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The verb baia or biai, to make or shape, whence Mr. Ridley derived Baiame, is not known to me in Euahlayi. Wir djuri has BAI, a footmark, and Byamee left footmarks on the rocks, but that is probably a chance coincidence. My informant said that he was instructed as to Byamee in his first Boorah, or initiation.

In Southeast Australia the personages called Daramulun, Baiame, Bunjil, correspond to this description: they are supernatural old men who have always existed; they are taken for granted without inquiry into their origin; they direct the affairs of the tribe in a general way in accordance with the moral ideas of the place and time.

Once more, syncretism came in as a mythopoeic influence. Say that several Australian nations, becoming more polite, amalgamated into a settled people. Then we should have several Gods, the chief Beings of various tribes, say Noorele, Bunjil, Mungan- ngaur, Baiame, Daramulun, Mangarrah, Mulkari, Pinmeheal. The most imposing God of the dominant tribe might be elevated to the sovereignty of Zeus.

But the essential idea of Mungan-ngaur, and Baiame, and most of the high gods of Australia, and of other low races, is that they never died at all. They belong to the period before death came into the world, like Qat among the Melanesians. They arise in an age that knew not death, and had not reflected on phantasms nor evolved ghosts.

The high Gods of savagery moral, all-seeing directors of things and of men are not explicitly envisaged as spirits at all by their adorers. The notion of soul or spirit is here out of place. We can best describe Pirnmeheal, and Nápi and Baiame as 'magnified non-natural men, or undefined beings who were from the beginning and are undying.

The term for the being called 'The All Father' by Mr. Howitt is also the term used by the Wir djuri and Kamilaroi, 'Baiame' or 'Byamee. The Euahlayi, however, possess myths, beliefs, and usages not recorded as extant among the Kamilaroi, but rather forming a link with the ideas of peoples dwelling much further west, such as the tribes, on Lake Eyre, and the southernmost Arunta of the centre.

The much-discussed Australian figures, Baiame, Bunjil, and Daramulun, appear not to differ essentially from those just mentioned.

But the locally intermediate tribe of the Wiraijuri, or Wiradthuri, have adopted Baiame, and reduced Daramulun to an exploded bugbear, a merely nominal superintendent of the Mysteries; and the southern Coast Murring have rejected Baiame altogether, or never knew him, while making Daramulun supreme. One obvious method of reconciling various tribal Gods in a syncretic Olympus, is the genealogical.

He dwells above "the vaulted sky beyond which lies the mysterious home of that great and powerful Being, who is Bunjil, Baiame, or Daramulun in different tribal languages, but who in all is known by a name the equivalent of the only one used by the Kurnai, which is Mungan-ngaur, or 'Our Father." This Father is conceived of in some places as "a very great old man with a long beard," enthroned on, or growing into, a crystal throne.

But if we put ourselves in the position of opponents whom he was trying to convert, of the two Marys for example, we cannot but perceive that his method was hopelessly mistaken. In attempting to evangelise an Euahlayi black fellow, we should not begin by threats of damnation, and by railing accusations against his god, Baiame.