Vaka Moana Voyages of the Ancestors Starting more than 3000 years ago, the worlds 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 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 todays Oceania have common ancestry in south-east Asia.