Where did the word pōnga come from?

Seven thousand years ago, bo was what the seagoing ancestors of Maori on the island of Taiwan called the dark unknown  depths of the sea.

As each generation moved south-east towards Aotearoa, variants of bo have been applied not only to after-sundown darkness, but also to the unknown spiritual darkness from which all light, matter and life came out of, and in which our ancestors now dwell.

In Tonga night is still bo, and in Fiji it is bongi.

Then later Polynesians changed the /b/ sound to /p/.


Nga Tini o Toi
Most Pakeha call a tree fern a punga, but Pakeha West Coasters call it a bungi, suggesting that the first Polynesian arrivals, Nga Tini o Toi, came from an island where dark was still called bo.

This famous haka angrily recalls the dark times when so-called "law" courts of the Pakeha assisted in the illegal sale of tribal lands to unscruulous British buyers. 

Read how the prized Murimotu (Desert Road) tussock lands of our local Ngati Rangi iwi were lost to land-shark John Studholme.