The Oceanic region sustains the lowest number of coronavirus infections worldwide, with Pacific Island Countries and Territories registering 3,057 COVID-19 cases as of 8 September 2020, Australia counting 26,651 and Aotearoa/New Zealand 1,797—a small fraction of the 28,789.698 reported cases across the globe (but disregarding the 260,000 cases in the Philippines not covered here). Yet as the reports, letters, discussions, poems and photo essays in this collection unravel, rural and urban communities across this vast region and including diasporic Pasifika communities, have been adversely affected in multiple ways. The diverse impacts of the evolving pandemic on Indigenous, settler and transnational migrant families can be usefully approached through the prism of space. Thus, the geographical expanse and isolation of Oceanic nations has helped prevent higher infection rates, yet the public health requirement of maintaining social distance flies in the face of everyday life in close-knit, often kin-based local communities, cultural etiquette and multigenerational households. Domestic spaces have turned into classrooms and workplaces. Lockdowns and fear of infection, international politics, and border closures bringing to a halt trade and tourism have changed well-established regional and transnational patterns of mobility, as, for example, in the case of Asmat sociality of aggregation and dispersal, and of Tongan circular migration. Food security, which had been sustained from a distance through imports, is now addressed by a return to the local, thereby recalibrating rural-urban relationships, for instance in Fiji where many families return to traditional subsistence farming, local market trading, and bartering. A social distancing of another kind, namely from external and national pressures to ‘develop’, ‘modernize’, ‘Westernize’ and urbanize, is taking place among the Pasifika community, in Melanesian and perhaps Australian Aboriginal life-worlds: as people turn their backs to larger settlements and return to traditional estates, cultural practices are reviving and in turn strengthen embedded knowledge transmission, connection to Country, cultural pride, and emotional and physical wellbeing. At the same time, as COVID-19 is exacerbating the impacts of climate change, natural disasters, widespread ill health and economic precarity in the region, island nations, local communities and individuals passionately encourage mutual support and even cultural alliances across borders. To briefly step inside this collection: Many contributions speak to the profound sense of isolation, anxiety, and uncertainty provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, precarity haunts the everyday life of Marshallese poultry workers in Northwest Arkansas and ni-Vanuatu laborers in New Zealand, who find themselves in increasingly dire economic straits, stranded from their families and homes indefinitely, and vulnerable to blaming and shaming (Bailey; Berta et al.). In Fiji and Vanuatu, the devastating impacts of the collapsing tourism industry point to the urgent need for more diversified economies that can sustain both long-term human and economic growth (Gounder; Leweniqila and Vunibola). Meanwhile, food insecurity has intensified in the context of restricted trade movements and the impending global economic crisis (Tagiafola et al.). On a more personal level, the pandemic has foregrounded individual and community experiences of grief, loss, and disconnection. As the collection's poems, personal reflections, and love letters vividly demonstrate, these experiences are exacerbated by the impossibility of physical mobility and the uncertain horizons of the pandemic itself (Boodoosingh; Faasisila; Vincent). And yet, despite the growing sense of precarity and disconnect provoked by the pandemic, resilience and creativity constitute central and recurring themes. We encounter collective conversations/talanoa/tok stories through which Pacific Islanders reimagine development as a more-than-human, pedagogical process (Kabutaulaka). We see transnational solidarities between local and diasporic communities, grounded in principles and practices of cultural vitality and resurgence (Berta et al.). Oceanic societies, including northern Australian families, are reviving small-scale, traditional subsistence practices, anchored in an ethos of exchange, self-reliance, kinship, reciprocity, as well as a deep connection to land (Dean; Leweniqila and Vunibola; Randin; Tagialofa et al.; Kearney et al.). Resilience and creativity include artistic modes of production and community care that showcase Pacific values of cooperation, reciprocity, and respect in the midst of crisis (Mook; Vaughn et al.). Central to Oceania modes of collective resilience has been the use of online platforms through which individuals and groups maintain culturally shaped, spiritually informed, and socially valued practices of togetherness. In Malaysian Borneo, for instance, COVID-19 related messages on Facebook, along with online church services, are being used by Indigenous Bidayuh to reframe the virus through Christian terms and idioms. This phenomenon invites us to rethink ‘virality’ as an aspirational and generative phenomenon, rather than one that is mainly destructive and therefore to be avoided (Chua). In Tonga, meanwhile, people are finding ways to nurture long-standing intergenerational connections and famili through online platforms that enable knowledge sharing, the development of cultural practices, and the emergence of new forms of collective well-being and online agency (Faleolo). The idea for this collection was to make audible and visible the people and scholars of Oceania, whose lives, views, knowledges and experiences in COVID-19 have not received much engagement in both mainstream academia and news media. As curators, we are thrilled to find that individuals, intergenerational research collectives, and local communities have responded to our call for scholarly and creative contributions with passion, concern, and insight. We have organized the 26 contributions geographically, roughly moving in an easterly direction. Ideally, new connections of support and recognition will grow every which way. Ute Eickelkamp is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic research has been with Anangu families in Central Australia, beginning in 1995. Through projects on art, children's imagination, play, ogres and the nexus of personhood, culture and ontology, she explores the symbolic articulations of a transforming Indigenous cultural imaginary. Drawing on German humanities traditions, philosophy and psychoanalysis, Ute seeks to understand how the Anangu accommodate or not the existential pressures they chronically live with. More recently, as an ARC Future Fellow, she considered how Anangu thinkers, including vernacular Christians, speak about nature, history, and being. She is developing a second interdisciplinary action research on rapidly changing ecologies beyond Australia—the post-coal world of Germany's Ruhr Valley where she grew up. Based on her growing work in the field of Design Anthropology, Ute has become Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design at the University of New South Wales. Sophie Chao is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney's School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and the Charles Perkins Centre. Her research explores the intersections of Indigeneity, health, capitalism, and ecology in the Pacific. Sophie completed her PhD in anthropology at Macquarie University. Her thesis examined how Indigenous communities in Indonesian West Papua experience, conceptualize, and contest the adverse social and environmental impacts of large-scale deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion. It was awarded the Australian Anthropological Society Best PhD Thesis Prize in 2019 and the John Legge Prize for Best Thesis in Asian Studies in 2020. Sophie previously worked for Indigenous rights organization Forest Peoples Programme in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. For more on Sophie's research, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.