AHC: Native Majority Oceania after 1642

[SinghSong]

Prompted by Lerk's thread, but asking the same question about the possibility of a Native Majority Oceania (ideally, ~75% or more), after the arrival of Abel Janszoon Tasman's voyage in 1642. On the face of it, at least IMHO, this seems like a far easier and more plausibly doable challenge than the 'Native majority Americas after 1492' AHC- anyone up for it?

 

[JesterBL]

If you exclude Australia from your definition of Oceania, we're already there, so really, it comes down to trying to preserve Indigenous Australians. I personally think that is pretty tough with a POD of 1642. Even with a much less drastic technological gap, things simply don't tend to go well when hunter-gatherers* encounter farmers. You can even see a natural experiment of sorts between the Maori and Indigenous Australians.

*and I tend to agree with the theories that place Indigenous Australian societies on the higher end of non-agricultural land management techniques.

 

[SinghSong]

If you exclude Australia from your definition of Oceania, we're already there, so really, it comes down to trying to preserve Indigenous Australians. I personally think that is pretty tough with a POD of 1642. Even with a much less drastic technological gap, things simply don't tend to go well when hunter-gatherers* encounter farmers. You can even see a natural experiment of sorts between the Maori and Indigenous Australians.

*and I tend to agree with the theories that place Indigenous Australian societies on the higher end of non-agricultural land management techniques.

Either that, or having those Aboriginal Australians be replaced/supplanted with a greater proportion of 'blackbirded' labour from the rest of Oceania, and then finding some way not to have all these people deported. Perhaps if the practice in Australia commenced earlier, on a scale comparable to the contemporary slave trade in the southern US, but with no greater/less European settlement than IOTL (ie, Australia colonized via the 'plantation model', in a manner more akin to Charleston or the Caribbean, rather than the 'penal colony' model, using predominantly Oceanian slave labour rather than African slave labour)?

 

[JesterBL]

Either that, or having those Aboriginal Australians be replaced/supplanted with a greater proportion of 'blackbirded' labour from the rest of Oceania, and then finding some way not to have all these people deported. Perhaps if the practice in Australia commenced earlier, on a scale comparable to the contemporary slave trade in the southern US, but with no greater/less European settlement than IOTL (ie, Australia colonized via the 'plantation model', in a manner more akin to Charleston or the Caribbean, rather than the 'penal colony' model, using predominantly Oceanian slave labour rather than African slave labour)?

Feels like that is stretching the definition of native but- assuming there is a plantation model in Australia- why use natives of Oceania over the peoples of India and SE Asia more broadly? The reason Indo-Fijians exist is because native Fijians died at higher rates in plantation agriculture due to higher susceptibility to communicable disease.

You'll also run into the problem of sourcing slaves at scale from Oceania- the reason sub-Saharan Africa was a source of slaves is not because the societies there were primitive- they were in fact developed enough to have polities and systems of exchange to wage war and distribute human plunder at the scale necessary for early capitalism. Oceania wouldn't/didn't have that.