BUNYIP

Opening

The bunyip is a dangerous water creature in the traditions of Aboriginal peoples across south-eastern Australia, said to live in rivers, swamps, lagoons and waterholes. Names and descriptions vary by language group. Colonists began writing about it in the 1840s, when sightings were reported from the Murray, the Yarra, the Barwon lakes and dozens of other waters, and settlers tried to fit it into European natural history.

The test case came in 1846, when a squatter found part of a skull by a lake near the Murrumbidgee that local Aboriginal people said came from an animal they had killed. Port Phillip's superintendent, Sydney's naturalists and Richard Owen in London all weighed in. The consensus was a deformed foal. Within a few years "bunyip" was Sydney slang for a humbug, and no specimen of an unknown animal has turned up since.

Timeline

July 1845The Geelong Advertiser reports fossil bones found near Geelong. Aboriginal people shown a knee bone identify it as the bunyip's, and one Wadawurrung man, Mumbowran, shows wounds on his chest he says its claws made.

1846Athol T. Fletcher, a squatter in the Balranald district, is told by Aboriginal people that they have killed a "Katenpai" near a lake by the Murrumbidgee. He finds a large part of a skull at the spot.

30 December 1846Captain Richard Hanmer Bunbury writes to his father that the animal's existence is "at last set at rest".

23 January 1847Charles La Trobe, Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, writes to the Tasmanian naturalist Ronald Gunn that he has long been convinced the beast exists.

9 February 1847The Sydney Morning Herald prints William Hovell's letter on the skull, with four woodcut views.

26 April 1847La Trobe tells Gunn he will hold back an article on the skull: "It would not do to be caught describing & drawing an abortion."

July 1847The skull is shown at the Australian Museum in Sydney. W. S. Macleay writes in the Herald that it is the malformed skull of a foal.

By 1848William Westgarth shows Richard Owen a sketch in London. Owen identifies a hydrocephalic skull of a foal or calf.

End of 1848George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines, concludes the bunyip is the bittern, a booming marsh bird.

1852G. C. Mundy records that bunyip has become a Sydney synonym for "imposter", "pretender" and "humbug".

Key figures

Athol T. Fletcher, who found the Murrumbidgee skull.

Charles Joseph La Trobe, Superintendent of Port Phillip, who corresponded about the bunyip and withdrew his article.

Ronald Campbell Gunn, who borrowed the skull through Edward Curr and published on it in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science.

James Grant, the Van Diemen's Land surgeon who examined it for Gunn.

William Sharp Macleay, the Sydney naturalist who called it a deformed foal.

Richard Owen, the London anatomist who agreed from a drawing.

Richard Hanmer Bunbury, a settler who wanted to hunt one.

Physical and documentary trail

The skull itself is lost. What survives is Hovell's woodcuts, the letters between La Trobe and Gunn (held in the State Library of New South Wales and published by L. J. Blake in 1975), Robinson's journals, Bunbury's letters home and the colonial press. Peter Clark's study "A Fascination with Bunyips" (La Trobeana, March 2018) collects most of them.

the beast exists, but what it is remains to be decided & I would give a year's salary to be able to go and look for one.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The skull was found by Athol Fletcher; no record of a "George Harrison" offering bones could be found. Owen did not examine the skull itself, only a sketch. The "year's salary" line, sometimes attributed to La Trobe, is Bunbury's.

Things you might not know

• One expert suggested a camel. Grant judged the skull to be from a young, possibly foetal, large herbivore, possibly a camel.
• Macleay placed it between a horse and a llama. If it really were a new species, he wrote, that is where it would sit. He thought it far more likely to be a deformed foal.
• The skull still had flesh on it. La Trobe reported in January 1847 that it looked recent, and that Aboriginal people who had seen it said it should have two long downward tusks.
• Gunn left the door open. He ended his paper: "Every effort is now making to obtain an entire or living Bunyip, or ascertain whether it is to be classified amongst fabulous animals."
• There is a bunyip cut into the ground. A figure "11 paces long" beside a waterhole at Challicum station near Ararat, Victoria, was sketched by the station overseer in 1867.

Competing explanations

An unknown animal. Colonists' descriptions, collected by Bunbury and others, describe an amphibious creature six to sixteen feet long with an emu-like or dog-like head. Aboriginal informants across a wide area agreed on its existence and its danger.

Known animals. The bittern's booming call at night, seals straying far up the Murray and Darling (Charles Fenner's explanation in 1933), and bones of extinct megafauna such as Diprotodon (which the naturalist Charles Barrett suggested for the 1845 bones) can each explain part of the record. The Murrumbidgee skull was a malformed foal or calf.

A cultural being, not a zoological one. Bunyip traditions carry meaning about dangerous water, law and place. Reading them as sightings of an animal is a settler framework, and the 1847 skull was a test of that framework, not of the traditions.

Later life of the case

"Bunyip aristocracy" became a jibe in 1853 when Daniel Deniehy mocked a proposal for a colonial hereditary peerage. The creature became a children's book staple and a common place name. Reports of bunyips in Victorian and New South Wales waters continued into the twentieth century, without a specimen.

Finding

The bunyip is a widespread Aboriginal tradition that colonists tried and failed to turn into a new species. The one skull put forward as proof was examined in Hobart and Sydney and from a drawing in London, and identified each time as a deformed young animal, most likely a foal.

What still will not resolve: what the 1840s colonial sightings were. Without the lost skull and with no other specimen, they can only be matched to bitterns, seals and fossils case by case.