The Bunyip

Deep Aboriginal water-spirit tradition of southeastern Australia

Ask ten sources what a bunyip looks like and you get ten answers, and that is the most interesting fact about it. Shaggy fur tangled with swamp weed. Scales. Feathers. Seal-like. Emu-like. The size of a dog, or the size of a cow. What is consistent is not the body. It is the address: still water. Billabongs, swamps, creek bends, the deep holes in a river that do not move.

The word comes from Aboriginal languages of southeastern Australia, and early colonial writers usually rendered it as devil or evil spirit, which is the same flattening that happened to sacred water on the other side of the world. People living along the Murray told nineteenth century collectors that sightings were frequent and that describing the thing was difficult; it behaves more like a warning attached to a place than a description of an animal.

There is a serious scholarly thread underneath. Australia had megafauna, including Diprotodon, a marsupial the size of a large car that lived through much of the Pleistocene and died out roughly forty six thousand years ago. When Diprotodon bones started coming out of the ground in the nineteenth century, settlers repeatedly identified them as bunyip remains. Researchers have argued the traffic ran the other way too: that stories of dangerous things in swamps preserve a cultural memory of animals that were genuinely there, and genuinely dangerous, an unimaginably long time ago.

Take the practical reading with you. A bunyip story marks a waterhole that will kill a child, and there is a lot of water in this country that will. Standing at a still, deep, weed-choked bend in the Murray at dusk, the warning does not need a monster to work. But the monster is how it got carried for forty thousand years, and that is a better delivery system than a sign.