Returning to the mythical Bunyip
Yes, we’ve been here before, but I’ve come back to the tales of the mythic al Bunyip for two simple reasons.
One is that Wikipedia lists a nonsensical use of the name, and two is that the Bunyip nearly stopped my wife entering Germany a few years ago.
Tricky little blokes, these Bunyips.
We have two places in West Gippsland named for them. Bunyip is the obvious one, though it was originally spelt, at least usually, as Buneep, or Buneep Buneep. The other is Tooradin, believed to have come from Too Roo Dun, “the monster of the (Great) swamp”.
Wikipedia tells us that “In the Australian Aboriginal Boonwurrung language the name for the river monster is Banib, meaning “a fabulous, large, black, amphibious monster”. If that was exactly true, which it is not, that would be a great deal of information to communicate with only two syllables.
It does recognise the Buneep and Bunyip spellings, and it introduces the new-to-me Bunnip and Banib, so perhaps I should not be too critical.
Round the Hunter River (Newcastle) area the Bunyip was called the Yaa-hoo and was pretty much human in form except that the feet were on backwards, unless we are talking of the Wowee Wowee, which lived in the deeper waterholes. I could not find any connection between that name and the word we sometimes use in English.
Where the Lachlan meets the Murrumbidgee is the home of the Kine Pratie which looked more or less like an emu (but a very wet one because it, too, lived in the deeper waterholes) and which lived on freshwater crayfish and the occasional Aborigine.
The article listed other names, like the Katenaipai (also on the Murrumbidgee), the Tunatbah (Edwards River) and the Dongus.
The document quotes an 1847 issue of the Port Phillip Patriot “At Port Phillip the existence of large amphibious animal inhabiting rivers of the colony called by different tribes as Bunyip or Bunyup, Katenpi, Kayen-prati, Tumulba, Tuna pan…” No mention of the TooRoo-Dun, but there should have been.
Katenpi as against Katenaipai? Tunatbah as against Tumulba? Bunyip as against Bunyup, Bannib or Bunnip?
These names were first written down by white men, and they did not all hear things the same way.
They did not know the languages nor understand the subtleties of intonation and emphasis but it is clear that the legends of the monsters in the waterholes were widespread and that the same names were sometimes used over a wide area.
To some of our bushmen the large lumps that grow on River Red Gums were called bunyips, and the rubbing of two branches together in a night breeze is another possible cause for people hearing the Bunyip’s cry.
I’m not sure that we’ll ever know just what the Bunyip was, or why it was. I found a reference to the Hexham Bunyip while doing some other research and I was taken in.
It happens a lot. The Hexham Bunyip was pretty much proven to have been a Bittern, a swamp bird which does have a rather unpleasant call.
There have been at least two “Bunyip skulls” in reputable museums, but one was found to the deformed skull of a young camel and the others was found to that of a deformed foal.
The descriptions vary widely, and I don’t know of any recorded actual sighting – unlike the Loch Ness Monster – but the descriptions fall into three broad groups. I’m not sure something no-one has ever seen can have a description but so be it.
One group of Bunyip descriptions has them looking like extremely ugly humans, one makes them out to be something like large emus and the third group makes them look like large, sleek, furred creatures something like a very large aquatic wombat, and there are other descriptions that are very much individualised.
Perhaps there was just a need to invent a bogeyman to keep the children away from the deep water. Every culture has a monster to terrify errant children.
In British Columbia, near Squamish, there is a bare area on the huge mountain known as The Stawamus Chief and that bare patch is
exactly the shape of a witch on a broom stick, even to the hat, and is known as the Squamish Witch. I’ve seen it and the likeness is other-worldly.
The Sasquach Indians created a legend for the witch and after that time none of the children would go outside after nightfall.
But to get back to Australia and our own monsters, the most recent Bunyip tale I found was that of the Burrawang Bunyip, southwest of Sydney.
This one did not appear in local Aboriginal myths but in the 1930s when a group of railway workers were terrified by the roars that came from the Burrawang Swamp at night, roars that were loud enough to shake the bottles in the Burrawang pub. It was heard right through into the 1960s and 70s.
As with most Bunyip reports no really satisfactory explanation has yet been found, but it is suggested that the Burrawang roars were those of gas escaping from the peat beds under the swamp.
There might be some sensible explanations for the stories – in some cases people might have seen a seal caught a long way upstream in a coastal river, for instance.
The terrible sounds could be a matter of imagination in dealing with the cry of the bittern or some other night bird, or those rubbing tree branches. I have one such source at my place and it has made me turn around quickly a time or to.
As with flying saucers or the Emerald Panther, on a sunny day, in my home, I can
call the stories nonsense. If I am alone in the bush at night, well, I’m not always quite so sure. There are still many things we can’t explain.
And to close, the entry to Germany and the EU saga mentioned at the start occurred when a pretty serious passport official looked at my wife’s passport and noticed that her place of birth was “Bunyip”. “Ah”, he said, “that is not a place.
It is an animal.” It took us quite a time to explain it all and I’m not sure that he realised that there is actually no such thing as a Bunyip (except for the lumps on trees).