The Feel of a Word: bunyip

It is astonishing the zeal with which the European settlers set to work to give a detailed description of the Aboriginal mythological creature that lived in the swamps and lagoons.  The small setback of never having seen one didn’t seem to trouble them.

There are two basic descriptions. One takes an alligator and gives it an emu head and feathers.

The Bunyip, then, is represented as uniting the characteristics of a bird and of an alligator. It has a head resembling an emu with a long bill, at the extremity of which is a transverse projection on each side, with serrated edges like the bone of the stingray. Its body and legs partake of the nature of an alligator.  The hind legs are remarkably thick and strong, and the fore legs are much longer, but still of great strength.  The extremities are furnished with long claws, but the blacks say its usual method of killing its prey is by hugging it to death. When in the water it swims like a frog, and when on shore it walks on its hind legs with its head erect, in which position it measures twelve or thirteen feet in height. Its breast is said to be covered with different coloured feathers; …

Geelong Advertiser and Squatters’ Advocate  Wednesday 2 July 1845

The other line of description likens the bunyip to a seal.

A young fellow working for Reis told me he saw the bunyip on two occasions, once about 50 yards from the water, standing by a tree, an animal remarkably black, about 6 feet in height, with a head like a big kangaroo dog, and long drooping ears like those of a spaniel.  Once only, about 10 in the morning, was it my luck to see a very brief glimpse of his head and top of his shoulders, a head very like that of a seal, with long ears, and intensely black. He was in the middle of a waterhole, about 25 feet in depth, and dived like a flash out of sight.

The Beaudesert Times (Qld) Friday 30 July 1920

And yet another likens it to a bullock.

The Murrumbidgee blacks assert that a large animal, ‘big as him bullock,’ exists in the lakes of that district; they describe it as having a head and long neck like an emu, with a thick mane of hair from the top of the head to the shoulders ; four-legged, with three toes on each foot, which is webbed ; and having a tail like a horse.

Sydney Morning Herald  Tuesday 9 February 1847, page 3

Estimates of size vary from the size of a large seal to an enormous animal capable of hugging a gum tree with its forelegs and ripping it out of the ground.

Everyone agreed that the sound made by the bunyip was a ghastly noise, a kind of weird booming, unlike the sound of any animal ever heard before. Alternatively it gave out a terrifying bull-like roar.

While the Aborigines had different names for the waterhole creature in various languages, the one that was borrowed into English, banyip, came from the Wathaurong people who lived on the western side of Port Philip Bay in an area ranging from present-day Geelong to Bacchus Marsh.  Indeed early stories of the bunyip seem to come mostly from the inland region of Victoria up into New South Wales.

But did the bunyip exist?  In 1847 a mutilated skull found in the Port Philip district was sent to the Australian Museum, with the idea that it would be examined at the Museum and then sent on to England.  Unfortunately the Museum experts came to the conclusion that the skill was that of a hydrocephalic foal or calf. It remained in Sydney.

Round about the same time the Sydney Morning Herald said that there seemed to be a bunyip in the lagoon at the bottom of the Botanic Gardens, judging by the weird noises coming from there.  Perhaps some of the young men of the town could investigate?

And here I think we have the beginnings of the two reactions to the bunyip story.  For some time there were those who continued to want to believe in its existence.  In time, the fears that people had about the bunyip melted away so that it was no longer a scary monster but a rather loveable creature evoking the essence of the bush.

The other reaction was to dismiss the story as nonsense.  Helpful suggestions were that the bunyip was merely a seal that had come up the Murray River, or a rare musk duck, or the swamp bittern which had a booming call and was difficult to spot.   This scepticism gave rise to the use of bunyip to mean ‘something unreal’.  In the case of a person it was stronger and meant ‘an imposter’ or even ‘humbug or con man’.   In 1853 an Australian system of hereditary peerage, proposed by William Charles Wentworth, was referred to by a Sydney journalist, Daniel Deniehy,  as ‘a bunyip aristocracy’:

Here, we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy.

The proposal was dropped.

We have lost this sense of bunyip as ‘unreal’ and are left with the mythical creature, now safely confined to children’s books and having a nice nature (underneath a still unprepossessing exterior) and still living in swamps and billabongs.

For those still seeking some truth in the story there is the suggestion that the bunyip in Aboriginal mythology was the ancient memory of a diprotodon or some other megafauna with tree-hugging tendencies and a desire to eat humans.