Oceanian Civilisations — Aboriginal Australians, Māori, Polynesians, Hawaiians

The introduction divides Oceania into four parts — Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia — and briefly describes the volcanic, mountainous and coral origins of the islands and population change from 1870 to today. This part is clear, but the book's back cover opens on an uneasy note: Aboriginal people finding water where there is no trace of moisture by «holding their palms facing the ground», and the quote «we are all visitors to this time and place». These motifs rest not on ethnographic sources but on romantic notions of «Indigenous wisdom» circulating in popular culture, and the book gives no source for them.

The weakest aspect of chapter one is its language. Aboriginal people are introduced as «Australoids», «a people with chocolate-coloured skin and strong bones»; they are said to have «never advanced socially beyond the Palaeolithic» and to have lived «primitively but in harmony with nature»; today they are described as a people «uneducated, struggling with unemployment and with a high tendency to crime». This racial-evolutionist language is a legacy of 19th- and 20th-century literature, and the author repeats it without question — even though the same chapter cites Geoffrey Blainey's «Triumph of the Nomads» to note that in the 1800s Aboriginal people lived more comfortably than 90% of the population of Eastern Europe.

The factual contradictions are serious too: at the start of the chapter Aboriginal arrival in Australia is dated to «17,000 years ago», while a few pages later, citing a 2016 genetic study in Nature, the book says they left Africa 72,000 years ago and reached Sahul 50,000 years ago; the back cover says 70,000. The word «Ngura» is explained as «the spiritual ancestor who created the world», whereas in Western Desert languages it means «country, camp, place». The claim that Aboriginal people were «not considered citizens» from 1788 to 1967 is also a simplification — the 1967 referendum concerned mainly the census and federal law-making power.

Even so, parts of the chapter are genuinely valuable. Tindale's 1940 count of 574 tribes and their distribution by state, around 250 languages, land belonging to the clan and being home to ancestral spirits, and the guarding of secret water sources are clearly described. The section on colonial massacres — Fremantle in 1830, Convincing Ground, Waterloo Creek in 1838 and Coniston in 1928, the forced removal of children from their families between 1910 and 1970, and the 1997 national inquiry's finding that this amounted to genocide — covers a topic rarely found in popular Turkish literature.

The section «Women in Aboriginal Life» is the longest part of the chapter: women being kept out of ceremonies and denied knowledge of the «Father God», girls being promised in marriage even before birth, marriages to much older men, polygyny, a double standard on adultery, as well as women's own ceremonies and the role of older women, are described in detail. Practices such as scarification and genital cutting imposed on girls in some groups are also mentioned. The information is often generalised without saying which group or period it applies to — a culture spanning tens of thousands of years and hundreds of distinct groups is flattened into a single picture.

The start of chapter two introduces the Māori through New Zealand's late settlement, the Hawaiki legend, adaptation to a cold climate, tribes called «iwi» and the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Here too the dating is outdated: Māori arrival is placed «around the year 1000 or earlier», whereas current archaeological consensus points to about 1250–1300. In the end the book may spark interest in the subject, but it should be read with caution as to both terminology and facts.

• Short text divided by headings and bullet points
• Historical photographs and quotations in sidebars
• A bibliography at the end