Baiame

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.