Chief Judicial Commissioner for the Western Pacific Chief Judicial Commissioner was renamed – no longer the Chief Justice of Fiji) and two puisne judges, one based in Port Vila, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and the other in Tarawa, Gilbert and Ellice Islands (now Kiribati and Tuvalu). Most of the island groups had gained either independence or internal self-government by 1971. On 2 January 1976 after nearly all had been given separate statehood, the office of High Commissioner and the entity of the Pacific Territories were abolished. The High Commission of the Western Pacific was abolished, the last archives being finally packed up in Honiara in August 1978.
Pacific Islands the Pacific Ocean once colonised by the British, French, Dutch, United States, and Japanese, such as the Pitcairn Islands, Taiwan, and Borneo. In other uses it may refer to islands with Austronesian linguistic heritage like Taiwan, Indonesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, Myanmar islands, which found their genesis in the Neolithic cultures of the island of Taiwan. Many islands located within the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean are not considered part of Oceania. These islands include the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador; the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, United States; Vancouver Island in Canada; the Russian islands of Sakhalin and Kuril Islands; the island nation