Baiame (also Biame, Biami, Baayami, Baayama, Byamee, Baiamin)

Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Aboriginal
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: An all-seeing, all-knowing creator and sky father who shaped the land, set the first laws, and watches over the people who keep them.
Role in Mythos: The supreme All-Father who descended from the sky to finish an unmade world, established the first initiation ground, and then withdrew to the sky to govern from above.
Relation to Humans: Baiame gave the people their country, their laws, their songs, and the ceremonies that make boys into men, and his knowledge is passed on deliberately at initiation rather than spoken of openly. His name was forbidden in everyday speech, and women were kept from his images and his sacred sites.

On a sandstone overhang above the Milbrodale valley in New South Wales, a man stands two and a half metres tall with his arms flung wide enough to span the rock. He is outlined in white and filled with red ochre, and where his eyes should be there are two great white circles that take in the whole valley below. The arms reach almost to his feet. No one who painted him left a name or a date, but the figure was never a mystery to the people who made it. The wide arms were the reach of a protector. The enormous eyes belonged to someone who saw everything.

This is Baiame, the sky father and creator of much of south-eastern Australia. The Wonnarua, Kamilaroi, Wiradjuri, Eora, Darkinjung, Guringay and Euahlayi peoples each carried their own version of him, and the name shifts with the country: Biame, Baayami, Byamee, Baiamin. The story underneath holds steady. Baiame came down out of the sky onto an unfinished land and made it into a world. He cut the rivers and raised the mountains and set the forests in their places. Then he gave the people the things that outlast any landscape, the laws and the songs and the ceremonies, the rules for how to live and marry and bury the dead.

The work that mattered most was the bora. He cleared the first one himself, the ring of bare earth where boys are taken to be made into men, and the pattern he set there is the pattern still walked. A boy brought to that ground was not being told a story. He was being handed something, in the right place, by the right men, at the cost of an ordeal, and only then did the true weight of Baiame become his to carry.

When the making was done, he went home. In the Lake Macquarie country he is said to have leapt back into the sky from the summit of Mount Yengo, and the leap pressed the mountain flat. Its level top still stands above the Wollombi valley, a piece of evidence you can walk up to and put a hand on. He made the world and then left it.

He did not arrive alone or depart childless. He had two wives, Ganhanbili and Birrahgnooloo, and Birrahgnooloo, who is bound up with the emu, held the floods. Asked in the proper way, she let the rivers rise. Their son Daramulam grew into a sky hero of his own, who in some tellings stands at the initiation grounds as his father’s voice and in others is named his brother rather than his son. The stories disagree on this and do not seem troubled by it.

To say his name aloud in the open was not done. When men had to speak of him they called him Boyjerh, which means Father, and kept the real name for the cleared ground where it belonged. Women were not to see his image or approach his sites, and the paintings of him sit in shelters set apart for exactly that reason. The silence around the name was not forgetfulness. It was care.

Outside the Milbrodale figure he was painted in other hands and other styles, always face-on, often crowned with a great head-dress or a high mass of hair, his body ruled with waistbands and vertical lines and rows of dots, with footprints walking away from him across the stone. When his son appears beside him, the son is drawn in profile. The father is always frontal, always looking straight out at whoever has come to stand before him.

Because his name turned out to be useful to outsiders, a doubt attached itself to him. The missionary William Ridley borrowed Baiame to translate the Christian God into Gamilaraay, and some later writers wondered whether the All-Father had been quietly installed by the missions to begin with. The collector K. Langloh Parker, who recorded the Euahlayi accounts at length, traced belief in him back to at least 1830, before the missionaries reached that country. The borrowing had run the other way. The church reached for a god the people already had.

His powers are the powers of a beginning. He made the land and everything standing on it, set the law that binds it together, and sees the whole of it at once through those white painted eyes. The sky answers to him, and through Birrahgnooloo the floodwaters come when they are asked for. The initiation he founded renews itself in every generation that completes it, which is its own kind of power, the power to keep happening.

His limit is distance. Having finished the world he stepped out of it, up to a sky that ordinary people cannot reach, and he rarely acts directly in the country he made. His dealings with the living run through his son, through ceremony, through the painted figures in their guarded shelters. His authority is total and almost entirely withdrawn. The single thing capable of unmaking the order he left behind was the people forgetting it, and so the heaviest work was never the rivers or the mountains but the keeping, and the passing on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Baiame in Aboriginal mythology?

Baiame is the creator god and sky father of several Aboriginal peoples of south-eastern Australia, including the Wonnarua, Kamilaroi, Wiradjuri and Euahlayi. He came down from the sky to shape the land, gave the people their laws and ceremonies, and then returned to the sky as the All-Father who watches over them.

What did Baiame create?

Baiame shaped the rivers, mountains and forests of south-eastern Australia and finished a previously unmade world. Beyond the landscape, he established the laws, songs, traditions and the first bora, the initiation ground where boys are made into men.

Why was it forbidden to say Baiame’s name?

Baiame’s true name was considered too sacred for everyday speech, so men referred to him instead as Boyjerh, meaning Father, and reserved the real name for the initiation ground. Women were also kept from seeing images of Baiame or approaching his sacred sites, which were male initiation places.

Who were Baiame’s wife and son?

Baiame had two wives, Ganhanbili and Birrahgnooloo, the latter associated with the emu and able to send floods when properly asked. His son Daramulam was a sky hero who in some accounts acts as Baiame’s voice at initiations, though other stories call Daramulam his brother instead of his son.

Is Baiame connected to the Christian God?

The missionary William Ridley adopted the name Baiame to translate the Christian God into the Gamilaraay language, which led some to suspect Baiame was a missionary invention. The collector K. Langloh Parker dated belief in Baiame to at least 1830, before missionaries reached the region, indicating the figure was an established Aboriginal deity that the church borrowed rather than created.