Tiddalik

Also Known As: also written Tiddalick and Tidelek; known in the Gippsland records as the Port Albert Frog
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He can take every drop of fresh water in the country into his own body and hold it there, and he loses it only when something makes him laugh.
Role in Mythos: A Gunaikurnai story of the country around Port Albert in South Gippsland, where his drinking and his laughter between them made the drought, the flood, and the shape of the local coast.
Relation to Humans: People and animals alike are left with dust and dying reed beds while he sits full, and it is their combined effort, not any single hero, that gets the water back. When it returns it arrives all at once and drowns a good many of them, which is the part of the story that later retellings quietly dropped.

The water went first from the soaks and the reed beds, then from the creeks, then from the deep holes that had never failed in anyone’s memory. Something was drinking, and it was drinking everything. By the time the animals of South Gippsland understood what had happened to their country, Tiddalik was already too heavy to move, squatting in the middle of a drying landscape with every drop of fresh water in the world inside him.

The old records are thrifty about his body. No colour, no markings, no measurements. What they give instead is the swelling: skin pulled drum-tight, the weight of rivers pressing outward against it, a shape that stopped being frog-like some hours earlier. Almost everything anyone can say about how Tiddalik looked comes from what he had swallowed. He is less a described creature than a container with a face.

In the ordinary way of things he would have been nothing much at all. A frog in the coastal scrub near what is now Port Albert, sitting out the heat under damp leaf litter, calling at dusk with a flat repeated note. That note is probably where the name came from. Say it aloud and it works as an imitation of a frog rather than a title, which is the likeliest account of a word that reached English through settlers writing down a language they did not speak.

Then the thirst. Nothing in the tellings explains where it came from, and nothing suggests he fought it. He simply drank, and kept drinking, and the country went to dust behind him. The animals came to him across ground that had cracked into plates lifting at their edges, sharp enough underfoot to matter, and they asked, and then they argued, and then they gave up on asking. What was left was to make him laugh, because a laughing thing cannot keep its mouth shut.

They took turns. The species change from telling to telling, and the failures are always the same shape: something clever, something loud, something undignified, and a frog watching it with no expression whatsoever. Then the eel came up out of the last of the mud. He stood on his tail and began to knot himself, looping and twisting into arrangements no eel has any business making, and something in the sheer absurdity of it got through. Tiddalik’s mouth cracked open.

What came out was not relief. It was the entire fresh water of the world arriving in one place at one time. The flood took the low country between the ranges and the sea, drowned a great many of those who had just been saved from dying of thirst, and left others stranded on the islands that still sit off that coast, Snake Island and Sunday Island and St Margaret Island among them. The bays, the inlets, the estuaries and the shoals around Port Albert are all held to be the shape his laughter left in the land.

Borun the pelican, whose feathers in those days were black all through, went out to ferry the stranded off the islands. The tellings disagree sharply about what happened next, and the disagreement is worth more than a tidy version would be. In the accounts written down in the nineteenth century, Borun tried to take one of the rescued women as a wife against her will, the quarrel that followed cost him his life at another pelican’s beak, and pelicans have worn black and white ever since. In the version Gunaikurnai people tell along the Bataluk trail today, he painted himself up with white pipeclay for the fight, which law did not permit an animal to wear, and he was fixed where he stood as stone. The white rock in the water near Port Albert is him.

The Tiddalik most people meet contains none of this. In that one a wise owl organises the animals, the eel is given a name, the water comes back, everybody drinks, and the story closes on a moral about sharing. The remaking is documented and reasonably recent. Versions were taken down by the missionary John Bulmer, the pastoralist Edward Curr, and the geologists Robert Brough Smyth and Alfred Howitt between the 1870s and 1904; the museum curator Aldo Massola published the Port Albert frog and the white rock together in 1965; and in 1980 the Kurnai elder Phillip Pepper recorded the version his grandmother had told him early in the century, which remains the least known of the lot. The anthropologist John Morton, tracing how the story travelled out of one stretch of coast and onto the whole planet, noted the irony plainly: the ending everyone knows is the one nobody local told.

There is a further puzzle in him. Tiddalik is routinely identified with the water-holding frog, which buries itself, seals in a bladder of water and waits out drought underground, and which desert peoples have long dug up and squeezed when they needed a drink. It is a neat fit and it is geographically impossible. Neither that frog nor any of its close relatives lives in Gippsland. Either Tiddalik was some other frog entirely, or the story is carrying a memory from ten or twelve thousand years ago, when the country south of Port Albert was dry land running out towards Tasmania and the sea came in and took it.

His power is capacity, and it is absolute while it lasts. No one in the story can force water out of him, and no one tries twice. His weakness sits in the same place as his strength, in a body that cannot do two things at once, because the mouth that holds an ocean shut has to open to laugh. He is not defeated by strength or by cleverness. He is defeated by an eel doing something stupid.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tiddalik?

Tiddalik is a giant frog from Aboriginal Australian tradition who drank all the fresh water in the world and caused a drought. The story belongs to the Gunaikurnai people of South Gippsland in Victoria, and centres on the coast near Port Albert. He is one of the most widely retold Aboriginal stories in the world.

How did the animals get the water back from Tiddalik?

They made him laugh. After various animals failed, an eel stood on its tail and twisted itself into knotted shapes, and Tiddalik opened his mouth, releasing all the water at once. In the older recorded versions this arrives as a catastrophic flood rather than a happy ending.

What happened after Tiddalik released the water?

The flood drowned many of the animals and stranded others on the islands off the South Gippsland coast, and it carved out the bays, inlets and estuaries around Port Albert. Borun the pelican rescued the stranded, and the tellings differ on what became of him afterwards, either killed after trying to take a rescued woman as a wife, or turned to stone as the white rock near Port Albert.

Is Tiddalik a real species of frog?

He is usually identified with the water-holding frog, which stores water in its body and survives drought buried underground. That identification does not quite work, because the water-holding frog does not live in Gippsland where the story comes from. Tiddalik may be a different frog altogether, or a memory of an older landscape before the sea flooded the land between Victoria and Tasmania.

Why does the modern Tiddalik story end happily?

The version taught in schools was reshaped over the twentieth century into a lesson about greed and sharing, with the water simply returned to the land. The versions recorded from Gunaikurnai people in the nineteenth century end in drowning, stranding and a death, and are much less widely known.