first Europeans reached the Oceania area. Magellan, during his voyage to reach the Spice Islands around South America rather than around Africa, discovered the Philippines and other islands in 1521. The feat would be repeated by England’s Francis Drake in 1577-1580. However, the profitable trade markets of India, the Spice Islands, and other areas of Southeast Asia drew explorers and traders there first, and exploration of Oceania would proceed more slowly. There was still much for James Cook to discover during the 1860s and 70s, when he found Hawaii and many other islands, and mapped much of Australia’s coastline. One by one the Pacific Islands were found.
The Polynesians came into contact with several different types of foreigners. Of course there were the explorers, followed by traders searching for products like cocoanut oil and sandalwood. Whaling ships and slavers also frequented Oceania; the slavers were called “blackbirders”, but thankfully the slave trade in Oceania never reached the scale it did elsewhere. Missionaries risked hostile tribes to bring the gospel. Sometimes they enjoyed great success, but unfortunately other times their insistence on the adoption of western customs or else infighting between Catholics and Protestant missionaries negated their positive impact or created a negative one.

Lastly, there were European settlers. These traveled mainly to the larger and richer islands, establishing plantations for products like cocoanuts and sugar. Their reception varied greatly from island to island: some natives resisted European incursion heatedly, while others accepted foreign dominance with little resistance. By and large, the Europeans were successful, though, and by the end of the 19th century many islands were economically dependent on their possessor nation: having specialized their economies to provide export products.

Due to its remoteness and the relatively small number of its inhabitants, the Oceania area played second fiddle to other colonies in the foreign relations policies of the European powers. For example, England was primarily interested in the Suez Canal (completed in 1869) because it shortened the route to India, although the Canal also greatly shortened the route to Oceania. As another example, the main issue which brought the United States and Spain to war in 1898 was Cuba, in the Caribbean, but the Spanish-American war also significantly changed the political balance of power in the South Pacific, where the United States took possession of the Philippines from Spain.

Histories of Selected Islands

The enormous number of islands prevents individual treatment or even mention of each of them, but a short history of some of the larger islands is included below.

Hawaii, a group of tropical islands (eight main ones) north of the greater part of Oceania, was settled by immigrants from Tahiti about 1000 A.D. Several different monarchies existed throughout the island, though they were unified into one by King Kamehameha in 1795. By this time several Europeans had visited the islands, including Captain Cook, the English explorer, who named them the Sandwich Islands. American missionaries arrived in 1820 and were gradually followed by businessmen who, in general, took advantage of the indigenous Hawaiians and gained control of the land and industry, primarily the sugar industry. These Americans, in order to facilitate trade with the United States, favored being annexed by their former country. They gradually gained control of Hawaii’s cabinet, and when Queen Liliuokalani tried to reinstate the stronger traditional monarchy through a revised constitution, they deposed her, formed a constitutional republic, and by 1898 had succeeded in having their country annexed by the United States.

Tahiti has a similar story of western takeover. Settled by Polynesians in about 800 A.D., Tahiti was, according to the first Europeans to visit, an idyllic place. Tahiti owes much of its fame to its visit by the H.M.S. Bounty, whose sailors mutinied on the voyage home. Some of them stayed at Tahiti, and their support helped one chief establish control over the others and found the Pomare dynasty. This royal line continued to be friendly to the Europeans to whom it owed its power, and on the surface at least, adopted Christianity. Modernization and the expelling of tribal religion occurred quickly. Like many islands, Tahiti suffered heavily from Western diseases that the population was vulnerable to.
During the 1840s a power struggle took place between the English and French in Tahiti, including the Protestant and Catholic missionaries from these countries. The English eventually ceded control and accepted the French protectorate over Tahiti that had been established in 1844. In 1880 the last king abdicated, leaving control to the French governor and the Assembly.

New Zealand was another island system the Polynesians settled. Called the Maori, they arrived around 950 A.D. – an event the Maori themselves remember in oral tradition. They were unique for their custom of extensive tattooing, and lived in tribes primarily on the North Island. Their staple food was the sweet potato. After the Europeans discovered New Zealand, they did not initially make any moves toward settling or conquering it. But beginning in 1839, thousands of British immigrants established several settlements in New Zealand under the auspices of the New Zealand Association, which operated independent (and without the approval) of the British government. But the government was galvanized into action by rumors of a pending French takeover and the pleas of some Maori chiefs to end the disorganized, anarchic state. Maori were for the first time using guns in their intertribal wars, with devastating effect. At the same time, nearly 30,000 Maori (a fourth of the population) had converted to Christianity.
In response to the chaos and French moves toward annexation, the British organized the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. The Maori kept their own lands but gave the right to pre-emptive purchase to the British, and to the British alone. Several wars followed, collectively known as the Land Wars, but these were generally put down (with difficulty) by the British by the 1880s. The school system had been set up to speed assimilation of the Maori into the English population, and this was widely successful. British troops also left, since it was judged that the New Zealanders could now take care of themselves. By 1900 New Zealand was becoming increasingly stable, though race issues still existed.

Australia

Aborigines, or Aboriginals, arrived in Australia very early in human history. They were quite isolated from other humans, perhaps because of this, by and large, did not change very much over the thousands of years between their own arrival and the beginnings of contacts with the English. They were hunters and gatherers, generally more settled near the coast and more nomadic in the harsher interior. Religious practices involved dances, oral history and mythology, a medicine man, rituals, and adopting a totem – a particular animal species that became a family’s symbol. Aborigines also had the concept of the past “Dreamtime” of the spirit ancestors. The Englishman William Dampier described the Aborigines as “the miserablest People in the world,” for life was, by all accounts, harsh and difficult.
In the 1600s the Portuguese visited Australia, but found the conditions too harsh and the people to resistant to form a colony there. The Dutch, and the English pirate William Dampier also visited prior to the definitive British era in Australian history.

This began with the exploration voyage of James Cook. On August 22, 1770 Cook claimed Australia for King George III of England and made the first charts of the eastern coast. This claim was not immediately followed up, however. Interestingly, the American Revolution in part provided the stimulus for Australia’s settling – after the American colonies’ successful rebellion, England found itself in need of a place to deport its criminals, and decided on Australia.

In 1788 the First Fleet arrived and started a settlement at Port Jackson (modern Sydney). The colonists were mostly convicts. The Second Fleet would follow it, and by 1852, when extradition of criminals was abolished in England, over 150,000 criminals had been sent to Australia.

In 1851, major change struck Australia as gold was found. Here and there, earlier immigrants had found gold, but security concerns about the upheaval a gold rush would cause prompted officials to hush these up. But after the California gold rush in the U.S. (which actually drew people from Australia), officials changed their attitude, and an Australian who had failed in the U.S. ignited the Australian gold rush in the summer of 1851 when he found gold specks near Bathurst. Eager prospectors soon found other mines, and a huge economic boom and influx of immigrants resulted. Even approximately 8,000 Chinese traveled to the Bellarat mine area and established three villages.

Australia’s past as a giant prison made mining a hazardous business. Police were often corrupt, and the now-infamous bushrangers robbed and murdered. But order was gradually restored and the gold rush faded. Colonists continued to make inroads from the initial settlements, eating up the land of the Aborigines. By 1900, there were 3.8 million white Australians. This same year, they would begin to transport the Aborigines to reservations and take other measures to destroy Aboriginal culture by force (though these policies have been reversed since). On the 1 of January, 1901, the various colonies of Australia federated into one country independent of Britain, a member of the English Commonwealth.

Conclusion:

By this time, nearly all the islands of Oceania had come under the dominion of one or another of the European powers. Trends away from tribal customs and toward modernization, education, Christianity, and demand for equality between natives and Westerners, were just a few of the many changes gaining force at the turn of the century. The era of settlement – first by the Polynesians and then by the Europeans – had ended, and a new era was beginning.

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