Bunyip: Australia’s Mysterious Amphibian Monster

 Arguably the most globally recognized mythicalcreature from Australia is the bunyip, an important staple in Aboriginal folklore. This amphibious being poses a threat to allwho 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 ofthe 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 Aboriginalword for an amphibious spirit-being. Australian indigenous peoples believe thebeings are separate from the ancestors and the Aboriginal people themselves, and werebelieved 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 thereare so many different accounts as to what the creature actually looks like. While many of these sightings describe a four-leggedcreature resembling a seal, others tell of a chimera-type being resembling differentanimals like emus, horses, kangaroos, and alligators. Some stories claim the bunyip has shaggy andlong hair, while others say it has feathers or scales. “Booming” noises and loud roars indicatestheir presence and they are even capable of causing illness. Some indigenous accounts give the bunyip thepowers of sorcery, capable of luring their victims to them, which makes them even moredangerous. The huge number of variations of the bunyip’sreported appearance seem confusing at first glance. But you could argue that the variation ofthe creature is what has kept it alive in Australia for so long. There’s no one cohesive story because thereis no one group of indigenous Aboriginal peoples. Before Europeans colonized Australia therewere an estimated 250 different languages spoken there. Then add different cultures and geographiclocations, 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 inlandwater. It serves as a lesson to children and adultsalike 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 lookingfor wrongdoers to attack. In another story, the bunyip lurks in thewater 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 atnight. Referred to as “the old fellow, the bunyip,takes the boy to its cave. An adult goes to save the boy, rubbing hisbody with “dead body fat” before diving into the river and finding the cave. There he waves feathers and sings, puttingthe 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 suddenlycomes to a halt in the river. The captain goes to shoot the bunyip thatis keeping the barge in place, but others aboard warn him “Don’t do that, if youdo that you will die. Don’t do that, you’ll die a bad death.” But he doesn’t heed their warning and killsthe creature. The captain later gets very sick, his wholebody covered in oozing blisters, and in two weeks, he is dead. The stories of the bunyip were told by theindigenous peoples with such conviction and vividness that the first European explorersand colonizers to hear of this creature initially believed that it must be some prehistoricanimal that remained unidentified by European science and believed that they would eventuallyfind a specimen to study. It’s worth keeping in mind that real Australianfauna 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 megafaunafossils, and the idea of the bunyip seemed less far-fetched at the time. Take the diprotodon —anextinct giant marsupial with claws whose appearance resembles some of the large, hairy descriptionsof bunyips. Then there’s this slightly smaller megafaunaspecies [Zygomaturus trilobus] that Indigenous Australians lived alongside for at least 17,000years. Newspapers in the 19th century reported bunyipsightings, and proposed explanations. Theories included crocodiles, misplaced seamammals like seals, fossil bones, the duck-billed platypus, swamp gas, and the sounds from swampbirds. Like the Australasian bittern bird who iscommonly called the bunyip bird for its nocturnal nature and booming call. In 1846, a book about Australia publishedin London included an excerpt from an 1845 Australian newspaper article about the discoveryof a supposed bunyip bone, making the legend international. In 1847, in what is now New South Wales, acycloptic head was presented for examination as possible evidence of the creature. Advertised as a bunyip skull, it was put ondisplay for public viewing at the Australian Museum in Sydney. But the specimen was eventually identifiedby naturalist W.S. Macleay [MAh-clay] to likely be the malformedskull 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-likewater mammal. Some folklore says that before the riverswere dammed in Southeastern Australia (one of the bunyips most prominent areas), allkinds of oceanic creatures from sharks to small whales would occasionally travel inland. Australia does have the world’s largestpopulation of dugongs. It is possible that high sea tides duringthe summer and low river levels could have led to an animal usually only seen at seamaking 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-19thcentury 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 thingactually inspired the bunyip’s physical appearance than the fact that it persistedfor so long in Aboriginal culture. Bunyip stories force a recognition of thevaried cultural and spiritual beliefs of the indigenous peoples of Australia before Anglo-Europeanintervention. These tales solidify indigenous identitiesand connections to the landscape in a long tradition that continues today.