The Coral Sea
Think of the Mediterranean Sea and immediately an image comes to mind of a body of water wedged between Europe and Africa. For thousands of years the Mediterranean has been a crossroads between Europe and Africa, the cradle of several civilisations and an economic highway.
The Coral Sea does not conjure up the same immediate images, nor is it surrounded by land, yet in Pacific terms it provided a similar crossroads with a cultural unity, and around its shores lay the colonies of major empires. The earliest imperial claims were ephemeral—sixteenth-century Spanish explorers with ambitions beyond their abilities—yet inexorably the Pacific Islands became incorporated into the German, British and French Empires in the nineteenth century and into Australia’s New Guinea territories in the early twentieth. Empire-builders did not rush to take control of the Coral Sea islands: the process grew out of what is known as the labour trade, and finally out of late nineteenth-century rivalries and the proximity of the British Australian colonies, particularly Queensland.The British navigator Matthew Flinders, the first to circumnavigate Australia, named the Coral Sea in 1803 for the myriad coral reefs around the islands, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest reef system. The western boundary is the north-east coast of Australia, now part of the state of Queensland; the eastern is the archipelagos of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The most substantial part of the northern boundary is the underbelly of south-east New Guinea. East of New Guinea the northern boundary is the D’Entrecasteaux, Louisiade and Bismarck archipelagos extending 500 kilometres off New Guinea. The sea lacks a distinct southern boundary, although New Caledonia, Norfolk Island and, at the far extreme, Fiji are on the southern shore. This rim of islands with Australia as the western boundary provided a concentrated and interlocking area for Pacific colonialism.