Entity

Bunjil

The eaglehawk creator-ancestor of the Kulin nation of central Victoria, maker of the land and the first people and origin of the two-moiety law, who rose into the sky as a star.

In the granite country of the Black Range, south of Stawell in western Victoria, a small shelter sits at the foot of a great boulder. On the rock inside, in red and white, a figure stands with arms spread, and at his feet two long-bodied dogs lie watching. The figure is Bunjil. It is the only painting of him known to survive, and the people whose Country this is have fenced and guarded it for a century against the hands of those who would scratch their names across it. The eaglehawk who made the world has, in the world, exactly one face.

The eaglehawk who made the country

Bunjil is the creator-ancestor of the Kulin nation, the alliance of peoples whose Country runs from the shore of Port Phillip up into the Great Dividing Range and along the Loddon and Goulburn valleys. The Kulin are not one people but several who share a kindred language and a common law: the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung about the bay, the Taungurung to the north, the Dja Dja Wurrung and Wathaurong to the west. The word kulin means, in their tongues, simply “man,” “person” — the people. Above them all, and before them, is Bunjil.

He is the wedge-tailed eagle. Aquila audax, the largest bird of prey on the continent, the great dark raptor that rides the thermals above the inland ranges with a wingspan wider than a man is tall: this is the shape the creator wears, the eaglehawk who flies high and sees far and keeps the Country and its people in his sight. To render Bunjil is to render the bird, and the bird, in the south-eastern sky, is never only a bird. The English word that the early writers reached for — “eaglehawk” — is itself a colonial coinage for the great eagle of the south, and it has clung to Bunjil ever since, so that to speak of him is to speak in two registers at once: the eagle of the naturalist’s field-guide and the maker who flew before there was anything to fly over.

The Kulin call the creation-time, and the law it laid down, in their own words rather than in the borrowed English. The English term “Dreamtime” — a translation that reaches back to the work of the anthropologists Spencer and Gillen at the turn of the twentieth century — has been worn smooth by overuse and is widely held to mislead, suggesting a fairy-tale long-ago. The Dreaming, as W. E. H. Stanner came to render it, is nearer the mark: not a closed past but what he called an “everywhen,” a creative order that made the world and has never stopped being present in it. The Country Bunjil shaped is the Country one walks today; the law he set is the law in force; the eaglehawk overhead is not the memory of a maker but the maker, still there.

In the creation-time he made the land — the mountains and the rivers, the trees and the animals — and he gave the people the laws by which they were to live. The fullest account of how he made the first men was given by William Barak, an elder of the Wurundjeri-willam, to the magistrate and ethnographer A. W. Howitt in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it is from Barak’s telling that the story is most reliably known. Bunjil took clay from the bed of a river and divided it in two. He laid the two portions on broad sheets of bark cut from a gum tree, and out of the clay he shaped two men, cutting and smoothing the form of each. He took stringy bark from the trees and made it into hair for their heads. Then he lay down upon them and blew his breath hard into their mouths, into their nostrils, and into their navels, and the clay stirred and the men rose and lived. So the first people were made — shaped by hand from the earth of their own Country, and quickened by the breath of the eaglehawk.

A wedge-tailed eagle in flight A wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax), the largest raptor of the continent and the form the creator-ancestor Bunjil is said to wear. Photograph by Lip Kee Yap, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

He did not make the world and the people alone, and he did not rule them as a solitary power. Around Bunjil is a household and a company of helpers. He has two wives; his son is Binbeal, the rainbow; his brother is Palian, the bat. Six helpers attend him — the wirmums, the clever men of the eaglehawk side — and each is a creature of the bush: Djart-djart the nankeen kestrel, Thara the quail-hawk, Yukope the parakeet, Lar-guk the parrot, Walert the brushtail possum, Yurran the gliding possum. The creator stands at the head of a world already peopled with kin, already ordered into relations. This matters, because the deepest thing Bunjil gave the Kulin was not the land or even the breath of life. It was the order of the kin.

Eaglehawk and crow: the two halves of the world

The Kulin world is cut in two, and Bunjil is one of the halves.

Every person born into the Kulin nation belongs to one of two great divisions — what the anthropologists came to call moieties, from the French for “halves.” One moiety is Bunjil the eaglehawk; the other is Waa, the crow — Waang in the Woiwurrung tongue. The two moiety totems of the Woiwurrung are named plainly as Bunjil the Eaglehawk and Waang the Crow, and between them they divide not only the people but, in principle, the whole of the world: each living thing, each kind of creature, each clan, falls to one side or the other. A person is Bunjil or a person is Waa, by descent, from the first breath.

The division is not a matter of preference or piety. It is the iron frame of marriage and obligation. A person of the eaglehawk moiety may marry only a person of the crow moiety, and a person of the crow only an eaglehawk — the rule the ethnographers named exogamy, marriage out, across the line. To take a husband or wife from one’s own moiety would be unthinkable, a violation of the order Bunjil set down. The consequence is that the two halves are bound to each other in perpetuity: every marriage is a knot tying eaglehawk to crow, every child the offspring of both halves of the world. The moiety reaches outward as well as down, for it is shared across the Kulin peoples, so that a Woiwurrung eaglehawk and a Wathaurong eaglehawk are kin across the distance between their Countries, and a stranger’s place in the order can be known before a word is exchanged.

What this produces is not a hierarchy but a reciprocity. Because no one can marry within his or her own half, no half can be self-sufficient; each is bound to give its sons and daughters to the other and to receive theirs in return. The eaglehawk side and the crow side are locked together by the very rule that keeps them apart, and the whole social fabric — who one may speak to and how, who must avoid whom, who owes a death and who a wife, who feeds whom at a gathering — hangs from the first cut Bunjil made when he set the world in two. A child knows from birth not only its name and its Country but its side, and through its side a place in a web of obligation that reaches across the entire Kulin world. Kinship, here, is not a private affair of feeling. It is the public architecture of a society, and the architect is the eaglehawk.

The pairing of eaglehawk and crow is itself ancient and widespread across the south-east of the continent, found among peoples well beyond the Kulin, the two birds standing as the universal emblems of the dual order. That the same two raptorial and corvid figures recur over so vast a stretch of Country marks the depth of the moiety idea — older, very likely, than any of the particular nations that hold it now, a structure of thought carried down through a span of time the written record cannot reach to its beginning.

Here is what sets Bunjil apart among the great ancestral beings of the continent. To his north, among the peoples of New South Wales, the sky-being Baiame is rendered as a kind of withdrawn All-Father — a high creator who set the law and the initiation grounds and then receded, remote, behind the sky. Bunjil is not that. He is a maker, yes, and he is in the sky, but his great gift is not distance and authority; it is structure, the living grid of who may marry whom and who owes what to whom. The eaglehawk did not retire above the law. He is one term of the law, half of the binary that runs through every person, every animal, every act of kinship in the Kulin world. The crow is the other half, and the two are not father and son or god and rival but partners, the paired poles a whole world is hung between.

The rising to the sky

When his work was finished — the land made, the people shaped, the law set down — Bunjil gathered his sons and his helpers and went up.

The accounts tell it as an ascent on the wind: Bunjil and his people were lifted upward into the sky, and there they remained. Bunjil himself became a star — identified by those who have set the Kulin sky against the European one with Altair, the bright eye of the eagle constellation, Aquila — and his two wives became the stars on either side of him, the ones the astronomers call Tarazed and Alshain, flanking Altair in a close row across the summer sky. The eaglehawk who made the Country looks down on it from the place where the people can see him every clear night. He did not die and he did not vanish; he rose, and he is overhead.

This is not a departure in the sense that Baiame’s is. Bunjil in the sky is Bunjil still watching — the high circling of the wedge-tailed eagle turned permanent, fixed as a star, the keeper of the Country keeping it from above. The same logic that puts the eagle high in the daytime air puts the ancestor high in the night.

It is worth pausing on how much of this remains, properly, not for the telling. The accounts gathered here — the clay and the breath, the moiety law, the rising to Altair — are those that the Kulin themselves have made public, set down by their own elders or shared openly with the world. But much Aboriginal knowledge is restricted: held within particular kin, or particular initiations, men’s business or women’s business, not to be passed to outsiders or across the lines that guard it. Where a body of knowledge is closed, it stays closed; what is written of Bunjil in the public record is a fraction, and the fuller weight of the law he set is carried in places no ethnographer’s notebook reached and no encyclopedia entry should pretend to. The shape of the creator-ancestor that an outsider may know is a real shape, but it is the public shape, and it would be a discourtesy as well as an error to mistake it for the whole.

The shelter in the Black Range

Of all the ancestral beings painted on the rock of the south-east, Bunjil is the rarest. There is, so far as is known, exactly one image of him on stone.

It is at Bunjil’s Shelter — Bunjil’s Cave, as it is also called — in the Black Range Scenic Reserve, some eleven kilometers south of Stawell, in the wider Grampians country the traditional owners call Gariwerd. The shelter is a low recess beneath a large granite boulder, and on its underside is painted a human figure with outstretched arms, accompanied by two animals taken to be dingoes — his helpers, the dogs that attend the creator. The painting is reckoned to be some thousands of years old, its exact age unknown. It is described, without rival, as the only known rock-art site to represent Bunjil, the creator-being of so many of the Koori peoples of the south-east.

The rock painting of Bunjil and his two dingo helpers at Bunjil's Shelter The painting at Bunjil’s Shelter in the Black Range near Stawell, Victoria — Bunjil with his two dingo helpers, the only known rock-art image of the creator-ancestor. Photograph by Michael Barnett, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The site became publicly known around the middle of the twentieth century, and with publicity came damage; it has long been fenced against vandalism, the figure shielded behind a barrier so that the one face of the creator is not lost to a careless or hostile hand. Scientific examination — including electron-microscope analysis in the 1980s — confirmed the pigments as authentically Aboriginal, beneath later European retouching, settling a question that should never have needed asking. A replica stands in Stawell so that the painting can be seen without crowding the original, and the image has appeared on the nation’s postage stamps in a series honoring the First Australians. The shelter remains a place of care for the traditional owners, the Country and its painting held, not surrendered.

Reception: the eaglehawk reclaimed

The colonial record that carries Bunjil’s name to the present is a record made largely by outsiders. Howitt the magistrate, taking down Barak’s account; the long line of ethnographers who classified the moieties and tabulated the marriage rules; the museum and the postage stamp and the heritage listing. Much of what is written of Bunjil came through that filter, and the filter was rarely friendly to the world it described. It is worth marking that the most authoritative early telling — the clay and the bark and the breath — comes not from an anthropologist’s theory but from William Barak, a Wurundjeri man who lived through the dispossession of his Country and chose to set its law down in words that would survive him.

They have survived him, and more than survived. Bunjil has become, in the present age, a living emblem of the Kulin peoples and of Aboriginal Victoria at large. His name marks places of meeting and culture across the south-east; his eaglehawk shape stands in public art and on the welcome that traditional owners extend to those who enter their Country. The breath he blew into the clay is invoked, still, as the origin of the people who never ceased to be there. The reclaiming of Country and culture that has run through Aboriginal Australia in the decades since the land-rights era has taken up Bunjil not as a relic of a vanished past but as the ancestor he has always been — the maker still overhead, the law still in force, the painting still under guard in the Black Range.

There is a particular dignity in the rarity of that one image. The continent’s other great beings are written across whole escarpments — the rain-spirits of the Kimberley in their hundreds, the lightning-man of Arnhem Land on panel after panel. Bunjil is painted once. The eaglehawk who made everything left a single likeness of himself in the world he made, and the people he breathed into life have kept it, against weather and malice and the long century of being told their ancestors were not real. The one face holds.