Solomon Islands in the context of Ontong Java Atoll

Tuvalu (/tuːˈvɑːluː/ too-VAH-loo) is an island country in the Polynesian sub-region of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean, about midway between Hawaii and Australia. It lies east-northeast of the Santa Cruz Islands (which belong to the Solomon Islands), northeast of Vanuatu, southeast of Nauru, south of Kiribati, west of Tokelau, northwest of Samoa and Wallis and Futuna, and north of Fiji.

Tuvalu is composed of three reef islands and six atolls spread out between the latitude of 5° and 10° south and between the longitude of 176° and 180°. They lie west of the International Date Line. The 2022 census determined that Tuvalu had a population of 10,643, making it the 194th most populous country, exceeding only Niue and the Vatican City in population. Tuvalu's total land area is 25.14 square kilometres (9.71 sq mi).

The House of Windsor is the current royal house of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms. The house's name was inspired by the historic Windsor Castle estate. The house was founded on 17 July 1917, when King George V changed the name of the royal house from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the English Windsor due to anti-German sentiment during the First World War. There have been five British monarchs of the House of Windsor: George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II, and Charles III. The children and male-line descendants of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, also genealogically belong to the House of Oldenburg since Philip was by birth a member of the Glücksburg branch of that house.

The monarch is head of state of fifteen sovereign states. These are the United Kingdom, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. As well as these separate monarchies, there are also three Crown Dependencies, fourteen British Overseas Territories, two associated states of New Zealand, and one territory.

Papua New Guinea (PNG), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia. It has a land border with Indonesia to the west and maritime borders with Australia to the south and the Solomon Islands to the east. Its capital is Port Moresby. The country's 462,840 km (178,700 sq mi) includes a large mainland and hundreds of islands. The majority of the country's land is held under the collective customary ownership of local clans. This protected tenure is globally exceptional due to remarkable legislative protections granted in PNG’s national constitution.

The territory of Papua New Guinea was split in the 1880s between German New Guinea in the north and the British Territory of Papua in the south, the latter of which was ceded to Australia in 1902. All of present-day Papua New Guinea came under Australian control following World War I, although it remained two distinct territories. The nation was the site of fierce fighting during the New Guinea campaign of World War II, following which the two territories were united in 1949. Papua New Guinea became an independent Commonwealth realm in 1975. Representing the King is a Governor-General. Politics takes place within a Westminster system, with the government led by a Prime Minister. Members of the national parliament also serve as provincial leaders.

Vanuatu (English: /ˌvɑːnuˈɑːtuː/ VAH-noo-AH-too or /vænˈwɑːtuː/ van-WAH-too; Bislama and French pronunciation [vanuatu]), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (French: République de Vanuatu; Bislama: Ripablik blong Vanuatu), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is 1,750 km (1,090 mi) east of northern Australia, 540 km (340 mi) northeast of New Caledonia, east of New Guinea, southeast of Solomon Islands, and west of Fiji.

Vanuatu was first inhabited by Melanesian people. The first Europeans to visit the islands were a Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Fernandes de Queirós, who arrived on the largest island, Espíritu Santo, in 1606. Queirós claimed the archipelago for Spain, as part of the colonial Spanish East Indies and named it La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo.

A Commonwealth realm is a sovereign state in the Commonwealth of Nations that has the same constitutional monarch and head of state as the other realms. The current monarch is King Charles III. Except for the United Kingdom, in each of the realms the monarch is represented by a governor-general. The phrase Commonwealth realm is an informal description not used in any law.

As of 2025, there are 15 Commonwealth realms: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and the United Kingdom. While the Commonwealth of Nations has 56 independent member states, only these 15 have Charles III as head of state. He is also Head of the Commonwealth, a non-constitutional role.

The Santa Cruz Islands form an archipelago in Temotu Province, Solomon Islands. They lie approximately 250 miles (220 nmi; 400 km) to the southeast of the Solomon Islands archipelago, just north of the archipelago of Vanuatu and are considered part of the Vanuatu rain forests ecoregion. The term Santa Cruz Islands is sometimes used to encompass all the islands of Temotu Province, Solomon Islands.

Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania. The country has 171 islands, of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about 750 km (290 sq mi), scattered over 700,000 km (270,000 sq mi) in the southern Pacific Ocean. As of 2021, according to Johnson's Tribune, Tonga has a population of 104,494, 70% of whom reside on the main island, Tongatapu. The country stretches approximately 800 km (500 mi; 430 nmi) north-south. It is surrounded by Fiji and Wallis and Futuna (France) to the northwest, Samoa to the northeast, New Caledonia (France) and Vanuatu to the west, Niue (the nearest foreign territory) to the east and Kermadec (New Zealand) to the southwest. Tonga is about 1,800 km (1,100 mi; 970 nmi) from New Zealand's North Island.

Tonga was first inhabited roughly 2,500 years ago by people who were a part of the Lapita culture, Polynesian settlers who gradually evolved a distinct and strong ethnic identity, language, and culture as the Tongan people. They quickly established a powerful footing across the South Pacific, and this period of Tongan expansionism and colonization is known as the Tuʻi Tonga Empire. From the rule of the first Tongan king, ʻAhoʻeitu, Tonga grew into a regional power. It was a thalassocracy that conquered and controlled unprecedented swathes of the Pacific, from parts of the Solomon Islands and the whole of New Caledonia and Fiji in the west to Samoa and Niue and even as far as parts of modern-day French Polynesia in the east. Tuʻi Tonga became renowned for its economic, ethnic, and cultural influence over the Pacific, which remained strong even after the Samoan revolution of the 13th century and Europeans' discovery of the islands in 1616.

Pacific Islanders, Pasifika, Pasefika, Pacificans, or rarely Pacificers are the peoples of the Pacific Islands. As an ethnic/racial term, it is used to describe the original peoples—inhabitants and diasporas—of any of the three major subregions of Oceania (Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia) or any other island located in the Pacific Ocean.

Melanesians include the Fijians (Fiji), Kanaks (New Caledonia), Ni-Vanuatu (Vanuatu), Papua New Guineans (Papua New Guinea), Solomon Islanders (Solomon Islands), West Papuans (Indonesia's West Papua) and Moluccans (Indonesia's Maluku Islands).

South Sea Islanders, also known as Australian South Sea Islanders (ASSI) and formerly referred to as Kanakas, are the Australian descendants of Pacific Islanders from more than 80 islands – including the Oceanian archipelagoes of the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, the Gilbert Islands, and New Ireland – who were kidnapped or recruited between the mid to late 19th century as labourers in the sugarcane fields of Queensland. Some were kidnapped or tricked (or "blackbirded") into long-term indentured servitude or slavery, despite the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 criminalising slavery in Australia and other parts of the British Empire. At its height, the recruiting accounted for over half the adult male population of some islands.

Today, the majority of South Sea Islanders are also Aboriginal Australians or Torres Strait Islanders. As of the 2021 census, there were 7,228 people who claimed South Sea Islander ancestry in Australia, 5,562 of whom lived in Queensland. However, this is lower than the actual number of people with South Sea Islander heritage, with the true number estimated to be as high as 20,000 in Queensland alone as of 2022. The largest South Sea Islanders community is in the city of Mackay, where approximately 5,000 South Sea Islanders reside (approximately 5.93% of Mackay's population).

The Australasian realm is one of eight biogeographic realms that is coincident with, but not (by some definitions) the same as, the geographical region of Australasia. The realm includes Australia, the island of New Guinea (comprising Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of Papua), and the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago, including the island of Sulawesi, the Moluccas (the Indonesian provinces of Maluku and North Maluku), and the islands of Lombok, Sumbawa, Sumba, Flores, and Timor, often known as the Lesser Sundas.

The Australasian realm also includes several Pacific island groups, including the Bismarck Archipelago, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia. New Zealand and its surrounding islands are a distinctive sub-region of the Australasian realm. The rest of Indonesia is part of the Indomalayan realm. In the classification scheme developed by Miklos Udvardy, New Guinea, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands and New Zealand are placed in the Oceanian realm.

The Islamic religion is followed by a relatively small proportion of the population of Oceania. By 2010 estimates, there were 620,156 Muslims in Oceania as a whole: 476,600 in Australia, 48,151 in New Zealand, 52,520 in Fiji, 6,352 in New Caledonia, 2,200 in Papua New Guinea, 360 in Solomon Islands, 221 in Vanuatu, 110 in Tonga.

According to a 2007 article in Pacific Magazine, entitled 'Green Moon Rising', Islam has seen a substantial increase in adherents amongst the peoples of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia. There have been thousands of indigenous converts to Islam in Melanesia.

The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages, itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family.

There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austronesian family. While half of them are spoken in geographical Polynesia (the Polynesian triangle), the other half – known as Polynesian outliers – are spoken in other parts of the Pacific: from Micronesia to atolls scattered in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu. The most prominent Polynesian languages, by number of speakers, are Samoan, Tongan, Tahitian, Māori and Hawaiian.

The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Eastern Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship.

New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there arguably are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands (for example, Lavukaleve. to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west. The westernmost language, Tambora in Sumbawa, is extinct. One Papuan language, Meriam, is spoken within the national borders of Australia, in the eastern Torres Strait.

The Oceanian realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms and is unique in not including any continental land mass. It has the smallest land area of any of the WWF realms.

This realm includes the islands of the Pacific Ocean in Micronesia, the Fijian Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, and Polynesia (with the exception of New Zealand). New Zealand, Australia, and most of Melanesia including New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia are included within the Australasian realm.

Ghizo Island lies in the Western Province of Solomon Islands, west of New Georgia and Kolombangara, and is home to the provincial capital, Gizo. The island is named after an infamous local head-hunter.

Ghizo is relatively small when compared to the surrounding islands, the island is 11 kilometres (6.8 mi) long and 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) wide, with a summit elevation of 180 metres (590 ft) (Maringe Hill).

Wagina Island (also Wiginna Island locally known as Vaghena Island) is a small island in the country of Solomon Islands. The easiest way to reach Wagina is by plane to Kaghau Airport, Choiseul Province, from Honiara (currently twice a week). From Kagau, it takes about 45 – 60 minutes by outboard motor canoe to Wagina.

A pan flute (also known as panpipes or syrinx) is a musical instrument based on the principle of the closed tube, consisting of multiple pipes of gradually increasing length (and occasionally girth). Multiple varieties of pan flutes have been popular as folk instruments. The pipes are typically made from bamboo, giant cane, or local reeds. Other materials include wood, plastic, metal, and clay.

A roromaraugi is a parrying shield from San Cristobal Island in the Solomon Islands.