Australasia is a region of Oceania comprising Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term was coined by Charles de Brosses in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes (1756). He derived it from the Latin for "south of Asia" and differentiated the area from Polynesia (to the east) and the southeast Pacific (Magellanica). It is also distinct from Micronesia (to the northeast). Australasia sits on the Indo-Australian Plate, together with India.

Geopolitically, Australasia is sometimes used as a term for Australia and New Zealand together in the absence of another word limited to those two countries. Sometimes the island of New Guinea (Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian part of the island) is encompassed by the term. There are many organisations whose names are prefixed with "(Royal) Australasian Society" that are limited to just Australia and New Zealand.

In the past, Australasia has been used as a name for combined Australia/New Zealand sporting teams. Examples include tennis between 1905 and 1915, when New Zealand and Australia combined to compete in the Davis Cup international tournament, and at the Olympic Games of 1908 and 1912.

Angelo Badalamenti (born March 22, 1937) is an American composer, known for his movie soundtrack work for director David Lynch, notably Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks saga (1990–1992) and Mulholland Drive. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Soundtrack Awards in 2008.

Badalamenti was born in Brooklyn, New York to an Italian family; his mother was from Sicily and his father was a fish market owner. Badalamenti spent much of his childhood listening to opera and classical music. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and at Manhattan School of Music where he earned a master's degree in music.

Badalamenti scored films such as Gordon's War, and Law and Disorder, but his big break came when he was brought in to be Isabella Rossellini's singing coach for the song "Blue Velvet" in David Lynch's classic film Blue Velvet. Rossellini was supposed to sing "Song to the Siren," a song by Tim Buckley, but Lynch was unable to secure the rights to use it. Badalamenti and Lynch collaborated to write "Mysteries of Love", using lyrics Lynch wrote and Badalamenti's music. Lynch asked Badalamenti to appear in the film as the piano player in the club where Rossellini's character performs. This film would be the first of many projects they would work on together.

Donald Eric Partridge (27 October 1941 – 21 September 2010) was an English singer and songwriter, known as the "king of the buskers". He performed from the early 1960s as a busker and one-man band, and achieved unexpected commercial success in the UK in the late 1960s with the songs "Rosie" and "Blue Eyes".

Don Partridge was born in Bournemouth, England. By his own account, he left home at age 15 and became a burglar, before working at some 45 different jobs. By the early 1960s, inspired by American singer Jesse Fuller, he travelled around Europe as a solo entertainer on street corners, initially simply singing songs with a guitar. However, he found that he gained more attention by performing as a one-man band, playing guitar, kazoo or harmonica, bass drum and cymbal at the same time.

Playing by that time mainly in London, Partridge performed traditional English and American folk songs as well as his own compositions. In 1964, he and his friend, guitarist Alan Young, were described in the Evening Standard as the first young street musicians to be seen in London since the second world war. He was frequently arrested and fined, but gained a local following and made a TV appearance on the Eamonn Andrews Show.