Baiame
Also known as: Baayami, Biame, Byamee
Mythological Narrative
In the traditions of the Wiradjuri, Gamilaraay, Wonnarua, and neighbouring peoples of south-eastern Australia, Baiame walks first: he came down from the sky in the Dreaming, made the rivers, ranges, and caves, showed people which animals to hunt and which plants to eat, laid down the law of kinship and marriage, and then returned to the sky, never to appear directly again. Around him stand his wife Birrahgnooloo and his son Daramulum, who in several tellings presides over initiation on his father's behalf.
Baiame's chief legacy is the Bora, the ceremony by which boys of the south-east became men. A Bora ground consists of two earthen circles, one large and one small, joined by a path — a layout said to copy the ground where Baiame first held the rite. His name was not to be spoken casually outside ceremony, and women were barred from the associated sites. These rules recur throughout the nineteenth-century record: the missionary William Ridley's 1875 linguistic work, A. W. Howitt's 1904 ethnography of the south-east, and K. Langloh Parker's collections from Yuwaalaraay tellers all set down accounts of "Byamee".
Near Milbrodale in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Baiame Cave holds a famous painting: a white figure with round eyes and arms stretched wide across the rock. Local Wonnarua tradition identifies him as Baiame reaching out over his country. The site is still looked after by the community, one of the few visible landmarks in the south-east tied directly to the sky father.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## A creator of many nations
Baiame is a creator ancestor for a number of peoples of central and northern New South Wales, including the Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi), Wiradjuri, Ngiyampaa (including the Ngemba of Brewarrina), and Yuwaalaraay (Euahlayi). Stories shared by these peoples describe Baiame travelling the land, shaping rivers and landforms, giving law, and eventually going up to live in the sky. Each people tells his story in its own way, and this site does not merge them.
## Baiame's Ngunnhu
The best documented public story is from Brewarrina, on the Barwon River. The Australian Government's National Heritage listing, prepared with the local Aboriginal community, records that the ancestral creation being Baiame revealed the design of the fish traps by throwing his net over the river, and that he and his two sons, Booma-ooma-nowi and Ghinda-inda-mui, built the traps to that design. Baiame allocated particular traps to each family group and made them responsible for their use and maintenance.
## Restricted aspects
Baiame is also associated with ceremonies, including initiation, that are restricted to initiated people; those are not described here. Nineteenth-century missionaries and ethnographers often presented Baiame as a supreme being comparable to the Christian God, a framing that scholars have questioned and that may reflect missionary influence as much as earlier belief.
## Rock art
A painted figure in a rock shelter at Milbrodale in the Hunter Valley, on Wonnarua Country, is widely known as Baiame's Cave; the site's significance is for its custodians to explain.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Baiame.
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