Sky Father of the South-East
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.
