Australasia

Australasia is included in some, but not all lists of the regions of the world, and yet, at the same time, Australasia is defined, not as a region at all, but as a sub-region: "Australasia, a region of Oceania, comprises Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. Charles de Brosses coined the term in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes..."

"A region of Oceania" troubles me,  because, when I look it up on the Internet, I find "Oceania, also known as Oceanica", and wonder if I am being diverted from my original search, if something of the clandestine nature that I failed to find in the Atlantic Ocean (see that blog entry) is indeed present in this corner of the Pacific Ocean. So I look up Oceanica - and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, or not in English anyway, other than a type of seaweed known technically as Posidonia Oceanica, more commonly as Neptune Grass or Mediterranean Tapeweed; and that latter indicates that this particular seaweed is endemic to the Mediterranean and not the Pacific anyway.

So I return to Oceania, and realise why the name sounded so familiar. Do not go there, reader. It is a place of unending war, where freedom of speech is non-existent and government surveillance by electronic means extends into the bedroom, the bathroom, even to the infinitesimally tiny USB cells implanted in the brains of every new-born child. It is a world of torture and poverty, of propaganda and the perpetual rewriting of history, and it functions under the great trinity - no, not the Christian trinity, not the triplet of Hillel's "If Not Now, When" statement, not the pre-Moslem trinity of Allah's daughters, not the Franco-American trinity of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", but the one that insists that "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength". Yes, Oceania is Orwell's Big Brotherdom - the one from 1984, not the unreality TV version; expulsion from this Oceania is permanent. And what is most disconcerting of all - Orwell predicted it for 1984; but 1984 passed by, and we all laughed at just how wrong he was. Today, thirty years later, neither Edward Snowden nor Charlie Hebdo are laughing quite that loud.

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