What makes Australasia a region

Where the edges fall

Charles de Brosses coined the name in 1756, in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, from the Latin for south of Asia, and coined Polynesia in the same book. At least three readings have been in print since. The narrow one takes in Australia, New Zealand and the islands governed with them, and that is the reading the catalogue files. The biogeographic one follows the Australasian ecozone across the Wallace and Lydekker lines and takes in New Guinea with it. A third has been institutional: a combined Australasia team competed at the Olympic Games of 1908 and 1912. The United Nations Statistics Division avoids the word altogether. Its M49 standard files the same ground under the heading Australia and New Zealand, adding Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and Heard Island and McDonald Islands, and states that its groupings are a statistical convenience implying nothing about political affiliation.

Two plates underneath

Australia sits deep inside the Australian plate, well away from any boundary of it. New Zealand sits on the boundary between that plate and the Pacific plate, and the Alpine Fault runs most of the length of the South Island. A second division lies further down. A paper in GSA Today in 2017 set out the case for Zealandia, roughly 4.9 million square kilometres of continental crust in the southwest Pacific of which about 94% is under water. New Zealand stands on it, and Norfolk Island stands on the Norfolk Ridge, which is part of it. Australia does not.

The colony that did not federate

Covering clause 6 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 defines the States as such of the colonies of New South Wales, New Zealand, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia as are for the time being parts of the Commonwealth. New Zealand is named in the founding document of a country it never joined. Delegates from New Zealand attended the National Australasian Convention of 1891, and the colony sent none to the conventions that followed. A royal commission appointed to consider the question reported against federating on 30 May 1901, five months after the Commonwealth came into being on 1 January 1901.

What crosses the Tasman

The Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement of 1973 lets citizens of either state live and work in the other without seeking authority first. Australia has required a visa of every non-citizen since 1 September 1994, and New Zealand citizens are granted a Special Category Visa on arrival, with 26 February 2001 dividing the holders into two classes on different terms. Trade runs under ANZCERTA, settled as a heads of agreement on 14 December 1982, signed on 28 March 1983 and given effect from 1 January 1983, covering goods including agricultural products as well as services. Both states belong to APEC, the OECD, the Commonwealth of Nations and the World Trade Organization. Norfolk Island belongs to none of them in its own right.

The territory in the middle

Self-government granted to Norfolk Island by an Act of 1979 was withdrawn by the Norfolk Island Legislation Amendment Act 2015, which received assent on 26 May 2015. The Legislative Assembly was dissolved; Commonwealth income tax, social security, Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme reached residents from 1 July 2016; and a regional council took over local services that year before being placed under an administrator in 2021. Norf'k stands as an official language of the island beside English under an Act of 2004, a blend of eighteenth-century English and Tahitian carried from Pitcairn by the settlers who arrived in 1856. The census of 10 August 2021 counted 2,188 residents.