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Countries in Oceania

  • Marshall IslandsThe Marshall Islands is 98.62 percent water. No other sovereign state has so much ocean against so little land.
  • TuvaluA deacon caught in a storm drifted for eight weeks and brought Christianity to Tuvalu.
  • PalauPalau is an island country made up of roughly 340 islands in the western Pacific Ocean, with a total land area of only 466 square kilometres. That makes it the sixteenth smallest nation in the world. Its own name for the islands is Belau,…
  • Federated States of MicronesiaThe Federated States of Micronesia has about 702 km2 of land but nearly 3 million km2 of ocean.
  • NiueNiue is a self-governing island country in the South Pacific, and its 2022 census counted fewer than 1,700 people. Its nickname is The Rock, drawn from the traditional name Rock of Polynesia. It is among the largest coral islands in the…
  • VanuatuOn the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, villagers of the Yaohnanen tribe revere Britain's Prince Philip as a god. Their belief rests on an ancient story about the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit. According to the tale, he ventured across…
  • NauruIn May 2026, the Parliament of Nauru voted to change the country's English name to Naoero, the spelling used in the Nauruan language. The amendment takes effect only if voters approve it in a referendum. Nauru is an island country in the…
  • SamoaSamoa, officially the Independent State of Samoa, once deleted a whole day from its calendar. Friday, the 30th of December 2011, never happened there. At the end of that month the island country moved its clocks from UTC-11 to UTC+13. The…
  • AustraliaAustralia's name began as a guess about a continent nobody had found. Mapmakers imagined Terra Australis Incognita.
  • KiribatiKiribati has only 811 square kilometres of land, yet its islands are scattered across such a vast stretch of the central Pacific that the country reaches into all four hemispheres. No other nation can say that. Its islands straddle both…
  • Solomon IslandsThe Solomon Islands are named for a biblical king who had no connection to them. Mapmakers imagined Bible gold there.
  • New ZealandNew Zealand was the last large habitable land on Earth to be settled by humans.
  • Papua New GuineaPapua New Guinea is home to about 840 known languages, more than any other country in the world. Most are spoken by fewer than a thousand people, and the typical language has only around 7,000 speakers. That one figure hints at how many…
  • FijiFiji is a country where the map was bent to suit the clock. The 180th meridian normally marks the place where one calendar date gives way to the next. In Fiji it runs through the island of Taveuni. The International Date Line swerves…

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