Bunyip

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Names & Creature Profile

Bunyip, also written Bun-yip, inhabits the lakes, swamps and deep waterholes of Australian accounts, but has no single settled shape. Nineteenth-century descriptions range from a feathered back to an emu-like neck or a hairy swimming body. Some tell of a creature that drags people underwater; another gives it a cub, a home and a desperate reason to pursue human beings. [2][3][7]

The Ngarrindjeri Mulyawonk has separately attributed local accounts and its own name. [8]

Tales & Encounters

The Victorian story begins with young men seeking food for their households. At pools fringed with plants, they prepare to gather bulrush roots. One youth mocks that task as women’s work, persuading the others to fish instead. They arrange lines of wattle bark with hooks made from kangaroo bone. Most bait their lines with worms; he secretly cuts a piece of raw meat for his hook. The empty afternoon suddenly changes when something beneath the water almost wrenches the line from his grasp. His companions help drag it ashore. [7]

The catch resembles both calf and seal, with a long broad tail. Its cry brings its mother from the opposite bank. The others urge its release. The captor refuses: he has promised enough food to keep his betrothed’s household feasting for three days, and now wants its children to play with this extraordinary prize. He brandishes his spear at the mother. She answers with pleading signs, but he convinces his companions to help put the cub on his shoulders. What they caught for food has become something they intend to possess. [7]

A rushing sound interrupts their triumph. Looking back, they see the pool flooding its banks. There has been no rain for days. Sunlight still falls on Mount Shadwell and magpies sing, yet Mustons Creek is spilling across ground usually safe from even its highest floods. They run uphill. From a ridge, the captor sees trees reduced to small shapes above a widening dark sea. He keeps the cub and races toward the settlement, his strength failing as he runs. [7]

At home the elders and children gather around the arriving youths. The dropped cub reveals the danger before anyone can explain it; then the flood appears. Families cling together. The captor holds his betrothed and promises to climb a tree beyond the water’s reach. As the water touches him, he looks down and finds claws where his feet had been. Beside him stands a black bird. His people have become birds too. Hands change into wings, speech into an unfamiliar cry, and the surface reflects a black swan.

Historical Record

The cub story reached print through several hands. W. Dunlop collected accounts after settling in Australia around 1850. His daughter, identified as Mrs David Lyall, wrote them out from his notes at Connop Schmitz’s request. Schmitz passed them to T. V. Holmes for communication to the Anthropological Institute. Holmes explains this history in the introduction to Australian Folklore Stories, in a volume whose title page is dated 1899. Neither the original teller nor a nation is named in that introduction. [7]

A different record begins with John Morgan’s 1852 Life and Adventures of William Buckley. Morgan says he assembled Buckley’s recollections through conversations, questions and answers, and notes taken at different times. The lake glimpse belongs to this mediated autobiography. When colonial compiler Robert Brough Smyth quotes it in his 1878 Aborigines of Victoria, he is repeating that earlier record, not adding another observer beside the same lake. [2][3]

Homeland & Tradition

Mustons Creek and Mount Shadwell give the cub tale a Victorian setting. Its landscape is not an empty wilderness: pools provide food, a path leads back to households, and the youths expect people waiting at home to share what they bring. The catastrophe travels along those familiar connections, from a fishing place to the settlement that depends upon it. [7]

John Fargher’s 2021 Fleurieu report identifies its speakers as Warki/Ramindjeri Elders Nita McAdam and Collin Koolmatrie, who grew up in the Coorong. It acknowledges differences between Ngarrindjeri clans rather than presenting one telling as universal. [8]

Appearance & Signs

At the lake Morgan spells Moodewarri, Buckley recalls a dusky grey, feather-covered back, apparently the size of a grown calf or larger. He never sees a head or tail. The creatures appear in calm weather on smooth water, and he says he could not learn of anyone who had seen those missing parts. His uncertainty concerns the whole animal’s shape and size, even though the glimpse itself seems clear to him. [2]

Smyth’s illustrations offer other outlines. He describes Kurruk’s Western Port drawing, made under a learned doctor’s direction, as emu-like. A separate Murray River drawing from 1848 reached him through named intermediaries; he could not decide whether its covering represented scales or feathers. Beside these he quotes a newspaper account from Midgeon Lagoon describing long, glossy black hair. That creature reportedly stopped about thirty yards from the witnesses and watched them for half an hour before swimming away. Neither this leisurely observer nor the feathered back supplies a complete anatomy for all the other accounts. [3]

Nature & Powers

Smyth distinguishes two local accounts of killing. At Western Port, Toor-roo-dun drowns and eats people who bathe in its basin. His Goulburn authorities instead say it holds people in its embrace until they die, without consuming them. The disagreement is explicit in the collection: the danger does not depend everywhere on an appetite for human flesh. [3]

Landscape & Associations

Buckley’s lake passage sits within an account of fishing and exchange. Moodewarri provides plentiful eels. A messenger arrives with red marks on his arms indicating the days needed to reach another group, and the travellers carry fish in kangaroo skins to a meeting on the Barwin River. Eels and roots pass between the two parties on long sheets of bark. The dark back interrupts a waterscape already known through skilled work, food and travel. [2]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Smyth records Toor-roo-dun both as the Western Port creature’s name and as the name of a basin said never to dry, even in the hottest summers. Its home lies in deep water and the thick mud beneath. The shared name binds the creature to that particular place. [3]

His compilation also places Bunyip beside Māori taniwha in a comparative footnote, borrowing a monster-slaying account from G. F. Angas. The comparison belongs to the compiler’s reading, not to evidence that the traditions share an origin. It shows how a Victorian anthology could bring distant beings together on the page even while its own local descriptions remained irreconcilable. [3]

Meaning & Belief

The captor’s decision carries the cub story beyond an accidental catch. He receives a clear plea, understands what he has taken and retains it anyway. His companions move from warning him to helping carry the prize. The whole settlement ultimately suffers the result. The mother’s distress is intelligible, but the flood is not gentle and its consequences are not proportionate: her child returns, while other parents lose their children’s human forms. [7]

The punishment also changes who depends on whom. The young men set out to provide for children; one returns with a child he has taken from its mother. His boast of abundance brings the pursuing water to the very households he meant to impress. The first wrong remains recognizable inside the much larger disaster. [7]

Later Retellings & Reception

Leonora Lang’s retelling in the 1904 Brown Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, keeps the cub, pursuit and transformation but alters their emphasis. Mustons Creek and Mount Shadwell disappear into a distant fairy-tale setting. The mother approaches with menacing yellow eyes, and the captor throws his spear instead of brandishing it. The swans keep their strange voices, but the account of people drowning while seeking those voices is omitted. The preface openly describes Mrs Lang’s work as adaptation for a white readership, with material selected or changed for that audience. [4][7]

Emma Duke’s Biami and Bunyip, published in Koori Mail issue 338 through a Moree Secondary College Aboriginal-studies project, follows an exiled wrongdoer rather than a bereaved mother. Stephen Wright’s nature essay takes another course: a waterhole on his property becomes the starting point for reflections on belonging, memory and colonial violence. His Bunyip is bound to the difficulty of feeling at home in a landscape whose history has been suppressed. [1][5]

Evidence & Open Questions

A calf-sized back in a reported glimpse and a calf-and-seal-like cub in a tale share an analogy, not an established identity. Morgan’s witness cannot describe a whole body. The Dunlop/Lyall narrator can follow a whole catastrophe, but the route from an unnamed speaker to the printed English story remains partly hidden. Those are different uncertainties, and neither is answered by fitting both creatures into one zoological outline. [2][7]

Even the cub’s recovery leaves something unresolved. Human voices still seem to come from the swans, but their words cannot be understood. A listener may recognize enough to enter the water, and too little to return safely. [7]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Morgan preserves Buckley’s recollection; Smyth quotes it among other local descriptions. The Dunlop/Lyall journal account and the Lang adaptation can be read side by side to follow specific changes. Fargher identifies the speakers behind the separate Mulyawonk account. Duke’s story and Wright’s essay extend the literary history of the name. [2][3][7][4][8][1][5]

Biami and Bunyip ↗
Emma Duke · Koori Mail, archived by AIATSIS · 2004-11-03 · English
Issue 338, YOUR SAY, “Biami and Bunyip” by Emma Duke, printed p. 21 in the official indexed text; page image not inspected
A student story published through a school project; no particular community’s oral account is claimed for it.
Checked 2026-10-11
The Life and Adventures of William Buckley ↗
John Morgan, from William Buckley’s recollections · Wikisource transcription of Archibald Macdougall edition · 1852 · English
Title and preface; Chapter III, Moodewarri lake passage
Morgan assembled Buckley’s recollections through conversations and notes; the wording is a mediated autobiography.
Checked 2026-10-11
↗

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

Only a dusky feather-covered back emerges among reeds in a moonlit wetland; head and tail remain unseen, within a charcoal woodcut border. — Original interpretive illustration following the partial, dusky feather-covered back in Morgan’s account of William Buckley; the head, tail and whole anatomy remain unseen.

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