Melanesia

Melanesia holds almost all of Oceania's people who are not Australian or New Zealander, and it consists of Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the French territory of New Caledonia. About 13 million people live here, more than ten million of them in Papua New Guinea alone. The name was coined by a nineteenth-century French navigator and means black islands, a reference to the skin color of the inhabitants — a colonial-era racial label that Melanesians have since reclaimed as an identity of solidarity. These are big, high, forested islands, nothing like the coral atolls further north and east.

The region sits along the collision zone of the Pacific and Australian plates, which is why it is mountainous, volcanic, and seismically violent. New Guinea, the second-largest island on earth, is split between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia — and the UN files the Indonesian half under South-Eastern Asia, so Melanesia's highest point is Mount Wilhelm at 4,509 meters rather than the taller Puncak Jaya just across a colonial border. Rainforest covers most of the land; the Coral Sea and the reefs around it hold extraordinary marine life. Cyclones arrive every season, and Vanuatu is regularly ranked the most disaster-exposed country in the world.

The linguistic density here is unmatched anywhere: Papua New Guinea alone has more than 800 living languages, roughly an eighth of the world's total, the product of mountain valleys that kept communities apart for millennia. Highland agriculture in New Guinea is among the oldest independently invented farming traditions on the planet, dating back some 9,000 years. Colonial rule came late and left late — Vanuatu was jointly run by Britain and France until 1980, and New Caledonia is still French and still argues about it. Mining dominates the modern economies: gold and gas in PNG, nickel in New Caledonia, and everywhere the question of who benefits.

• Fiji
  The crossroads of the South Pacific country in region
• Papua New Guinea
  A land of a thousand languages country in region
• Solomon Islands
  A Melanesian archipelago of forest and reef country in region
• Vanuatu
  A volcanic chain in the southwest Pacific country in region
• Coral Sea
  The South Pacific sea that holds the Great Barrier Reef defining feature
• New Guinea
  The world's second-largest island, a wall of rainforest and glaciated peaks defining feature
• Oceania
  The smallest continent, built around Australia and the Pacific isles located in