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Australasia

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This article is about the geographical term. For the Pelican album, see Australasia (album).

Australasia

Australasia is a term variably used to describe a region of Oceania: New Zealand, Australia, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term was coined by Charles de Brosses in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes (1756). He derived it from the Latin for "south of Asia" and differentiated the area from Polynesia (to the east) and the southeast Pacific (Magellanica). It is also distinct from Micronesia (to the northeast).

1 Human geography
2 Ecological geography
3 See also
4 References

Human geography

Geopolitically, Australasia is sometimes used as a term for New Zealand and Australia together, in the absence of another word limited to those two countries. There are many organizations whose names are prefixed with "(Royal) Australasian Society" that are limited to just New Zealand and Australia.

Australasian Olympic Flag

In the past, Australasia has been used as a name for combined Australia/New Zealand sporting teams. Examples include tennis between 1905 and 1913, when New Zealand and Australia combined its best players to compete in the Davis Cup international tournament (and won it in 1907, 1908, 1909 and 1911), and at the Olympic Games of 1908 and 1912. Australasia also competed in the 1911 Festival of Light in London, the precursor of the Commonwealth Games. In speculative fiction or counterfactual historical analysis, it is used to describe an alternate history New Zealand and Australia which agreed to political union at Australian federation in 1901, rather than seeking divergent British Empire Dominion status in 1901 and 1907 respectively. Anthropologists, although disagreeing on details, generally support theories that call for a Southeastern Asian origin of indigenous island peoples in Australasia and neighboring subregions.

Ecological geography

Main article: Australasia ecozone

From an ecological perspective the Australasia ecozone is a distinct region with a common evolutionary history and a great many unique flora and fauna. In this context, Australasia is limited to Australia, New Guinea, and neighbouring islands, including the Indonesian islands from Lombok and Sulawesi eastward. The biological dividing line from Asia is the Wallace line – Borneo and Bali lie on the western, Asian side. New Zealand comprises another ecological zone altogether, as it had been isolated from the rest of the world, including the rest of Australasia, for even longer.