The four, after a series of ceremonies, rowed out from the island and, after several days, came to Arnhem Land, and followed the coast to Yalangbara (Jelaŋbara, aka Port Bradshaw).
[5] If there was indeed an historical reality behind the Baijini mentioned in Yolŋu myth, the origin and timing of those Asians who would have served as the prototype for this mythological people remains lost in the past.
[6] It has been suggested that they may be identified with the Sama-Bajau,[7] or Sea Gypsies, the fishing folk of South East Asia who traveled with their families.
In his work on their mythic traditions, published in 1952 he wrote: the Baijini, although partially mythological are, rather, historical; for they are said to have been pre-Macassans, primarily traders and aliens to the coast, and not in any way creative as were the Djanggawul.
Fitzgerald's allusion was a figurine which had been dug up 4 feet down among the roots of a banyan tree by Chinese natives, under the direction of a Public Works superintendent, Mr. Strawbridge, who was overseeing the clearance of dense jungle for the construction of a road at a site called Doctor's Gully in Palmerston just outside of the town of Darwin in 1879.
[19] Eventually, In a paper read before the Royal Society of South Australia on 8 March 1928,[20] Norman Tindale identified it as a Chinese deity from the Tang dynasty,[18] a high backdating which elicited Fitzgerald's skepticism.
[23] Anthropologist Ian McIntosh has interpreted the cycle's mention of the Baijini as a fictional history devised by the Yolngu, centered on Warramiri clanland at Dholtji[b] in the Cape Wilberforce peninsula.
According to this theory, the function of the Baijini stories was to provide a mythic charter to govern trade relations, originally, with Asians.
[24] McIntosh argues that Birrinydji, in his twin roles as a powerful sea-captain and blacksmith in the Dreamtime, was the key figure in legends that encode the problems arising from primal encounters with outsiders.
[26] Beneath these possible traces in myth suggestive of some pre-modern contact with Southeast Asian traders, the Baijini strarum of legend, in this light, would appear to evoke specifically an older pre-Macassan order.
Whatever the historical reality, McIntosh concluded, functionally in these Yolngu traditions, the contrast between a golden age of wealth, reciprocity and law-giving, and a subsequent period of seafaring Macassan trepang hunters, functions in counterpoise to mediate between two distinct realms, the sacred and profane spheres to enable thinking about their world's relationship with a foreign order.