Indigenous peoples of the Coral Sea

Europeans ‘discovered’ the Pacific Islands slowly between the fifteenth and twentieth cen­turies, finding them inhabited by a mix of maritime and agricultural peoples speaking more than a thousand languages.

Map 10.1 The Coral Sea and its surrounding nations.

northern border dwelt the people of Torres Strait with a shared heritage between the mainland and New Guinea, the second largest land mass bordering the Coral Sea. The time depth of settlement in New Guinea and island Melanesia varied; some New Guineans are descended from the same migrations as populated Aboriginal Australia while others arrived from Asia as recently as 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. The agricultural Highlanders of New Guinea lived in huge high valleys isolated from the coastal peoples, who had more in common with those of island Melanesia.¹

Before colonial partition, one million Aborigines lived in Australia and three million people lived in New Guinea and island Melanesia. None of these indigenous societies had hierarchical leadership of a type that Europeans could easily recognise; they consisted of hundreds of small-scale social groups based loosely around languages. European scientists seeking to classify racial order placed the peoples of Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia as the lowest of humans, based on skin colour and lack of hierarchy, which meant that chiefly leaders could not be identified or co-opted into colonial processes as in more hierarchical Polynesia. There was very limited use of technology familiar to Europeans. Today we realise that Aborigines possessed methods of shaping the land, that Highland New Guineans were some of the first agriculturalists in the world and that coastal and island people had sophisticated navigation systems. The same qualities which made them successful over thousands of years also made them easy prey for imperial expansion.