Vaka Moana Voyages of the Ancestors

by Australian National Maritime Museum Media on 14 Nov 2008 Starting more than 3000 years ago, the world’s first blue-water mariners set out from south-east Asia in sailing canoes to explore the vast ocean that lay before them.

Over succeeding centuries and millennia, against enormous odds, they extended the boundary of human settlement thousands of kilometres into the oceanic hemisphere.

'The Pacific islands were the most remote and difficult places on earth to reach,' says New Zealand historian Professor K R Howe. 'With their settlement, humans finally came to the end of the habitable world.'

The story of this stunning migration is the subject of a major exhibition coming to the Australian National Maritime Museum, 6 December – 15 February 2009

Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors traces the biological and cultural trails left by the Pacific mariners, showing that the far-flung cultures of today’s Oceania have common ancestry in south-east Asia.

The exhibition also reveals the technologies that enabled the mariners to cross vast expanses of ocean thousands of years before the Vikings, Portuguese, Spaniards and other Western seafarers made their first trans-oceanic forays.

It traces the evolution of their vessels from the early and critically important invention of the stablising outrigger which enabled them to put to sea long before anyone else. A double-hulled canoe from the Cook Islands, one of the more striking artefacts in the exhibition, shows some of the traditional techniques of building and rigging.

The Pacific Islanders developed their own means of open ocean navigation – or ‘wayfinding’ – based on the observation of sea and sky.

The exhibition includes two Marshall Island ‘stick charts’, woven latticework frames with shells attached, on which ocean navigators plot islands, local swells and current patterns.

This methodical recording of navigational information leads modern observers to believe the Pacific’s ancient mariners were able to navigate purposefully and deliberately over vast distances of ocean.

The exhibition shatters the myth that the Pacific’s ancient navigators discovered a succession of luxuriant tropical island paradises. In fact, most of the islands were sparse in flora and fauna – and quite incapable of sustaining a human settlement for long.

Historians agree the peopling of the Pacific Islands could have happened only in the past 10,000 years – when humans evolved from hunters and gatherers to agriculturalists. The new arrivals brought their own seedlings and domesticated animals.

In other areas, the exhibition considers the sudden and extensive social changes that came with the arrival of Western mariners in the 17th and 18th centuries, and a recent 20th and 21st century renaissance of interest in the ancient mariners and the replication of their voyages.
Vaka Moana (literally Ocean Canoe) was assembled by New Zealand’s Auckland Museum: Tamaki Paenga Hira.

That museum drew on its own superb Maori and Pacific collections as well as those of other New Zealand and overseas institutions for the 130 objects that tell the story of one of the world’s great human migrations.

It enlisted the expertise of in-house curators and academic specialists from across New Zealand and around the Pacific. The exhibition incorporates the most recent scientific research in fields as diverse as genetics, linguistics, and computer modelling.

'We’re proud indeed to be showing this remarkable exhibition in Sydney,' says Mary-Louise Williams, director of the Australian National Maritime Museum. 'It lifts the veil on many mysteries about the original settlement of the Pacific Islands and helps us to a much better understanding of the people and cultures of our region.'

Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors has already been on display in New Zealand, Japan and Taiwan. After Sydney, it will travel to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

It will be on display at the Australian National Maritime Museum from 6 December this year until 15 February 2009. The museum, at Darling Harbour, is open daily (except Christmas Day) from 9.30 am to 5 pm (9.30 am to 6 pm throughout January).

Professor Kerry Howe is Professor of History at Massey University’s Albany Campus, Auckland. He is a contributor to, and overall editor of Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors, a lavishly illustrated book that accompanies the exhibition. The 368-page volume brings together contributions by internationally acknowledged specialists.

For more information, telephone (02) 9298 3777, or visit www.anmm.gov.au .