What makes Melanesia a region

Where the edges fall

The M49 standard of the United Nations Statistics Division files exactly this set under Melanesia, and states that its own groupings are a convenience for statistics and carry no political meaning. Read as culture and language instead, the region reaches further west, into the Indonesian provinces on the western half of New Guinea, which M49 files under South-Eastern Asia, and across to the Torres Strait Islands, which it files with Australia. Fiji sits at the other margin, tied by Rotuma and the Lau group to Tonga and Samoa, and is described in some accounts as Melanesian and Polynesian at once. Both readings are in print, and the catalogue settles neither.

A group that seats a movement

The Agreed Principles of Cooperation Among Independent States of Melanesia were signed at Port Vila on 14 March 1988 by Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The FLNKS, the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front of New Caledonia, was admitted in 1989 and Fiji in 1996; a trade agreement followed in 1993, and a permanent secretariat opened at Port Vila in 2008. That seat is the unusual part: a political movement inside a territory, sitting as a full member beside four governments. At the leaders' summit held at Honiara in June 2015 the group admitted Indonesia as an associate member, on the basis of provinces with Melanesian populations, and granted the United Liberation Movement for West Papua the standing of an observer. Both decisions are recorded here without a verdict on either.

Land that is not for sale

Roughly 97% of the land in Papua New Guinea is customary land, held by clans and families under custom rather than by registered title, and most land in Solomon Islands is held the same way. Article 73 of the Constitution of Vanuatu, in force since independence in 1980, states that all land in the republic belongs to the indigenous custom owners and their descendants, and Article 74 makes the rules of custom the basis of ownership. iTaukei land in Fiji reaches an outside user by lease alone, through a board set up under an act of 1940. New Caledonia keeps a third category of land beside private and public property, customary land, which the Noumea Accord of 1998 and the organic law of 1999 made impossible to sell, transfer or seize. A mine, a plantation or a port here is negotiated with landholding groups rather than bought from them.

What the states date from

Fiji became independent on 10 October 1970, Papua New Guinea on 16 September 1975, Solomon Islands on 7 July 1978, and Vanuatu on 30 July 1980, out of the New Hebrides, which Britain and France had administered jointly under a convention of 1906. France annexed New Caledonia on 24 September 1853 and administers it still. The General Assembly returned that territory to the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories by resolution 41/41 of 2 December 1986, and referendums on independence were held there in 2018, 2020 and 2021. The two colonial administrations still show in small things: Vanuatu and New Caledonia drive on the right, the other three on the left.

What gets spoken between languages

Each of the independent members carries a common tongue belonging to none of its own communities. Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Pijin in Solomon Islands and Bislama in Vanuatu are English-lexified creoles grown out of nineteenth-century plantation labour, and a speaker of one can follow much of another. Article 3 of the Constitution of Vanuatu makes Bislama the national language, with English and French official beside it. Fiji's second vernacular came from further off: Fiji Hindi, carried by labourers brought under indenture from India between 1879 and 1916.