Oceania

Overview

None of these societies wrote before the nineteenth century: the first texts set down were written by missionaries learning the language to translate the Bible, and the collections of stories read today pass through that hand. The literature of indigenous authors is recent: Witi Ihimaera's Tangi, the first Maori novel, appeared in 1973, at the same time as the land claims. Papua New Guinea alone has more than eight hundred languages, almost none of which has any publishing. Australian cinema flourished in the seventies, from Walkabout to Picnic at Hanging Rock.

What circulates

English and French serve as languages of publication, and the island states have almost no publishing of their own: authors from Fiji, Vanuatu or the Solomons publish in Suva, Australia or New Zealand. The universities of the Pacific and their reviews played the part of publishing houses for a whole generation.

Limits of this grouping

The word covers worlds unrelated to one another, which colonial geography named Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia after the skin colour of their inhabitants. In this catalogue, Australia and New Zealand hold the place their publishing gives them, and the archipelagos remain thinly represented for want of translated books.

Works cited

• NovelTangiWiti Ihimaera · 1973Maori funeral rites, from Wellington to a village on the east coast, experienced by a son mourning his father.Literature
• CinemaWalkaboutNicolas Roeg · 1971Two city children find themselves alone in the desert and are found by an Aboriginal teenager.Cinema
• CinemaPicnic at Hanging RockPeter Weir · 1975Boarding-school girls climb up to explore a rock one afternoon in 1900, and not all of them are seen again.Cinema
• CinemaTinpis RunPengau Nengo · 1991Fifteen years after independence, the Highlands road links villages to towns and elders to the young.Cinema