Bunyip
Mythological Narrative
The bunyip haunts the billabongs, swamps, and river bends of south-eastern Australia, lying on the bottom by day and bellowing in the dark. Descriptions vary wildly from district to district: a dog-faced beast with tusks and black shaggy hair, something like an enormous seal or calf, or a creature with an emu's neck and a horse's tail. What the accounts share is the bond to deep water and a plain cautionary purpose — elders invoked it to keep children from wandering to the water alone, and at certain pools women called out before drawing water. The word itself comes from banib in the Wemba-Wemba language of north-western Victoria, and spread through colonial retelling until it became the blanket name for water monsters across the country.
The colonial bunyip craze left a paper trail. William Buckley, the escaped convict who lived thirty-two years among Aboriginal communities, said in his 1852 memoir that he had repeatedly seen a grey humped back in Lake Modewarre. In July 1845 the Geelong Advertiser reported the unearthing of giant "bunyip bones", and in 1847 a supposed bunyip skull drew crowds at the museum in Sydney before being identified as the malformed skull of a foal or calf. Scholars have since suggested that some accounts may preserve distant memories of the extinct Diprotodon, or record seals that occasionally travel far up the rivers.
By the mid-nineteenth century "bunyip" had also entered Australian English as a word for an impostor, and the creature settled into children's literature: the mournful monster of the 1973 picture book The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek, forever asking what a bunyip is, made it a household figure.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## An Aboriginal word
"Bunyip" is usually traced to the Wergaia or Wemba Wemba languages of western Victoria; other peoples of south-eastern Australia had their own names for dangerous beings of the water. In Aboriginal tellings recorded in the nineteenth century, such beings lived in deep waterholes, swamps, and billabongs and could seize people who came too close, especially at night. Many of these stories served to keep children away from dangerous water.
## A colonial sensation
From the 1840s, settlers took up the word. Newspapers reported bunyip sightings and bellowing in the swamps, and in 1846 a skull found on the Murrumbidgee River was exhibited in Sydney as a bunyip's (it was later identified as a deformed animal skull). The bunyip became a figure of colonial folklore, and later of children's books, often with little connection to the Aboriginal beings behind the word. "Bunyip aristocracy" became an insult in colonial politics.
## Distinguishing the two
This site distinguishes the Aboriginal water beings, which belong to particular peoples and places and are told about in their own languages, from the colonial "bunyip" of newspapers and fiction. Some scholars have suggested that stories of water beings preserve memories of extinct megafauna or reflect seals travelling up rivers; these are interpretations, not the peoples' own accounts.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Bunyip.
You Might Also Like
Tiddalik
In a Gunaikurnai telling, Tiddalik drinks the waterhole, creek, and river dry. The animals must make the frog laugh before the waters can surge back across Country.
Rainbow Serpent
A vast serpent creator known across the continent: it carved rivers, guards waterholes, and arcs overhead as the rainbow. Called Ngalyod in western Arnhem Land and Wagyl by the Noongar, among many regional names.
Baiame
Creator and law-giver of the Wiradjuri, Gamilaraay, and neighbouring peoples of New South Wales: he shaped rivers and people, instituted the Bora initiation ground, then withdrew into the sky.
Bunjil
The creator ancestor of the Kulin nations of central Victoria, a wedge-tailed eagle who shaped the land, made people, gave them law, and rose into the sky, where the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung see him as the star Altair.