Non-Aboriginal Australians have made various attempts to understand and explain the origins of the bunyip as a physical entity over the past 150 years. Antiquarian Reynell Johns claimed that until the mid-1850s, Aboriginal people made a "habit of visiting the place annually and retracing the outlines of the figure which is about 11 paces long and 4 paces in extreme breadth." The outline image no longer exists. According to the report, the bunyip had been speared after killing an Aboriginal man. The Challicum bunyip, an outline image of a bunyip carved by Aborigines into the bank of Fiery Creek, near Ararat, Victoria, was first recorded by The Australasian newspaper in 1851.
is said to be that of an enormous starfish." Robert Brough Smyth's Aborigines of Victoria of 1878 devoted ten pages to the bunyip, but concluded "in truth little is known among the blacks respecting its form, covering or habits they appear to have been in such dread of it as to have been unable to take note of its characteristics." However, common features in many 19th-century newspaper accounts include a dog-like face, a crocodile like head, dark fur, a horse-like tail, flippers, and walrus-like tusks or horns or a duck-like bill.
George French Angus may have collected a description of a bunyip in his account of a "water spirit" from the Moorundi people of the Murray River before 1847, stating it is "much dreaded by them . Characteristicsīunyip (1935), artist unknown, from the National Library of Australia digital collections, demonstrates the variety in descriptions of the legendary creature.ĭescriptions of bunyips vary widely. The word bunyip can still be found in a number of Australian contexts, including place names such as the Bunyip River (which flows into Westernport Bay in southern Victoria) and the town of Bunyip, Victoria. In the early 1990s, it was famously used by Prime Minister Paul Keating to describe members of the conservative Liberal Party of Australia opposition. The term bunyip aristocracy was first coined in 1853 to describe Australians aspiring to be aristocrats. īy the 1850s, bunyip had also become a "synonym for impostor, pretender, humbug and the like" in the broader Australian community. Some modern sources allude to a linguistic connection between the bunyip and Bunjil, "a mythic 'Great Man' who made the mountains and rivers and man and all the animals." The word bunyip may not have appeared in print in English until the mid-1840s. However, this translation may not accurately represent the role of the bunyip in pre-contact Aboriginal mythology or its possible origins before written accounts were made. The word bunyip is usually translated by Aboriginal Australians today as "devil" or "evil spirit".
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