The History of Oceania

Oceania holds the final chapter of the human settlement of the planet. Around the time this timeline begins, Polynesian navigators were completing the last great migration, reaching Aotearoa New Zealand guided by stars, swells and birds across thousands of kilometers of open Pacific. This page follows what came after: the flourishing of Maori and island societies, the European ships of Tasman and Cook, and the colonization of Australia and the Pacific that followed contact, with consequences indigenous communities still carry. The twentieth century brings Gallipoli and the Pacific War to the region's shores, then a wave of island independence and, today, nations confronting rising seas firsthand. The corpus holds fewer events here than for larger regions, which makes each one below count.