How Oceania divides into regions

The dependencies are not a footnote here

The roster records eleven dependencies in Oceania and names the state each one answers to: French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna under France; American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands under the United States; the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau under New Zealand; Norfolk Island under Australia; and the Pitcairn Islands under the United Kingdom. That is close to half of everything filed on this continent.

Six of them are on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, which has run since 1946: American Samoa, French Polynesia, Guam, New Caledonia, the Pitcairn Islands and Tokelau. The Cook Islands, Niue and Norfolk Island are not on it.

The region's own body draws the line differently

The Pacific Islands Forum was founded in 1971 and brings the region's leaders together. Its membership includes French Polynesia and New Caledonia, which this catalogue records as French territories, and the Cook Islands and Niue, which it records as New Zealand ones, seated alongside Australia, New Zealand and the independent island states. A regional organisation seating territories as full members is not an oversight. It is what a boundary looks like when it runs through communities rather than between them.

Four groupings, and how they divide

Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia are older than any of the states inside them and are used by those states themselves, which is why the catalogue did not invent replacements for them. Australasia holds Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island. The proportions differ sharply: four of the five countries in Melanesia are sovereign states and five of the seven in Micronesia are, while only three of the ten in Polynesia are. The catalogue keeps all four groups rather than collapsing them, because a grid of 25 islands sorted alphabetically tells a reader nothing about which ones lie together.