Baiame, the sky being who made the country, gave the law and then withdrew upward, is recorded across a wide band of south eastern Australia, and Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi are the two nations most often named as holding him. He is not a distant abstraction in the record. A. W. Howitt, collecting in the 1880s and 1890s, was told of Baiame in connection with the bora, the ground on which young men were brought into the law, and of the earthen figures and carved trees made for those grounds; bora rings survive as raised circles of earth in Wiradjuri and neighbouring country and a number are now protected sites. Howitt, and the missionaries and settlers he drew on, are the reason any of this is in writing, and they are also the reason the writing needs handling with care.
What was told to a nineteenth century collector was told selectively, sometimes by men under considerable pressure, sometimes in terms shaped to what the collector was expected to understand, and the comparison with a Christian creator that runs through the early literature is at least partly the collectors' own contribution rather than a report. The initiation itself is restricted knowledge. The atlas holds that Baiame is Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi, that his law was taught at the bora, and that the bora grounds are in this country, and it does not set out what happened on them. Wiradjuri people hold that, and it is absent here because they have not published it, which is a different thing from its being unknown.