This area consists of several moderately large Indonesian islands. Westernmost is the small populous and mountainous island of Bali, one of the Lesser Sundas(2). In the west the Indonesian islands border other parts of their nation: Java(3), the Celebes(4) and New Guinea(5), and the shallow Timor and Arafura Seas are their only separation from the Australian mainland. More than a million people live on the various islands of Indonesia's Molucca Province. These islands include Halmahera between the Molucca and Halmahera Seas; Ceram(6) and its neighbors between New Guinea to the east and the Celebes to the west, and the Ceram Sea up north and the Banda Sea down south. Farthest south, and surrounded by the Lesser Sundas, the Banda Sea, New Guinea and the Arafura Sea, are three more chains. Even more populous than the Molucca's are the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Bali is the equally mountainous Lombok. Just as filled with volcanoes and people are Flores and Timor(7).
There is no majority language. Balinese comes closest because of the large number of speakers on one island--almost four million. The language of national government on Bali is Indonesian(8), which is not a regional first language(9). Bali's neighbor, Lombok, speaks Sasak, with two million speakers. (Bali and Sasak together belong to the Bali-Sasak group--accounting for almost half of the speakers. This group is part of the Malayo-Polynesian group which does account for a majority of locals.) Other languages spoken locally by one in 20 or more are: Timor or Atoni, a language of Timor spoken by 700,000; Bima, a language of eastern Sumbawa spoken by half a million, and Manggarai, spoken by 400,000 in western Flores.(10) Of the remaining one in five, almost all of them speak an Austronesian language.
In religion, also there is no clear majority. There are slightly more Moslems than Christian--both more than a third of the total. Of the Christians Catholics outnumber Protestants almost two to one, virtually all of them in the eastern Lesser Sundas. The Protestants are also mostly in the eastern Lesser Sundas, but there are many in the Molucca provinces too. The third religion, Hinduism, is represented almost entirely by Bali; Hinduism accounts for less than one in four people in the Lesser Sundas and Molucca provinces.
There are no giant cities, but several administrative centers are significant. Denpassar, Bali's capital sits near a southern neck of the island. Mataram, the capital of Western Lesser Sunda Province, sits not far from the west shore of Lombok. And on western Timor is Kupang, the cpatial of the eastern set of these islands. Far to the northeast is Ambon, capital of the Moluccas, on the island of the same name that is just southwest of Ceram.
People lived in the Indonesian islands long before today's groups arrived--some of them migrated on to Australia to form its indiginous population. Perhaps the speakers of Ternate on the 'Spice Islands' of the Moluccas are a long standing group, or perhaps they migrated west from the Bird's Head Peninsula of New Guinea where similar languages are spoken.
Tens of thousands of years ago speakers of Western Malayo-Polynesian arrived from the Philippines to Guam, Indonesia and further west. A second migration--speakers of Central Malayo-Polynesian and Eastern Malayo-Polynesian--added diversity to the Moluccas and the Lesser Sundas. One of the Eastern groups gave rise to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea languages, and another, starting about 3,000 years ago, to the Oceanic group. The latter left the area and went east in two waves.
Islam arrived in the Lesser Sundas and Moluccas in the 15th century. Bali held out for the older Hindu religion which had arrived there by 700 C.E. Christianity arrived with European colonization.
north
east from Palau and northern Halmahera
east from southern Halmahera
north and east from Ceram
south of Aru
southeast of Timor
southwest of the Lesser Sundas
west of Bali
north of Bali, Lombok and western Sumbawa
north of eastern Sumbawa and western Flores
north of eastern Flores and Alor and west of the southern Moluccas
east between the Sulu Islands and Buru
north of the Sula Islands
south between the Sula Islands and Obi
west of Halmahera
(1) Or Moluku.
(2) Or Nusa Tenggara.
(3) Or Jawa.
(4) Or Sulawesi.
(5) Or Irian Jaya.
(6) Or Seram.
(7) Or Timur.
(8) Also called Malay or Malaysian.
(9) Creoles however are spoken in five cities local to this part of Indonesia.
(10) I'm assuming that not as many as one in 20 are migrants from eastern Java. Seven million have been resettled to other islands, especially Borneo (Kalimantan) and New Guinea.