Bunyip

Region/Culture: Oceania (southeastern Australia)
Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A water-dwelling predator whose booming cry carries across still water at night and whose appearance no two accounts describe alike.
Role in Mythos: Guardian and punisher of waterholes, swamps, and billabongs, devouring those who trespass on the places it haunts.
Relation to Humans: The bunyip is overwhelmingly hostile, favoring women and children as prey and dragging the careless beneath the surface. In several traditions it functions as a warning that keeps people away from dangerous or sacred water and discourages greed in taking from the rivers.

Somewhere out past the firelight, in the black water where the reeds grow thick, something is making a sound no animal should make. It is a boom, low and rolling, the kind of noise that gets into the chest before it reaches the ears. Camped men have heard it and gone quiet. The cattle have pulled at their tethers. By morning the print of something heavy may be pressed into the mud at the water’s edge, or there may be nothing at all, which is somehow worse.

This is the country of the bunyip, the most famous monster in Australia and the one nobody can describe. The name comes from the Wemba-Wemba language of the Aboriginal people who live along the Murray River, where it appears as banib, and the word is usually rendered today as devil or evil spirit. But the creature was never confined to one people or one river. Across the continent its name shifted as the language shifted. The Ngarrindjeri knew a water spirit called the Mulyawonk. The Dharawal of the southeastern coast spoke of the gu-ru-ngaty, the Wiradjuri of the mirree-ulla. One scholar combing the records counted at least nine distinct regional versions of the thing, each its own beast, all of them lurking in the same dark water.

What the bunyip looks like depends entirely on who is doing the looking. Some accounts give it a round head and a long neck on a body like an ox or a manatee. Others describe walrus tusks, a duck-like bill, a horse’s tail, flippers, scales, feathers, a coat of dark hair tangled with weed. It has been reported as small as a dog and as large as a bullock, as a sleek seal-thing and as a feathered hulk, even, in one early account from the Murray, as an enormous starfish. The one detail witnesses tend to agree on is its size. It is big enough to be a man-eater. When the colonial naturalist Robert Brough Smyth tried to pin the creature down in his 1878 study of the Aboriginal people of Victoria, he gave it ten pages and concluded, honestly, that almost nothing was known of its form, because people were too frightened of it to look closely.

The fear was the point. Among the Ngarrindjeri the bunyip-spirit was the Mulyawonk, and it came for two kinds of people: those who took more fish from the water than they needed, and children who strayed too near the edge. A mother could tell a small child that the Mulyawonk would have them, and the child would keep back from the deep water, and the river would not be stripped bare by greed. The monster carried a whole ethic of living with the land folded inside its tusks. In the storytelling of southeastern Australia, more than one tale begins with a parent’s warning about the waterhole and a child who does not listen, and the bunyip rising out of the billabong to teach the lesson that warnings exist to be heeded.

There are origin stories too. In one Aboriginal tradition the first bunyip was a man who broke the law of the land and was cursed for it by an envoy of the Rainbow Serpent, transformed into the shape that now haunts the water. The creature is bound up with the spiritual weight that water carries in Aboriginal cosmology, where billabongs and waterholes can be the dwelling places of ancestral beings and the thresholds between worlds. To approach such a place carelessly was to risk far more than drowning.

When Europeans arrived they heard the boom and saw the prints and wanted a body. The 1840s and 1850s brought a flood of bunyip sightings across Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia as settlers pushed into new country. In 1818 the explorers Hamilton Hume and James Meehan had already pulled large strange bones from Lake Bathurst, comparing them to a hippopotamus or a manatee. In 1845 a newspaper in Geelong announced that fossils found nearby belonged to a dead bunyip, and the colony caught what one writer called bunyip fever. There was the Challicum bunyip, an outline of the creature carved by Aboriginal people into the bank of Fiery Creek near Ararat, said to mark the spot where a bunyip had been speared after killing a man. For years the people returned to retrace its lines in the earth, a figure some eleven paces long.

The creature’s powers are the powers of dark water itself. It strikes from below, unseen, and pulls its victim down before a cry can finish. Its booming roar can be heard across great distances and in some tellings carries sickness, even rheumatism, to those who hear it. A few traditions grant it stranger gifts, the ability to raise or lower the water and to hold a victim still with its gaze. Its limits are the limits of its element. The bunyip belongs to the swamp and the billabong and the slow brown river, and away from the water it has no story at all. Stay back from the reedy edge after dark, take no more from the river than the river can spare, and the boom in the night remains just a sound.

The naturalists kept trying to explain it. In 1933 the geographer Charles Fenner proposed that the legend grew from fur seals that swam far up the Murray and Darling, smooth and big-eyed and given to bellowing when stranded inland. The booming cry has been laid at the webbed feet of the Australasian bittern, a marsh bird so associated with the legend that it earned the nickname the bunyip bird. These are tidy answers. None of them have ever made anyone walk easily past a black waterhole at night.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bunyip?

A bunyip is a water-dwelling monster from Australian Aboriginal mythology, said to lurk in swamps, billabongs, creeks, and waterholes across the continent, particularly in the southeast. It is best known as a man-eating predator with a loud, booming cry, though descriptions of its appearance vary enormously from one region to another.

What does a bunyip look like?

No two accounts of the bunyip agree, which is part of its legend. Recurring features across different traditions include dark shaggy fur or scales, a dog-like or seal-like head, a horse-like tail, flippers, and tusks, with reported sizes ranging from that of a large dog to that of a bullock. Some early accounts describe it instead as having a long neck, a duck-like bill, feathers, or even the form of an enormous starfish.

Where does the word “bunyip” come from?

The word bunyip comes from the Wemba-Wemba language of Aboriginal people living along the Murray River in southeastern Australia, where it appears as banib. It is usually translated today as “devil” or “evil spirit.” The creature itself appears throughout Aboriginal Australia under many different names, including the Ngarrindjeri Mulyawonk and other regional variants.

Is the bunyip dangerous to humans?

Yes, the bunyip is almost always portrayed as hostile to humans, especially favoring women and children as prey and dragging victims beneath the water. In several traditions it also serves a protective social function, warning people away from dangerous or sacred waterholes and punishing those who take more from the rivers than they need.

Did people actually believe the bunyip was real?

Many European settlers did. A wave of reported bunyip sightings swept Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia in the 1840s and 1850s, and in 1845 a Geelong newspaper claimed nearby fossils belonged to a dead bunyip, sparking what became known as bunyip fever. Later naturalists proposed that the legend may have grown from fur seals straying up the rivers or from the booming call of the Australasian bittern, sometimes nicknamed the “bunyip bird.”