One Land, Many Stories — Dreaming story handout

Bunjil the Creator

Kulin nations — the Melbourne region and central Victoria

The atlas

Dreaming story — Kulin nations — the Melbourne region and central Victoria

Bunjil the Creator

The wedge-tailed eagle who made the country, gave the law, and rose into the sky.

The story

Told as it is shared

Before there were people, Bunjil — the wedge-tailed eagle, the greatest hunter in the sky — made the mountains, the rivers, the forests and the animals of the country the Kulin nations call home. He made the people, too, and taught them the law: how to live on country, how to share it, how to care for the young and the old.

When the work of creation was done, Bunjil asked Bellin-bellin the musk crow — keeper of the wind bags — to open one and let the wind escape. The gale lifted Bunjil and his family from the earth and carried them into the sky, where the eagle still shines: some say as the star Altair, his two wives shining beside him.

The law Bunjil gave remains in force. When Kulin Elders speak for country today, they speak with the eagle's authority — and when Wurundjeri people welcome visitors, they welcome them under Bunjil's law.

Country & context

The land that holds it

Kulin Country takes in the Melbourne region and much of central Victoria — five nations joined by language, ceremony and marriage: the Wurundjeri of the Birrarung (Yarra) valley, the Boonwurrung of the coast, the Wathaurong of the Bellarine, the Taungurung of the Goulburn and the Dja Dja Wurrung of the volcanic north.

The great meeting grounds of the Kulin lie beneath the modern city: the Birrarung's billabongs, the stone quarries of Mount William, the corroboree grounds where thousands gathered each season. Bunjil's country is one of the oldest cultural landscapes on the continent — and now its busiest.

Art & memory

Painted, woven, sung

In a rock shelter in Gariwerd (the Grampians), Bunjil is painted in ochre with his two dingoes — a figure of such presence that it anchors the oldest style of rock art on the continent's south.

Today Bunjil watches from unexpected places: a giant sculpture of the eagle spreads its wings at the You Yangs west of Melbourne, and the eagle's name is given to schools, centres and meeting places across Victoria.

Kuniya & Liru

Anangu — Uluru, Tjukurpa of the rock