Oceania Map Quiz: Find the Countries of Australia and Oceania

How to play the Oceania map quiz

The map is centered on the western Pacific Ocean, with Australia in the lower left, New Zealand in the lower right and the Pacific islands spread across the ocean between them. Indonesia, the Philippines and the territories, such as Guam and New Caledonia, are gray.

• Click the map. The quiz names a country ("Click Vanuatu") and you click it. The small island nations have wide invisible tap targets.
• Type the name. One country is highlighted; type its name. Spelling is forgiving, and "Federated States of Micronesia" works for Micronesia.
• Multiple choice. Pick from four names. Island neighbors make the wrong answers.
• Drag labels. Drag all 14 names onto the map, or tap a name and then a country.

Practice is untimed, the Quiz is timed with three tries per country, and Challenge lasts 60 seconds.

Australia, Oceania and the Pacific

Oceania is a region rather than a single landmass. It includes the continent of Australia, the islands of New Zealand and New Guinea, and thousands of smaller islands across the Pacific. Australia makes up most of the land: about 7.7 million km², which is about 90 percent of the region's land area and close to the size of the 48 contiguous US states.

Geographers divide the Pacific islands into three groups, a scheme first used in the 1800s:

The UN groups Australia and New Zealand together and puts the other twelve in those three groups. Kiribati spans so much ocean that its islands reach into both Micronesia and Polynesia.

Countries and capitals of Oceania

Watch out for Canberra, not Sydney, and Wellington, not Auckland. Canberra was built as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne, and Wellington was picked for its central spot between New Zealand's two main islands.

Islands, reefs and the shape of the Pacific

The Pacific islands come in three main kinds. Continental islands, such as New Guinea and New Zealand, are pieces of continental crust with mountains and big rivers. Volcanic islands, such as Samoa, Tonga and much of Vanuatu, rise steeply from the ocean floor. Atolls, such as most of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, are rings of coral islands around a lagoon, often only a few meters above sea level, which is why rising seas are a serious concern there.

The Great Barrier Reef, off Australia's northeast coast, is the world's largest coral reef system, more than 2,300 km long. New Guinea is the world's second-largest island after Greenland. And the International Date Line zigzags through the region: Kiribati moved it in 1995 so all its islands share the same date, which means Kiribati's Line Islands are among the first places on Earth to start each new day.

The three biggest countries up close

Australia is the only country that covers a whole continent. It has six states (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania) and two mainland territories, including the Australian Capital Territory around Canberra. Most Australians live near the southeast and east coasts, in cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane; the dry interior, called the outback, includes the Great Victoria, Great Sandy and Simpson Deserts and the giant sandstone rock Uluru, sacred to its Aboriginal owners.

New Zealand has two main islands, the North Island and the South Island, plus many smaller ones. The Southern Alps run down the South Island, topped by Aoraki / Mount Cook at about 3,724 m. The North Island has active volcanoes and hot springs. Its Māori name, Aotearoa, is often translated as "land of the long white cloud," and the quiz accepts it as an answer.

Papua New Guinea shares the island of New Guinea with Indonesia and includes hundreds of smaller islands. More than 800 languages are spoken there, more than in any other country in the world, and much of the mountainous interior is covered in rainforest.

How people settled the Pacific

Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived in Australia for at least 50,000 years, among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. Much later, starting about 3,000 years ago, Pacific voyagers sailed east across open ocean in double-hulled canoes, navigating by stars, waves and birds. They reached Samoa and Tonga, then far-flung islands such as Hawaii, Easter Island and finally New Zealand, where the Māori arrived around 700 years ago.

Tips to memorize Oceania

1. Start with the big three. Australia, Papua New Guinea (east half of New Guinea, north of Australia) and New Zealand (southeast).
2. Learn Melanesia next. Going east from Papua New Guinea: the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, then Fiji.
3. Go north for Micronesia. Palau in the west, then Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Kiribati along the equator.
4. Finish with Polynesia. Tuvalu, Samoa and Tonga sit east of Fiji. Tonga is the farthest south of the three.
5. Zoom in. At full size, the small nations are dots. Zoom in during Practice to see each island's shape, then play the Quiz at full size.

Keep learning

The Southeast Asia map quiz covers the islands to the northwest, and the continents and oceans quiz puts Oceania in the big picture. The flags of Oceania are in the flag quiz under Flags from: Oceania. Several have stars of the Southern Cross, which makes them a fun set to compare.