THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
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.
