Whowie

Also Known As: also Whowhie, Wowie
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: An enormous six-legged reptile that swallowed sleeping people whole and whose slow dragging bulk pushed up the sandhills of the Riverina.
Role in Mythos: It is the devouring terror of the Murray River, destroyed by the river peoples acting together in the tale that explains both the sandhills and a long cave in the riverbank.
Relation to Humans: It hunted human camps at night, taking thirty to sixty people in a single raid until flight seemed the only option left. After it was killed the name survived as a threat parents used on disobedient children.

The sandhills of the Riverina keep the shape of something that used to drag itself across them. Ridge after low ridge of pale sand, pushed up by a body too heavy for the ground it slept on, and at the far end of them a hole in the bank of the Murray where the air came out cool and stale and smelling of wet stone. That was the door. For a long time nobody who went close enough to describe it properly came back to do the describing.

The thing behind it was built like a goanna and sized like a fallen tree. Twenty feet from snout to tail tip, six legs where a lizard has four, and mounted on the front of all that reptile bulk a head borrowed from a frog: broad, flat, hinged wide at the corners. Every telling lingers on the mouth. It was not a mouth for tearing. It was a mouth for swallowing, and it did not need to be fast.

The Whowie was slow, and the slowness was never a flaw. It had no cause to hurry. Everything that saw it in daylight was already running, and at night nothing saw it at all. In the afternoons it hauled itself out below the cave mouth and lay against the warm sand with its flanks working, shifting position once or twice an hour, and each shift left a furrow the wind would later finish into a dune. That is the whole of its ordinary life as the story gives it: a very large animal, sunning itself, quietly rearranging the district.

After dark it went into the camps. It came in low and without noise, across ground where families were sleeping, and it took whoever did not wake in time. Thirty people in a night. Sometimes sixty. Nobody described what the raids sounded like, because the accounts come from the ones who got up and ran.

Where it came from, the stories do not say. There is no origin, no parentage, no moment of making. The Whowie is simply present at the start, already grown, already in the cave, an inherited fact of the river like the water and the red gums.

The water-rat people had suffered worst, so they met first. Their chief put it plainly: stay and be finished, or leave for safer country, and he would not decide it for them. It was an old man who stood up and argued against going. They had lived here their whole lives. There had always been food, and work, and reason to be on the river, and now they could not go near it. Better, he said, to find some other way of being rid of the thing.

So they set night guards and sent word out, and the answer came from everywhere. Kangaroo, platypus, eagle, magpie, cockatoo, lizard, snake, opossum, crow. Scouts followed the tracks to the bank and found what mattered more than the tracks: the cave had exactly one opening. It also ran for miles under the ground, which meant that with the Whowie at the deep end, they had close to a week before it could reach daylight.

They held a corroboree first, a full night of dancing and telling, and then in the morning everybody went out for sticks. The bundles went in halfway down the tunnel and were heaped again at the mouth, and when the timing was right they lit them.

What followed was six days of noise coming out of a hill. Roaring, then coughing, then the scrape and thud of something enormous trying to force its way up through smoke in the dark. Teeth are no use against smoke. Claws are no use against smoke. On the seventh morning the haze at the entrance thinned and the Whowie came out into the light burned along both flanks, eyes ruined, sides heaving, and for the first time in anyone’s memory harmless. The spears went in before it could turn. Stone axes and nulla-nullas finished what the fire had started.

It was not quite killed. It dragged itself back down its own tunnel and was never seen again, and afterwards people said you could still hear it sighing a long way inside the rock, either dying slowly or reduced to something less solid than a body. What it certainly was reduced to is a name. A monster that had emptied camps became the thing you invoked at a badly behaved child, which is a considerable demotion.

Its powers were all consequences of its build. The size let it swallow instead of chew, the weight let it remake the landscape without meaning to, the darkness of a cave miles deep gave it a refuge nobody could follow it into, and the general terror it produced meant it never had to move quickly. Its weaknesses came from exactly the same list. A creature that slow could be timed. A creature that large could not turn around in its own corridor. A creature with one door could be sealed in by anyone patient enough to gather firewood, and a creature bred to the dark was helpless the moment it was forced out into the sun with its eyes gone.

The tale reached print by a route worth naming. David Unaipon, a Ngarrindjeri man of the lower Murray, inventor, preacher and the first Aboriginal author published in Australia, spent 1924 and 1925 travelling southern Australia collecting stories, and wrote them up as Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. He sold the copyright to Angus and Robertson. In 1930 the manuscript appeared in London as Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals under the name of W. Ramsay Smith, Chief Medical Officer of South Australia, with Unaipon mentioned once in passing as a narrator and his own voice edited out. The Whowie is in there, at pages 147 to 151. It took until 2001 for Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker to put the book back out under Unaipon’s title and Unaipon’s name.

Two later readers have tried to give the story an address. The palaeontologist Ralph Molnar, writing about the giant monitor lizard Megalania, suggested that a six-metre carnivorous goanna in the Australian past might sit somewhere behind a six-metre carnivorous goanna in Australian story. In 2021 the caver Karl Brandt went looking for the lair itself and nominated Punyelroo Cave, five kilometres south of Swan Reach in South Australia, which runs about three kilometres into a Miocene sandstone cliff on the riverbank and is the longest cave on the Murray system. On the New South Wales stretch of the river, where the sandhills are, there is nothing of the kind.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Whowie?

The Whowie is a giant man-eating reptile from southeastern Australian Aboriginal tradition, associated with the Murray River and the Riverina district. It is described as a goanna about twenty feet long with six legs and a huge frog-shaped head, able to swallow a person whole. Its slow movement across the riverbank was said to have formed the local sandhills.

Where did the Whowie live?

The Whowie lived in a cave in the bank of the Murray River that ran for miles underground and had only one entrance. It slept and basked there by day and left at night to hunt. In 2021 the caver Karl Brandt proposed Punyelroo Cave in South Australia, the longest cave on the Murray system, as the likely original of the lair.

How was the Whowie killed?

The river peoples smoked it out. Led by the water-rat tribe and joined by the kangaroo, platypus, eagle, magpie, cockatoo, lizard, snake, opossum and crow tribes, they piled bundles of sticks inside and across the cave’s single entrance and set them alight while the Whowie was at the deep end. It struggled upward for six days and emerged on the seventh burned and blinded, and was speared and clubbed before dragging itself back inside, never to be seen again.

Who first recorded the Whowie story?

David Unaipon, a Ngarrindjeri man from the lower Murray and the first Aboriginal Australian author to be published, collected the tale in 1924 and 1925 for his manuscript Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. He sold the copyright, and in 1930 the collection was published under the name of the anthropologist W. Ramsay Smith with Unaipon named only in passing. The book was republished under Unaipon’s own name and title in 2001.

Was the Whowie based on a real animal?

Possibly. The palaeontologist Ralph Molnar has connected the Whowie to Megalania, the giant monitor lizard that lived in Australia during the Pleistocene and reached comparable lengths. The resemblance is suggestive rather than proven, and the Whowie’s six legs and frog-like head have no counterpart in any known animal.