Mulka is a legendary figure of the south-eastern Noongar country around Hyden, Western Australia. According to the tradition recorded at Mulka's Cave (Bates Cave) near Wave Rock, he was born with crossed eyes as the son of a woman who broke the marriage law by taking a man of a forbidden class. Though he grew into a giant of great strength, his crossed eyes kept him from spearing game, and in frustration he took to catching and eating children, becoming the terror of the district. When his mother rebuked him he killed her, then fled; the outraged people tracked him far to the south, killed him, and left his body to the ants, denying him ritual burial. The unusually high hand stencils on the cave walls are pointed to as the prints of his giant hands, and ethnographers read the story as a cautionary tale about the consequences of wrong-way marriage.