The story

Told as it is shared

In the tellings collected on the Narran and Namoi rivers in the 1890s, Baiame was the Father of all — he walked the plains when they were new, made the birds and the animals, and gave the people their law: when to hunt, when to rest, what to take and what to leave. What he asked in return was the share. No catch belonged to one canoe alone.

At Brewarrina, on the Barwon, he set the dry-stone walls of the great fish traps — Baiame's Ngunnhu — laid in the river's channel like nets of stone, deep enough to hold the pyramids of fish that ran each season. He gave the traps into the keeping of the Ngemba, and made the law of the water plain: when the fish ran, the nations of the rivers came together, and every family left with food.

When his work was done, Baiame climbed into the sky, where his camp remains. Thunder is the sound of him turning in his sleep; the brightest stars are his fires. In the old tellings he watches still, to see that the law of the share is kept.

Country & context

The land that holds it

Baiame's country runs across the river plains of northern New South Wales — Euahlayi (Yuwaalaraay) and Ngemba country, the black-soil country of the Namoi and the Barwon. The traps at Brewarrina were worked and shared by the nations of the whole river system — a meeting ground of trade, ceremony and news for thousands of years before the town had a name.

The tellings most often quoted were written down by Mrs K. Langloh Parker among the Euahlayi tellers of the Narran, and published in 1896 as Australian Legendary Tales — translations that carry both the stories and the limits of their recorder. The deepest parts of Baiame's law were never written down at all.

Art & memory

Painted, woven, sung

The traps themselves are the art: dry-stone weirs of cut and balanced granite, engineered to work the river's height through every season. The National Heritage listing calls them among the oldest human-made structures anywhere on Earth.

A painted figure of Baiame — arms spread wide across a cave wall in Wonnarua country near Milbrodale — is heritage-listed in its own right, and still visited in law. And at Brewarrina the traps are tended as they always were: as a place of work, teaching and shared meals.