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.