Bunyip

An Aboriginal word

"Bunyip" is usually traced to the Wergaia or Wemba Wemba languages of western Victoria; other peoples of south-eastern Australia had their own names for dangerous beings of the water. In Aboriginal tellings recorded in the nineteenth century, such beings lived in deep waterholes, swamps, and billabongs and could seize people who came too close, especially at night. Many of these stories served to keep children away from dangerous water.

A colonial sensation

From the 1840s, settlers took up the word. Newspapers reported bunyip sightings and bellowing in the swamps, and in 1846 a skull found on the Murrumbidgee River was exhibited in Sydney as a bunyip's (it was later identified as a deformed animal skull). The bunyip became a figure of colonial folklore, and later of children's books, often with little connection to the Aboriginal beings behind the word. "Bunyip aristocracy" became an insult in colonial politics.

Distinguishing the two

This site distinguishes the Aboriginal water beings, which belong to particular peoples and places and are told about in their own languages, from the colonial "bunyip" of newspapers and fiction. Some scholars have suggested that stories of water beings preserve memories of extinct megafauna or reflect seals travelling up rivers; these are interpretations, not the peoples' own accounts.