Cecil refers to this question here:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_021.html
(For some reason, I love this column…)
Re. Australia/Australasia
According to my Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia (give me a break - it’s all i have within easy reach of my computer), “Islands standing on the continental shelf of a given continent are considered part of that continent. Prominent examples are Great Britain and Ireland in Europe; the Malay Archipelago and Japan in Asia; New Guinea, Tasmania, and New Zealand in Australasia; and Greenland in North America.”
But when listing the continents in order of size, Encarta names Australia, not Australasia, as the smallest. According to the Encarta article on Australasia, this designation of physical geography includes (in addition to Australia, NZ, and New Guinea), New Caledonia and Dependencies, the Marquesas Islands, and a large part of the malay Archipelago. That is, the lands and islands of the Pacific Ocean lying between the Equator and latitude 47 degrees south.
All this leads me to conclude that the proper name for the continent itself is Australia - and that’s what we were taught in school in Sydney when i was growing up.
cheers mate,
michael.
We learned that the continent’s name is Australia, as well. However, I’ve also heard the continent referred to as “Oceania”. This fits in with what has been discussed so far…
Here are the facts.
Australia: A continent, also an island.
The Commonwealth of Australia: A nation/country, commonly referred to as a Australia just as the USA is commonly referred to as America.
Australasia: A biogeographical/geopolitical region whose exact borders are somewhat vague, but usually incorporating Oz, NZ, New Caledonia, parts of Micronesia, PNG and those parts of Asia SE of Wallaces Line. Definitely not a continent since both PNG and NZ straddle the Australian and Pacific plates, the Indonesian Islands are 50% Asian and most of Polynesia and Micronesia aren’t on any continental plates, being volcanic/Coral Cays
Oceania: Even less a continent. A collective term for the groups of Islands in the SE Pacific Oceans including Fiji, French Polynesia, Samoa etc. Sometimes incorporating Australia, sometimes not. Again Polynesia and Micronesia don’t lie on any plates at all.
Encarta frankly sucks, as if you didn’t know. New Zealand isn’t on the Australian plate, but is in fact a continental fragment in its own right, added to as a result of volcanic/techtonic activity caused by the collision of the Pacific and Australian plates. Saying New Guinea and New Zealand are part of the Australian continent is a bit like saying that all of Indonesia is part of Australia because it’s islands straddle the Australian and Asian plates.
Thanks to the fellow Aussie for putting us right about the continent. I did know that Encarta sucks, but didn’t know enough about continental plates to say exactly how bad they sucked.
I’ll even forgive you for being from Qld.