Kulin

Kulin is not the name of a single people. It names a confederacy of five Aboriginal nations of central and southern Victoria whose languages were close enough to be partly mutually intelligible, who intermarried under a shared rule, and who came together for ceremony and for the settlement of disputes: the Wurundjeri of the Yarra, the Boonwurrung of the coast and the bay, the Taungurung of the Goulburn, the Dja Dja Wurrung of the central goldfields country, and the Wathaurong to the west around Geelong. Melbourne was founded in 1835 on Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung land, and the document by which John Batman claimed to have bought that land from Kulin elders is one of the more studied misunderstandings in Australian history: what the elders appear to have conducted was a tanderrum, a ceremony granting visitors temporary access and safe passage, and not a transfer of ownership, which was not a thing their law contained.

The confederacy is also a kinship structure. Kulin society is divided into two halves named for Bunjil the eaglehawk and Waa the crow, and a person belongs to one, inherits that affiliation through the father, and marries into the other. The two beings are therefore not only characters in narrative but the categories by which Kulin people are related to one another across the whole confederacy, which is why the atlas records the Kulin as a culture in their own right rather than treating Bunjil as belonging to Victoria in general.

Bunjil is the eaglehawk. In the Kulin accounts recorded from the 1840s onward he made the land, the trees and the first people, taught them how to live, and then went up into the sky with his wives and his sons, where he remains. Waa is the crow, his counterpart, in some tellings a helper and in others a figure who works against him, and the pairing of eaglehawk and crow as opposed and complementary beings recurs across a wide stretch of south eastern Australia well beyond Kulin country.

The pair does double duty. They name the two moieties into which Kulin people are divided, so that saying a person is Bunjil or Waa is a statement about whom that person may marry and how they stand to everyone else. This is the ordinary shape of religion in Aboriginal Australia, where a being is at once a maker in narrative, a category in the kinship system and a presence in a particular place, and where separating those three would misrepresent all of them. Most of what survives in writing came through A. W. Howitt and through William Thomas, the assistant protector for the Port Phillip district, in the second half of the nineteenth century, working with Kulin men whose ceremonial life had been broken inside their own lifetimes by one of the fastest and most complete dispossessions on the continent. The record is therefore late, partial and collected under pressure. Bunjil is meanwhile named continuously and publicly in Victoria today, in Wurundjeri welcomes to country and in public art, which is a different kind of evidence and a more current one.