Bunjil (also Bundjil)

Name: Bunjil (also Bundjil)

Pronunciation: BUN-jil

Region/Culture: Oceania (Kulin Nation, southeastern Australia)

Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology

Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities

Mythical Attributes: A creator and lawgiver who shaped the land, the plants and animals, and the first people, and now keeps watch over the country from the sky.

Role in Mythos: The ancestral eaglehawk of the Kulin Nation and one of its two moiety ancestors, standing at the head of the people opposite Waa the crow.

Relation to Humans: Bunjil made the first humans, gave them the law, and placed the land in their care. He still offers guidance to those who ask and are willing to listen, but he intervenes only when people put their conduct and their care of the earth back in order.

Physical Description: Most often a great wedge-tailed eagle soaring high overhead, though he is also pictured as an ancestral man, as in the rock-art figure at Bunjil’s Shelter where he stands with arms outstretched between two dingoes.

The wedge-tailed eagle rides the thermals above the Victorian ranges without a single beat of its wings, a dark cross held against a hard blue sky. It can hang there for the better part of an hour, watching the grass move, watching the smoke of far-off fires, watching the people below get on with the business of being alive. To the nations of the Kulin that patient shape overhead was never only a bird. It was Bunjil, the one who made the country and then climbed above it to keep an eye on the work.

He belongs to the peoples of central and southern Victoria, the Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, Taungurung, Wathaurong, and Dja Dja Wurrung, five tongues bound into one alliance by a shared duty to the land. In their ordering of the world everything falls into one of two halves, and Bunjil the eaglehawk stands at the head of one of them. Waa the crow holds the other. Between the eagle and the crow the whole social fabric is split, marriage and kinship and obligation, so that to ask which moiety a person belongs to is to ask whose descendant they are. Bunjil sits at the root of half a people.

Before any of that, the land itself had to be made, and the stories say Bunjil made it. This was in the deep ancestral time, when the world was still formless and the laws of living had not yet been set down. He cut the courses of the rivers and raised the mountains and put the plants and the animals into their places. Only then did he turn to people. He gathered a great mass of clay and divided it in two, and out of each pile he worked a human shape, pressing and smoothing the cold wet earth until the limbs came right. For hair he took long strands of stringybark and laid them down along each head. Then he lay over the figures and breathed into the nose, the mouth, the navel of each, and the clay warmed and stirred, and the first men sat up and looked at him.

The women came another way. Bunjil’s brother Pallian, the bat, knelt at the water’s edge and beat the surface with his hands, on and on, until the churning of mud and water drew itself together into two female forms and rose dripping into the air. The brothers gave the men spears for hunting and the women stout sticks for digging yams and roots, and so the people had both life and the means to keep it. Bunjil taught them the law. He told them how to live with one another and how to look after the ground that fed them, and he gave that ground into their hands. Then he took the shape of an eagle once more. The work was done, and a maker who is done has little reason to stay.

When he was ready to go he did not simply vanish. He called on Bellin-bellin, the musk-crow who kept the winds shut up in skin bags, and asked him to loosen them. Bellin-bellin opened the bags a little at a time, letting the wind build from a stir to a roar, until at last there was enough of it to lift Bunjil and his two wives and his son clear off the earth and into the sky. The cold thinned around them as they rose. There they stayed. Bunjil became the star that English speakers call Altair, steady in the late-summer dark, and his wives, the black swans, took their places to either side of him. His son Binbeal, the rainbow, arches over the country after rain as a sign of his father.

His face survives on stone. In a granite shelter in the Black Range near Stawell, in the wider country of Gariwerd, a small painted figure stands with its arms held out and two dingoes crouched at its feet, the ochre worn thin but still legible after long generations of weather. People still come to stand in front of it in the quiet, in the smell of dry granite dust and eucalyptus, and look up at the most senior ancestor any of them has a name for.

The eagle did not stop watching once he reached the sky, and the accounts of his dealings with the living carry a consistent edge. He helps, but on terms. One story remembers a time when the Kulin fell into disorder, tribe against tribe, duties dropped, the land neglected until the sea itself grew angry and rose up to swallow the coast. The people called on Bunjil. He told them plainly what they had done wrong and what they would have to put right, in their own conduct and in their care of the earth, and only when they agreed did he raise his spear over the water and order the sea back into its place. The flood was a correction, not a cruelty.

That is the shape of his power and also its limit. He made the world and can still turn back the elements when he chooses, yet he governs almost nothing directly any longer. The winds answer to the crow, the waters answered to the bat, and Bunjil’s own hand reaches down only when people ask and only when they are ready to listen and to change. A creator who has withdrawn to a star is a long way off. His authority is real but conditional, woven into law and reciprocity rather than raw command, which is perhaps why the Kulin speak less of fearing him than of keeping faith with what he laid down. The eagle is still up there. Whether he comes down depends a good deal on what is happening beneath him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bunjil in Aboriginal mythology?

Bunjil is the creator god and ancestral eaglehawk of the Kulin Nation, a group of five Aboriginal peoples in central and southern Victoria, Australia. He shaped the land, the plants and animals, and the first human beings, then rose into the sky, where he watches over the country as a star.

How did Bunjil create the first people?

Bunjil made the first men from clay, dividing a large mass of it in two, working each pile into a human form, adding strands of stringybark for hair, and breathing life into the nose, mouth, and navel of each. His brother Pallian, the bat, created the first women by beating the surface of the water until it took female shape. The brothers then gave the men hunting spears and the women digging sticks.

Why is Bunjil associated with the wedge-tailed eagle?

Bunjil is depicted as a wedge-tailed eaglehawk because that is the form he takes to soar high above the land and keep watch over the people he created. Within the Kulin moiety system he is the eaglehawk ancestor of one half of the people, paired against Waa the crow, who heads the other half.

What happened to Bunjil after he created the world?

After making the land, teaching the people the law, and placing the country in their care, Bunjil asked Bellin-bellin the musk-crow to release the winds from their skin bags. The rising wind carried Bunjil, his two wives, and his son into the sky, where Bunjil became the star known in English as Altair and his wives became black swans beside him.

Where can you see images of Bunjil?

Bunjil is depicted at Bunjil’s Shelter, a rock-art site in the Black Range near Stawell in the Gariwerd region of Victoria, where he appears as a figure with outstretched arms flanked by two dingoes. He is also honored by Bunjil Place, a public cultural building opened near Melbourne in 2017 whose form evokes an eaglehawk with outstretched wings.

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