Best australian & oceanian literary books according to redditors

As /u/l33t_sas suggested, the Pacific world was very extensively connected in the pre-contact and early contact eras. There's been a wellspring of work on that topic in the wake of Epeli Hau'ofa's essay "Our Sea of Islands", which was published in 1993. Hau'ofa argues that the image of Pacific islands as small, remote, and isolated is one created and fostered by colonialism, and that Pacific islands are more properly understood as part of a large Pacific world and deeply interconnected.

There have been some wonderful theoretically-oriented pieces like Joakim Peter's "Chuukese travelers and the idea of horizon," which seeks to connect Islander's travel in the past with contemporary movement and to examine the meaning of that movement. Geographers like Lola Bautista have done more on-the-ground fieldwork to investigate the ways in which islanders continue to travel, the pathways through which they move, the relationship between contemporary and historical travel, and the meaning of that travel.

But historians have been involved in this work also. Kealani Cook just completed a dissertation at the University of Michigan called "Kahiki: Native Hawaiian Relationships With Other Pacific Islanders, 1850-1915" which, as you might imagine, seeks to connect Hawai'i with a broader Pacific world. Alice Somerville's Once Were Pacific does something a bit similar, although it's more focused on contemporary relationships among Maori and other Pacific Islanders (in New Zealand).

Of course there's also the literature on navigation, within which I particularly like Paul D'Arcy's People of the Sea. If you're interested in the mechanics of navigation, that's not a bad place to go -- and it paints a pretty legible picture of which islands would have been more connected and for what reasons. For example, within Micronesia, high volcanic islands like Pohnpei or Kosrae would have had somewhat less motivation to foster cultures of long-distance voyaging because those islands tended to be fertile enough to provide residents with anything they needed. The same is true for Hawai'i. Voyaging existed in all three of those places, and very long distance voyages certainly took place from time to time, but most trips tended to be short or medium range. In the Central Caroline Islands, however, since most people lived on low coral atolls that were more susceptible to droughts or storms, voyaging represented an insurance policy of sorts -- so Central Carolinians paid a tribute to a traditional leader on the high island of Yap to have an extra layer of protection in times of crisis. A similar situation obtained in the Marshall Islands, except that there was no central high island. Instead, Marshallese atolls were deeply connected with one another -- to the extent that many Marshallese claimed (and claim) multiple atolls as their homeland.

I don't meant to imply that voyaging is all in the past. It isn't, and many islands maintain a thriving culture of navigation. But it's also true that Pacific Islander interconnectedness and mutual dependency never ended. Pathways of connection were interrupted or reshaped by colonialism and the boundaries it erected in the ocean, but as Hau'ofa argued, Islanders have long "made nonsense" of those boundaries by continuing to move across them. Pacific Island voyaging has been transmuted into other forms, in other words.