Folklore & belief — the old word is law
Not gods, not demons —
ancestors.
The first writers to record these beings reached for their own words — gods, angels, demons, monsters. But the beings of the Dreaming are older than those words: ancestral makers, teachers and warners whose law still runs the country they shaped. Here they are grouped the way visitors often ask about them — creators, keepers, and the fearsome ones — told only from public collections, and always belonging to their own Country.
The creators
Ancestral makers of the land, water, animals and law — the beings early writers called gods.
The Rainbow Serpent
Known across the continent — Arnhem Land to the Kimberley and beyond
The great snake of water — it carved the rivers, gorges and waterholes as it moved across a sleeping land, then called the plants, animals and people up from the earth. Painted in rock galleries from Kakadu to the Kimberley, some among the oldest paintings on Earth, it remains the keeper of springs and sacred pools: giver and taker of life.
Bunjil
Kulin country — the Melbourne plains and Port Phillip
The wedge-tailed eagle, creator of the land, the animals and the people — in the published Kulin tellings, Bunjil shaped men from clay and breathed law into them, then rose into the sky as the star Altair. His brother Balayang the bat, and Waa the crow, share his stories.
Baiame
Euahlayi (Yuwaalaraay) & Ngemba country — the north-west plains of NSW
The Father, the maker — who threw the stones that became Baiame's Ngunnhu, the fish traps of Brewarrina, and taught the law of sharing the harvest. In the tellings collected by Mrs K. Langloh Parker on the Namoi, Baiame sits in the sky camp watching that his law is kept.
The Wandjina
Worrorra, Ngarinyin & Wunambal country — the west Kimberley
Cloud-and-rain beings with mouths that are never painted and eyes that ring like wheels — they made the country, then came out of the sea and put their spirits into the rock walls. Each wet season the Wandjina bring the rain; custodians refresh the paintings so the law stays alive.
The images are not art to be copied — photographing and touching them without permission is against the law of that country.
Keepers, teachers & tricksters
Sky, sun and rock-country spirits who teach, guard and tease — the messengers of the Dreaming.
Waa the Crow
Kulin country — Melbourne and the western plains
Trickster and protector, keeper of the waterholes — Waa is one half of the Kulin world, every person born into his moiety or Bunjil's. In the old tellings the crow bargains, steals and saves: cleverness cuts both ways, and the story teaches where to draw the line.
The Mimi
Bininj Kunwok country — Arnhem Land
Thin as reeds, the Mimi live in the cracks of the escarpment; the wind can break their necks, so they come out only in still weather. They taught Bininj to paint and to hunt, and their thin figures move through the oldest galleries of the stone country.
Yhi, the Sun Woman
Told across the southeast — printed in the early collections
She slept in the dark of the beginning until the voices of the ancestors woke her, and her light woke the world. Each night her fire burns out in the west before she walks the sky road east again — the telling of the sun carried in the early printed collections.
The fearsome ones
Beings of warning — what the old books called demons. To the people who tell them, they are teachers: they show where the law draws its lines.
The Bunyip
The word is Wemba Wemba/Wergaia — the being is told across the whole southeast
The thing in the waterhole — a booming voice from billabongs after dark, a swallowing darkness that took the unwary who camped too near the water. The colonists heard its name and wrote it into their dictionaries as demon; the old word is banib.
A teaching of the first kind: fresh water is life, and life has laws — be careful at the billabong, and camp away from it.
The Quinkan
The bama of the Laura sandstone — Quinkan country, Cape York
Two kinds of spirit dance through the Laura galleries — as the published tellings have it, the tall, thin Timara who is trouble, and the small, fat Imjim who is worse: punishers of those who break the law, helpers of those who keep it. The sandstone country at Laura is called Quinkan country for them.
Some Quinkan paintings are seen only in ceremony — the public galleries are the edge of a much larger world.
The Nargun
Gunai/Kurnai country — Gippsland
An immense stone woman who lives in a cave of the rock country — in the published Kurnai tellings she cannot be lifted or carried, she wakens at noise near her pool, and she takes the child who strays too far from camp. A mother's warning told at night: stay within the fire's ring.
Mindi
Kulin country — central Victoria
The great serpent of sickness, sent in anger to carry plague through the camps — whom only the magic of the women could turn back. In the tellings A. W. Howitt recorded, Mindi is the reason for the strict law around sickness and burial: the disease remembers, so the living keep their distance and their ceremonies.
A word on the old books
Most of these tellings survive because recorders — Ms K. Langloh Parker (1905), A. W. Howitt (1904), and storytellers like Percy Trezise with the Quinkan country — wrote them down, in translation and through the filters of their time. The beings were never ‘mythology’: the word suggests stories that are finished, and these are not. They are living law. If you visit rock galleries or the countries named here, go with the custodians’ welcome, and leave every image where it stands.
Sovereignty was never ceded — and neither were the stories. What is restricted stays restricted; what is shared, we share here with thanks.