Oceania is the last great region of the world to have been peopled. The colonisation of this space took place from west to east, over several millennia, by successive waves of Austronesian navigators setting out from South-East Asia. New Zealand was not peopled by the Māori until around the thirteenth century, while some islands of the central Pacific received their first inhabitants only after the year 1000. This youth of the settlement is directly legible in this section: the culinary traditions of the zone are among the most recent in the world, and its charcuterie traditions are even more recent. European colonisation, from Cook’s voyage in 1769, came to overlay indigenous food traditions founded on fishing, hunting and a few subsistence crops.

The Australian and New Zealand sub-ensemble received its charcuterie tradition from the British route. The chapter ‘The circulations’ mentions the arrival of the settlers at Botany Bay in 1788 as one of the most recent cases of European charcuterie tradition transplantation. From this tradition was born the snag, whose status within Australian culture illustrates the appropriation of an imported preparation. The New Zealand lamb sausage reflects the same British origins associated with lamb, in a country with about 4 sheep per inhabitant. The kangaroo sausage adds a distinctive element: the folding in of bush tucker spices (wattleseed, Tasmanian pepper), whose indigenous traditions go back tens of millennia.

Beyond Australasia, Oceanian charcuterie is more discreet. New Caledonia uses the rusa deer, a cervid introduced in 1862 by the governor of Java as a gift to the wife of Governor Guillain, which has become overabundant in the absence of predators; local butchers today make it into fresh and dried sausages, as well as merguez calédoniennes. From the end of the nineteenth century, Hawaii received Azorean and Madeiran workers engaged for the sugar-cane plantations: their Portuguese chouriço, which became ‘Portuguese sausage’ in English transcription, is today a daily ingredient of the local breakfast.

The other Pacific archipelagos (Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, French Polynesia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands) developed no stable, documented cased charcuterie tradition. Their food cultures rest on fish, whole pig cooked in a buried oven (lovo, umu, ahima’a), tubers (taro, yam, cassava), and coconut milk. Where sausages are eaten, they are imported industrial products or very recent artisanal creations (a tuna-and-coconut fish sausage, for instance, in Tahiti), without a tradition passed down collectively. Their absence from this section reflects that reality rather than a lack of documentation.

None of the preparations retained in the Oceanian section is more than two centuries older than its documentation: the charcuterie of this zone is everywhere the product of a recent meeting between an imported European technique and local resources, whose modalities vary according to the colonial and migratory waves that touched each territory.