One day in the late 1980's a Gold Coast , {south-east Queensland} resident, Mr Roy Markham, was digging on his property when he unearthed a large stone slab, carved in the form of a human face, later identified as a Polynesian carving. Similarly, about this time, further inland, a husband and wife collecting garden rocks on the Auburn River near Mundubbera found, partly exposed above the bank a Polynesian-style human head carved from local sandstone.

The head measures 40.5cm tall by 16cm wide across the forehead and 17cm in profile from nose to the back of the head. And again, in the mid 1970's, another, small Polynesian-style, Easter Island like head, carved from a rock alien to Australia, was unearthed in the Sydney suburb of Punchbowl, NSW. Back in 1923, on Murriwai Beach north-west of Auckland, on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island, a local resident was digging in an ancient Maori midden of seashells and fishbones, when he unearthed an old wooden boomerang of undoubted Australia Aboriginal origin.

What do these finds all have in common?

They are certain proof that, centuries before the arrival of Europeans explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries, Polynesian explorers had visited Australia, and as the boomerang suggests, they had reached our east coast from New Zealand.The Polynesian colonists of New Zealand named themselves Maori. When some were interviewed by anthropologists in the late 19th century, they claimed that many of the early explorers had traded with far north Queensland Aboriginal tribes, even sailing as far as Arnhem Land for this purpose.

Such voyages were by no means beyond the abilities of these hardy Neolithic "Vikings of the Sunrise", for, as I am about to show, Polynesian canoes at one time or another touched upon every major continent. Scholarly opinion has long been divided on the origins of the Polynesian race. Among the more exotic theories was that they originated in South America {Thor Heyerdahl}, however, all evidence points towards Asia.

Perhaps the Polynesians developed out of an admixture of migrating peoples from Mesopotamia and a later admixture with people from southern China, who came together in the Malay Archipelago over 4,000 years ago, from where they eventually began to spread out on their great cross-ocean migrations. There is merit to this theory. The Easter Islanders possessed a script practically identical with that of the Indus Valley civilisation {around 2500-1500 BC}, and the Maoris called themselves Urukehu {"people of Ur"} or" the decendants of the first chiefs".

Thor Heyerdahl points out that, in ancient Mesopotamia, the name Uru meant "People of Ur". Another argument for the primarily Mesopotamia origins is their extensive astronomical knowledge and calendar; and belief in a spherical earth, which grew from their discovering new stars as their explorers sailed north and south upon the "watery highways" of the vast oceans. The Polynesians called thier homeland Hawaiki {which had nothing to do with Hawaii}.

According to the descendants of the Takitimu canoe, one of the original canoes of Polynesian immigrants to reach New Zealand in 1350 AD, their ancestors came from a place called Uru, this the Maori sage, Te Matorohanga {1860's} identified as being somewhere in western Asia. Scholarly opinion today places "Hawaiki" in the society-Cook-Tahiti Islands region, the from area where the Hawaiian Islands, Easter Island and New Zealand were settled by 400 AD and 1000 AD respectively.

The occupants of the Takitimu canoe passed on three words: Uru, Ari and Irihia, all of which belong to the early Mesopotamian Neolithic period. Uru; which was the early Sumerian word for city, a village or other area of human inhabitation, and also their name for the "Great South Land of Uru", the "lost paradise" and land of origin of all mankind.

Ari; the oldest Sumerian word for 'grain', any cultivated grain. It is also another ancient variant after Uru for 'Ayran'. Irihia; A word in Maori which could be a passive of the ancient verb Iri, another variant of 'Aryan', meaning "be elevated", and believed to be an even more ancient Maori verbal noun meaning 'elevation' or 'sunrise', as in the Maori tribal name Ra-iri. it was cognate with Sumerian Il, meaning 'raise', and in Sumeria it also meant "the Far East".

Polynesian Face