2.17: Pacific Realm- Overview
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In the various essays about the Pacific Realm in this textbook, there are many facts presented and many ways of life understood. After reading the textbook, students or other readers should know and understand many things about the Pacific Realm. Also, as has been stated, it is not the point of this textbook to attempt to convey every possible bit of knowledge about the Pacific Realm. However, there are a few basics about the Pacific Realm that the reader should know, whether picked up in previous chapters or not.
The Pacific Realm is dominated in land area by Australia. Papua New Guinea and New Zealand feature large islands, but Australia is a continent. The rest of the Pacific Realm is made up of small and tiny islands. Actually, the most common surface of the Pacific Realm is water – the Pacific Ocean.
Given the larger landmass, naturally Australia also leads the region in population. This is true, even though Australia features mostly dry landscapes that have very low population densities. The Austronesian Expansion highlighted in Chapter 15 explains a great deal about the populating of the Pacific Realm. This migration also explains much of the complex ethnic patterns across the region.
Again given the larger landmass, Australia dominates the region in terms of raw materials. As of 2012, Australia had:
51% of the world’s antimony
34% of the world’s bauxite
38% of the world’s black coal
51% of the world’s cobalt
28% of the world’s copper
55% of the world’s diamonds
42% of the world’s gold (see the so-called Super Pit, pictured above)
34% of the world’s iron ore
45% of the world’s lead
55% of the world’s lithium
72% of the world’s manganese
39% of the world’s molybdenum
90% of the world’s opals
67% of the world’s rare earths
36% of the world’s silver
48% of the world’s tantalum
61% of the world’s tin
51% of the world’s tungsten
34% of the world’s uranium
50% of the world’s zinc.
Now in 2020, Australia leads the world in exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG), a means of selling their natural gas output without using pipelines (under the ocean?).
The extensive land area also is heavily utilized in agriculture, sometimes for crops such as wheat and sugar cane, but significantly for ranching – cattle and sheep. Comparatively, New Zealand has significant dairy and sheep farming.
For the small islands of the Pacific Realm, the random chance of having noteworthy raw materials is low. As described in Chapter 21, Nauru had the odd circumstance of huge phosphate deposits from bird droppings. New Caledonia does beat the odds with raw materials, especially in heavy deposits of nickel ore.
The physical landscape of the region is dominated by islands, a mix of high volcanic islands and low coral islands. The larger islands of New Zealand feature volcanoes and high mountains, in addition to beautiful fjords – see Chapter 23. Australia has few mountains and they are relatively small in stature. Instead, Australia features a great deal of dry landscapes.
A dominant element of the Pacific Realm is its relative isolation. Hawaii and Easter Island are some of the most remote places on the planet. Isolation makes the Austronesian Expansion even more impressive. When compared to other parts of the globe, Australia’s isolation led to its late European discovery and settlement. Nevertheless, this isolation meant that Australia was relatively empty, a feature that the British utilized in their colonization and eventually claim of all of the landmass. Strikingly, this settlement mainly began with the shipping of convicts to Australia to settle that new land. The original settlers of Australia brought with them the English language; however, the isolation of this place, both in distance and in separation from British civilization, endeavored the language to evolve, so that modern Australian English has a distinctive accent and numerous words that do not fit into British English nor into other regional variations of English (such as American English). Similar linguistic changes happened in New Zealand, as seen in “Zealand speak.”
In addition, isolation created a unique set of wildlife in Australia with some unusual animals and others that can be found only in Australia. This land down under is famous for the kangaroo and certainly known for the platypus and the koala. Wallace’s Line and Weber’s Line are two scholars’ works to delineate the separate Asian animal species (fauna) from Australian animal species.
Beautiful Pacific islands in tropical settings offer very appealing tourist destinations; however, the isolating distances to these islands is a deterrent to some potential tourists choose not to overcome. Similarly, Australia’s economy includes a major tourist sector, partly existent because of exotic elements present because of its isolation, while at the same time partly diminished because of the costs of distance as created by the same isolation.
Overall, the Pacific Realm is a fascinating region, largely dominated by Australia, and strongly influenced by its isolation.
Did you know?
The koala is not a bear. Although the koala looks like a cuddly teddy bear, it is in the marsupial category and not at all related to bears.
Cited and additional bibliography:
Chen, Jackson. 2020. “Australia Takes Crown as World’s Top LNG Exporter | U.S. & International.” JWN Energy. January 8, 2020. https://www.jwnenergy.com/article/20...-lng-exporter/.
Geoscience Australia. 2014. “Resources.” Www.Ga.Gov.Au. May 29, 2014. https://www.ga.gov.au/data-pubs/data...ment/resources.
Lindstrand, Tor. 2012. Australian Mining. https://tinyurl.com/wamining. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Szekely, Pedro. 2017. Perth. https://tinyurl.com/perthwesta. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).