| I had never considered upon which continent New Zealand is considered to reside before reading your comment. After consulting Wikipedia, I've discovered that the answer is a lot less straight-forward than I had originally thought. Before doing my (minimal) research, I would have assumed they were part of Asia, if for no other reason than that I considered Australia the continent and Australia the country to be essentially one and the same (i.e. a continent consisting of just one country), but that doesn't seem to be the case. According to Wikipedia's article on the continent of Australia [1], "New Zealand is not on the same continental shelf and so is not part of the continent of Australia but is part of the submerged continent Zealandia. Zealandia and Australia together are part of the wider region known as Oceania or Australasia." Similarly, Wikipedia's "list of sovereign states and dependent territories by continent" page [2], does not use "Australia" as a continental group, and instead uses "Oceania" to encapsulate states in that region. So I guess New Zealanders don't really have any right to complain about not being able to call themselves Australian, since they're not even technically part of the Australian continent. They could refer to themselves as Oceanians, Australasians, or even Polynesians [3], but not as Australians. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_%28continent%29 [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de... [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oceanias_Regions.png |
