Baiame

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In a sandstone shelter above the Wollombi valley, in the Hunter country of New South Wales, a figure stands more than three meters across the rock. He is outlined in white and filled with red ochre, two great circles for eyes, and his arms reach so far to either side that their ends seem to touch the trees that frame the shelter’s mouth. The Wonnarua, on whose Country the shelter sits, know whose image it is. He is the maker of all things, and the long reach of his arms is the reach of one who holds and watches over everything he has made. The shelter is called Baiame Cave, and the being painted there is Baiame, who came down from the sky in the creation-time, shaped the land and the first people, gave the Law, and went back up beyond the clouds.

Across the river-nations of inland south-eastern Australia he goes by names that shift with the tongue: Baiame to the Kamilaroi and Wonnarua, Byamee or Baayami among the Euahlayi to the north-west, with cognate figures among the Wiradjuri, the Darkinjung, the Guringay, and the people of the coast. The English-speaking ethnographers who first wrote him down reached for a single word and settled on a strange one — the All-Father — and that word, and the argument it started, has shadowed him ever since. But the word came from the observers. Within the nations that hold him, Baiame is the one who made the Country and then withdrew, and whose Law still stands in the land he left behind.

The maker who came down and went up

In the Dreaming — the ever-present creation-order that the Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri name in their own tongues, not a vanished long-ago but the living ground of how things are — Baiame came down out of the sky onto a land not yet finished. He traveled across it making what was not there: the courses of the rivers, the ranges of the hills, the timber and the plains. He made the animals and the plants, and then he made the first men and women, and to them he gave their laws of life, their customs, their songs, and the ceremonies by which the generations would be carried forward. When the making was done he did not stay. He went back up, beyond the clouds, to a country above the sky, and there he remains.

The Euahlayi, among whom the writer Catherine Langloh Parker lived on the Narran River from the 1880s, told her that Byamee’s camp above the sky was a place of running water and everlasting bloom — Bullimah — beside the great stream of stars the Europeans call the Milky Way. The accounts gathered by the anthropologist A. W. Howitt at the turn of the twentieth century carry the same shape: a sky-dwelling being, never himself born and never dying, whose abode is above the clouds and to whom, in some nations, the spirits of the dead make their way. In the documented Wiradjuri material on the making of medicine-men, the path to his camp runs up a mountain and then up a cord or thread through an opening in the sky that keeps shutting and opening very fast, and at the top sits Baiame himself, beside a throne and a substance of quartz — water turned to crystal and crystal turned to water — the shining stone that is the very stuff of the doctor’s power.

That detail is worth pausing on, because it marks the line between two kinds of knowing. The crystal, the cord, the sky-camp: these come to the written record from inside ceremony, and the ceremony of the medicine-men, like the men’s initiation it belongs with, is restricted knowledge. The outline above is what reached print through the colonial-era ethnographers and stands in the public record; the living substance of the rite is not for outsiders, and was never meant to be. Where the older books are confident, the tradition itself draws a boundary, and the boundary is part of the meaning.

Baiame does not stand alone in the sky. The Euahlayi accounts give him a wife, Birrahgnooloo — in some tellings identified with the emu, that great dark shape the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi read not in the stars but in the dust-lanes of the Milky Way itself — and she is the maker of floods, the one to whom one appeals when the rivers must rise. And there is Daramulun, named in many south-eastern nations, called in some his son and in others his brother or his agent: the being of the initiation ground, the one whose voice is heard in the roar of the sounding-board swung at the ceremonies, the intermediary who stands between Baiame above and the boys being made men below. The relation among the three is not fixed across the nations, and the early collectors, hunting for a tidy genealogy, sometimes forced one where the traditions held several. What is constant is the shape: a withdrawn maker above, a goddess of the waters, and an intermediary at the threshold of manhood.

Nor is Baiame the only sky-maker of the south-east. He belongs to a family of such beings whose territories abut and overlap. Where his Country gives out to the south, in the lands of the Kulin nations around the place that became Melbourne, the maker is the eagle-being Bunjil, who shaped that Country and ordered its moiety law before rising into the sky; among the coastal nations to the south-east the intermediary Daramulun is in some accounts the master in his own right. The early ethnographers, struck by the resemblance among these figures, gathered them under their single coined label and asked whether they were one god under many names or many gods of one kind — a question, again, more theirs than the traditions’. Each nation holds its own maker, on its own Country, in its own tongue; that the makers rhyme is a fact about a shared and ancient world, not a doctrine any of them set out to teach.

The Law, the bora, and the name not spoken

What Baiame left in the land was the Law, and the Law was kept above all in the ceremony that made boys into men. Across south-eastern Australia this ceremony, and the ground prepared for it, took the name bora — a word from the Gamilaraay tongue of the Kamilaroi that the colonists then carried right across the east. A bora ground was not a casual clearing. It was two rings of raised earth, a larger and a smaller, joined by a worn pathway, the great circle open and the inner circle sacred and closed; and the work of cutting and mounding the earth, the raising of the figures and the keeping of the sacred objects, was done in Baiame’s name and under his presiding eye. The astronomers who have studied the surviving rings note that the pathway between the two circles tends to point along the line of the Milky Way as it stands in the initiation season — the bora on the ground answering a bora in the sky, the camp of Baiame mirrored in the camp of the men.

The figure of Baiame in the rock shelter on Wonnarua Country, Hunter Valley, New South Wales — outlined in white, filled with red, his outstretched arms reaching toward the trees that frame the shelter. The site is sacred and access is restricted by the traditional owners. Photo by Wikimedia user Rayd8, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Inside the bora the boys were taken from the women and the children, kept apart, and over days and nights were given the things a man must carry: the sacred songs, the designs, the lore of the Country and the conduct it demands. The physical marks varied by nation. The deep content of the rite does not belong in any account written for outsiders, and is left here where the tradition leaves it — closed. What can be said plainly is that the ceremony was the hinge of the whole social and religious order, and that it was Baiame’s; the boys emerged not merely older but remade, brought for the first time inside the Law he had given.

His weight is measured, too, in the silence around his name. Among several of the nations Baiame’s name was too sacred to be spoken aloud in ordinary talk, above all where women and the uninitiated might hear. The Euahlayi, Parker recorded, when they had to refer to Byamee at all, used instead the word Boyjerh — “Father” — a circumlocution that named him without uttering him. The rock-art image carried the same charge: the shelter in the Hunter country was a place women did not approach, and the figure on its wall was not for every eye. A god whose name one steps around, whose image one does not look on without standing, is a god held at a particular pitch of seriousness — not feared as an enemy, but kept apart as the highest things are kept apart.

The All-Father and the long argument

When the explorers, missionaries, and ethnographers of the nineteenth century began to write down what they were told of Baiame and Daramulun, they found something they had not expected and did not know how to hold. Here, among peoples their own century insisted on calling the simplest on earth, was a sky-dwelling maker who had created the world, given the moral law, and withdrawn — a being who, set down on paper, looked uncomfortably like the God of the people doing the writing. Out of that recognition came one of the longest arguments in the study of religion, and it is an argument that reveals as much about the Europeans waging it as about the being they were arguing over.

A. W. Howitt, gathering testimony across the south-east, distinguished these figures from the ordinary run of ancestral spirits and proposed a single English term to cover the family of them — the All-Father — and held that the belief was genuinely the people’s own. The Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang seized on the material for a larger thesis: that a notion of a high, moral, creating sky-being could be found among the world’s least technologically elaborate societies, and might therefore be old — perhaps older than the spirits and the magic that the reigning evolutionary anthropology assumed must come first. Lang’s contemporaries answered at once. In the pages of the journal Folk-Lore in 1898, the question of “the high gods of Australia” was fought out directly, and the counter-case was sharp: that whatever the ethnographers were now recording had already been reshaped by decades of contact, that the missionaries had been preaching one creator God to these nations for two generations, and that a figure who so conveniently resembled the missionaries’ God might be partly the missionaries’ echo. Later the priest-ethnographer Wilhelm Schmidt would build the Australian material into a vast argument for a primeval monotheism underlying all religion, and later still Mircea Eliade would set Baiame among his “supreme beings of the sky” — the withdrawn high god, the deus otiosus, the maker who finishes and recedes.

The dispute has never closed cleanly, and the honest description marks it as contested. On the one side stands the documentary fact that belief in Baiame is attested early — Parker, who knew the Euahlayi from the 1880s, traced their knowledge of Byamee back before the missionaries reached that country at all, dating it to 1830 at the latest — and the further fact that the bora, the sky-lore, and the restricted ceremony form a dense, integrated whole that no outside preaching could have improvised. On the other stands the plain caution that every word of the early record passed through European hands and European categories, that “the All-Father” is itself a European coinage smuggling in a European theology, and that the impulse to find a primitive monotheism — to make these nations witnesses for or against the writer’s own God — bent the evidence in the writing of it. What the argument has rarely paused to notice is that the question it asks is not the tradition’s question. The nations that hold Baiame do not frame him as proof of monotheism or as evidence against it. He is the one who made the Country and gave the Law and went up beyond the sky, and that is a different kind of statement than the one the Europeans were so anxious to extract.

The figure that still watches the valley

Baiame did not recede into the past with the ethnographers who described him. His image still stands on the wall of the shelter on Wonnarua Country, and in 2015 that shelter — Baiame Cave at Milbrodale — was entered on the New South Wales State Heritage Register, its protection a matter of state law as well as of the older Law it holds. The site remains sacred; it is cared for by Wonnarua traditional owners, and access is restricted, the painted figure with his far-reaching arms still looking out over the country he made.

The custodianship is unbroken in a more important sense as well. The nations who hold Baiame — the Kamilaroi, the Wiradjuri, the Wonnarua, the Euahlayi and their neighbors — are living peoples, their languages taught again to children, their ceremonies and their connection to Country surviving two centuries that were meant, by the policies of the colony and the state, to end them. To these communities the story of Baiame is not folklore recovered from old books but knowledge carried forward, some of it open and some of it held close in the way it has always been held. The published record set down by the earliest observers of the continent’s peoples is one thread; the authority over what Baiame means runs, now as before, through the people whose maker he is.

His name is written, too, across the map of his Country, surfacing where the colonial overlay has begun to be peeled back. At Bathurst, the mountain that the motor-racing circuit made famous as Mount Panorama carries again its Wiradjuri name, Wahluu — a men’s place, an initiation ground, a height from which the land was watched over — and the Wiradjuri account of its making is a Baiame story: the creator, angered by a death, raising the mountain over the place. The dual name, granted on the application of the Bathurst Local Aboriginal Land Council, is one small instance of a wider movement, the Country’s own names returning to it after two centuries of erasure.

The European argument about whether Baiame was an ancient high god or a contact-era invention belongs, in the end, to the Europeans. It was a quarrel conducted in their categories, for their purposes, in their journals; it told the truth about their hopes and their anxieties more reliably than about the being in dispute. The nations of the south-east kept something steadier through the whole of it. The maker came down, finished the Country, set the Law in it, and withdrew above the sky, where his camp is the river of stars and his wife sends the floods and his image, on a wall in the Hunter, still holds the valley in the long span of its arms. He is not a god they argue over. He is the one whose work they are standing in.

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