Arguably the most globally recognized mythical creature from Australia is the bunyip, an
important staple in Aboriginal folklore.
This amphibious being poses a threat to all who travel near the inland waters.
Lurking in lagoons, deep water-holes, swamps, and rivers, this predatory creature presents
a clear danger to humans and animals alike, threatening to drown or eat them at a moment’s
notice.
Originating in the stories and beliefs of the southeastern indigenous peoples of Australia,
accounts of the bunyip are widely varied, but a few things are for certain: it’s big,
scary, and won’t hesitate to kill you.
[Monstrum intro.]
The word bunyip most likely came from an Aboriginal word for an amphibious spirit-being.
Australian indigenous peoples believe the beings are separate from the ancestors and
the Aboriginal people themselves, and were believed to exist alongside humans.
The bunyip goes by several other names
depending on who is telling the story.
The tricky thing about bunyips is that there are so many different accounts as to what
the creature actually looks like.
While many of these sightings describe a four-legged creature resembling a seal, others tell of
a chimera-type being resembling different animals like emus, horses, kangaroos, and
alligators.
Some stories claim the bunyip has shaggy and long hair, while others say it has feathers
or scales.
“Booming” noises and loud roars indicates their presence and they are even capable of
causing illness.
Some indigenous accounts give the bunyip the powers of sorcery, capable of luring their
victims to them, which makes them even more dangerous.
The huge number of variations of the bunyip’s reported appearance seem confusing at first
glance.
But you could argue that the variation of the creature is what has kept it alive in
Australia for so long.
There’s no one cohesive story because there is no one group of indigenous Aboriginal peoples.
Before Europeans colonized Australia there were an estimated 250 different languages
spoken there.
Then add different cultures and geographic locations, and the variations between bunyip
accounts begin to make more sense.
Regardless of the form this water spirit takes, or the details of the story, the bunyip always
functions as a warning of the danger of inland water.
It serves as a lesson to children and adults alike to respect the unpredictability of water
and the dangers it presents.
One Aboriginal story tells of a four-legged, milk white bunyip with a ‘big bull-head”
and large eyes that prowls the land looking for wrongdoers to attack.
In another story, the bunyip lurks in the water with its glowing red eyes, attacking
a woman who goes to fetch water at night, tearing off her arm.
The next morning when the creature is hunted, all that can be found is a blood-covered black
and red feather.
In another Aboriginal story, a boy is taken
by a bunyip while playing by the river at night.
Referred to as “the old fellow, the bunyip, takes the boy to its cave.
An adult goes to save the boy, rubbing his body with “dead body fat” before diving
into the river and finding the cave.
There he waves feathers and sings, putting the bunyip to sleep, and brings the boy back
to safety.
Although the bunyip poses a severe threat, harming them was often taboo.
Another tale tells of a steamer that suddenly comes to a halt in the river.
The captain goes to shoot the bunyip that is keeping the barge in place, but others
aboard warn him “Don’t do that, if you do that you will die.
Don’t do that, you’ll die a bad death.”
But he doesn’t heed their warning and kills the creature.
The captain later gets very sick, his whole body covered in oozing blisters, and in two
weeks, he is dead.
The stories of the bunyip were told by the indigenous peoples with such conviction and
vividness that the first European explorers and colonizers to hear of this creature initially
believed that it must be some prehistoric animal that remained unidentified by European
science and believed that they would eventually find a specimen to study.
It’s worth keeping in mind that real Australian fauna was totally foreign and flat-out weird
to European travelers.
Things like black swans, wombats, platypus, and echidnas were seen by Europeans for the
first time in the 19th century.
Add to that the discovery of large megafauna fossils, and the idea of the bunyip seemed
less far-fetched at the time.
Take the diprotodon —an extinct giant marsupial with claws whose appearance
resembles some of the large, hairy descriptions of bunyips.
Then there’s this slightly smaller megafauna species [Zygomaturus trilobus] that Indigenous
Australians lived alongside for at least 17,000 years.
Newspapers in the 19th century reported bunyip sightings, and proposed explanations.
Theories included crocodiles, misplaced sea mammals like seals, fossil bones, the duck-billed
platypus, swamp gas, and the sounds from swamp birds.
Like the Australasian bittern bird who is commonly called the bunyip bird for its nocturnal
nature and booming call.
In 1846, a book about Australia published in London included an excerpt from an 1845
Australian newspaper article about the discovery of a supposed bunyip bone, making the legend
international.
In 1847, in what is now New South Wales, a cycloptic head was presented for examination
as possible evidence of the creature.
Advertised as a bunyip skull, it was put on display for public viewing at the Australian
Museum in Sydney.
But the specimen was eventually identified by naturalist W.S.
Macleay [MAh-clay] to likely be the malformed skull of a foal altered with taxidermy to
appear even more unusual.
While speculations of the bunyip circulated, geographer George Windsor Earl proposed that
the bunyip was really a dugong, a manatee-like water mammal.
Some folklore says that before the rivers were dammed in Southeastern Australia (one
of the bunyips most prominent areas), all kinds of oceanic creatures from sharks to
small whales would occasionally travel inland.
Australia does have the world’s largest population of dugongs.
It is possible that high sea tides during the summer and low river levels could have
led to an animal usually only seen at sea making its way into more interior areas of
the country.
While older beliefs like the Dreaming Ancestors, and ghosts and spirits endured, Aboriginal
folklore was influenced by European cultures.
Which can help explain why from the mid-19th century on, the bunyip was described more
as a humanoid spirit, and in one instance, a half man half fish with a “matted crop
of reeds” for hair.
To me it matters less what creature or thing actually inspired the bunyip’s physical
appearance than the fact that it persisted for so long in Aboriginal culture.
Bunyip stories force a recognition of the varied cultural and spiritual beliefs of the
indigenous peoples of Australia before Anglo-European intervention.
These tales solidify indigenous identities and connections to the landscape in a long
tradition that continues today.