Baiame- Aboriginal Australian GodDeity"Sky Father"

The Making

Baiame came down from the sky to a world that had no shape. The land lay flat and bare, without rivers, without hills, without anything that grew. He walked across it, and where he set his feet the ground rose into ridges and ranges. He called the rivers out of the earth and filled the waterholes. He planted the seeds of every tree and grass until the country that had been empty was covered and alive.

Then he knelt at the red earth and shaped the first people from it. He breathed into them. They stood. He taught them what to eat and how to find it, which animals belonged to which clan, and the laws they must follow to keep the world he had made in order. The people were his. Every generation after carried that connection back to the clay and the breath.

The Kurrea at Narran Lake

K. Langloh Parker recorded a story from the Noongahburrah that runs like this: Baiame's two wives, Birrahgnooloo and Cunnunbeillee, went to fish at Narran Lake while he was away hunting. In the deepest water lived the Kurrea, a creature like an immense crocodile. It rose and swallowed both women whole.

When Baiame returned and found his camp empty, he tracked his wives to the lake. He could see the Kurrea's shape beneath the surface. He struck the water spirit with his power, killed it, and split the body open. The two women came out alive. Narran Lake remains a sacred site tied to this story.

The Ascent to Bullima

When his work on earth was finished, Baiame went back to the sky. He ascended from Mount Yengo in the Hunter Valley, and the shape of his reclining form marks the mountain still. His sky realm, Bullima, lies beyond the visible heavens, a place of eternal light.

He did not vanish. His wife Birrahgnooloo, in the form of a wedge-tailed eagle, sends rain down to the country below. His voice sounds in thunder. At night the dark nebulae of the Milky Way trace the shape of Gawarrgay, the celestial emu, one of his sacred forms. The Pleiades mark where the Meamei, the Seven Sisters, fled skyward to escape Wurrunnah; Baiame set them among the stars, and their rising and setting pace the seasons he wove into creation.

In the Karraur tradition, it was Baiame who woke the sun goddess Yhi from her sleep in the Dreamtime darkness. He whispered her name. She opened her eyes, and light flooded the world for the first time.

The Bora Ground

Baiame gave his people the Bora, the initiation ceremonies through which young men learn sacred law. R.H. Mathews documented the Kamilaroi Bora grounds: two circular clearings connected by a sacred path, the larger ring open to the gathering, the smaller ring hidden among trees where only initiated men may enter.

At the smaller circle, Baiame's image is carved into the surrounding trees. These dendroglyphs, cut deep into the bark, encode patterns of the Dreaming. The bullroarer spins in the dark, and the deep thrumming drone that fills the air is understood as the voice of Daramulum, Baiame's son, who oversees the rites on his father's behalf. A.W. Howitt recorded among the Yuin of the south coast that Daramulum is the figure who stands between the All-Father in Bullima and the people on the ground, his presence announced by that sound and nothing else.

The initiates learn what Baiame set down at the beginning: the laws of kinship and the care of country. The wirinun, the clever men and healers, trace their powers back to him. What Baiame made, the Bora keeps alive.