Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/329

Rh Being, Baiame, is shown to the neophytes in this ridiculous attitude, with a print in the clay beside him left by the hand that he vainly spread out to save himself as he tumbled headlong. But he had better luck sometimes, for the emu is his food.

It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the foregoing merry adventures of the Baiame family, neglected by Mr. Lang, are not "a kind of joke with no sacredness about it." They are inseparably bound up with the innermost sanctities of religion, and communicated to the adolescent Kamilaroi at the most solemn moment of their lives. When, therefore, we are told that Baiame is their creator, we must ask in what sense the word is used. Unfortunately we have no details of the creative act. But we know that the idea of creation, as we use it, is completely foreign to savage ideas. The sublime conception of the creative fiat as set forth in the book of Genesis, and interpreted by Christian dogma, is the product of ages of civilisation; and to use the word creation is to import into the deeds of an imaginary being, who is presented, if not as "a deified blackfellow," at least as hardly more than a very exalted savage wizard, ideas which do not belong to them, and therefore are utterly misleading to the reader. The Rev. W. Ridley, indeed, states that, among certain aborigines on the Namoi, Barwan, and other tributaries of the Darling, "the blacks who are acquainted with English," and have therefore presumably come into contact with English ideas, say that "He made earth and water and sky, animals and men; that He makes the rain come down and the grass grow; that He has delivered their fathers from evil demons; that He welcomes good people to the great 'Warrambool' (watercourse and grove) in the sky—the Milky Way—a paradise of peace and plenty; and that He destroys the bad." And his name is said to be