Europeans in Oceania

[8] Between the end of World War II and 1955 alone, 850,000 Europeans came to Australia, including 171,000 "Displaced persons", war-time and post-war emigrants resettled in the country by arrangement with the International Refugee Organization.

[10] A government program known as the Good Neighbour Council operated in Australian communities, with the specific aim of encouraging locals to establish friendships with post-World War II immigrants.

[48][49] Before he left, Cook got his painter William Hodges to draw a portrait of what the typical male and female inhabitants looked like, as he had previously done while in Vanuatu two months prior.

[48] The significant distance between Europe and Oceania made New Caledonia an ideal location for opponents to the various regimes which rose to power in France following the French Revolution of 1848.

[57] The country forced both male and female convicts to remain in New Caledonia for a period equivalent to the duration of their prison sentence, the aim of this being primarily to boost their colony's overall population.

[59] The Americans had a positive economic, political, and cultural impact on the Kanak population, but caused a suspicion among French officials, who viewed it as an occupation and a threat to their colonial dominance in New Caledonia.

[48][60] This was evidenced by a controversial ad created during a 2021 referendum on New Caledonia's independence, which was accused of depicting Kanaks as having no mastery of French language and with accents that signified a "primitive and uncultivated state".

After thousands of years in isolation, European contact with Oceanians was established during 1521 in the neighboring Micronesian region of Guam, when a Spanish expedition under Ferdinand Magellan reached its shoreline.

The first contact that Spain had with the Carolines was in 1525, when a summer storm carried the navigators Diogo da Rocha and Gomes de Sequeira eastward from the Moluccas (by way of Celebes).

[71] Charles W. Morgan, an officer on a whaleship in Kosrae, recounted in his journals: One day when out cutting ironwood poles, we came to a small village, and the sight of the people in it was perfectly terrible.

[88] This led to Nauru's discovery by outsiders on November 8, 1798, when a whaling British ship called the Snow Hunter came across it, en route from New Zealand to the China Seas.

Delaporte's wife Salome reflected on the accomplishments of Christianity in Micronesia by writing: From being slaves to being freed-women, from immorality to decency in moral living, from superstition to a degree of enlightenment and civilization, from semi-nudity to at least a partial conception of the necessity for clothes; such are some of the things Christianity has accomplished for and among the women and girls of the island of Nauru, Marshall Islands, in the far South Pacific.Nauru remained a German colony until Australian forces expelled them in 1914 during World War I.

[88] The 1970 book Nauru: Phosphate and Political Progress, by Australian author Nancy Viviani, states: "For however deep we go back into the annals of history it is impossible to discover a parallel case in which a community of near comparable size has gained its independence in the teeth of opposition from a metropolitan country numbering over 10 millions.

[90][100] The Australian government launched the Pacific Solution in 2001, which was intended to deter asylum seekers from making boat trips to Australia by denying them access to their processing facilities.

There is disagreement as to whether Spaniard Ruy López de Villalobos, who landed in several Caroline Islands, spotted Palau in 1543, or if Ferdinand Magellan sighted it even earlier in 1522.

[108] The book's theme of mutually beneficial interaction between Europeans and Pacific Islanders was in stark contrast to the suspicion and violence that marred early encounters between the two groups in other parts of Oceania.

[124] In 1888, Rapa Nui king Atamu Tekena signed a deed by Chilean naval captain Policarpo Toro, giving Chile full sovereignty over the island.

[124] In the mid-20th century, Norwegian scientist Thor Heyerdahl proposed a theory that the natives were of Indigenous American descent, due to the similarity between Rapa Nui and Inca stonework.

These people were merely immigrants brought to Hawaii as ordinary plantation workers, and only became "Haole" once they had emerged from the unskilled labor category and moved into middle or upper class positions.

[146] After suffering losses in their Māori Contingent during the 1915 Gallipoli campaign with Australia, New Zealand MP Māui Pōmare led a recruiting mission in Niue and the Cook Islands' Rarotonga.

[164][165] Outsider contact with inhabitants of Tokelau was officially established on January 25, 1841, when the United States Exploring Expedition visited Atafu, discovering a small population.

[123] On Atafu, natives were shown samples of cloth, shirts and trousers to entice them to come on board, and were invited to bring their coconuts and fowls to the ship to barter.

However, there is a relative lack of historical research regarding the area in the Pacific between Easter Island and South America, meaning that an early Polynesian connection cannot be conclusively ruled out for either archipelago.

In his 1985 book, Kanaka – A History of Melanesian Mackay, Moore wrote, "the [Solomon] Islanders often thought the men on the big ships wanted to barter ... but when they tried to trade ... their canoes were smashed and they were forced on board.

Scores of other articles were in demand, like cloths, axes and knives, hand sowing machines, scissors, needles and thread, mirrors and cones, hooks and line, pots and pans, mouth organs, rice, hard biscuits, beads, perfume and, in the Gilberts and Marshalls, rifles, flintlock muskets, revolvers, powder and shot.

[212] When Australian author John Cromar visited Honolulu, he noted that, "the Hawaiians were a very superior type of native, and similar to the Māoris of New Zealand, being light-skinned, and having long straight hair and perfect physique.

[217] In 1980, former Australian National University student Greg Dening, who later taught in Melbourne, revised his Harvard doctoral dissertation as Islands and Beaches, which was an anthropologically based history of the Pacific.

[223] Between 2012 and 2016, the Australian government also claims to have educated 8,500 school children in the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands about climate change mitigation and disaster risk management.

It is a private non profit, non governmental organization that engages in public education, with a purpose to assist the people of Micronesia in reflecting on life in their islands under the impact of change in recent years.

Pākehā (European) whalers, sealers and traders established liaisons with Māori women, resulting in mixed race children very early on in New Zealand's colonial history.