Folklore is full of stories of fierce mythical creatures. North America has Bigfoot or the Sasquatch, Nepal and Tibet have the Yeti, and Australia has the Yowie/Yahoo and water-dwelling Bunyip. Bunyip sightings have been reported since the early days of settlement, and today’s story is one of the first literary accounts of the creature. A foolish aboriginal hunter tries to kidnap a Bunyip cub, secure in the knowledge that he can out-run its clumsy mother on land. He learns too late that the mother has magic powers that will change his people forever.
Our source for the story was The Brown Fairy Book, one of a series of twelve collections of folk and fairy tales for children edited by Andrew Lang. This is the ninth book in the series, and was first published in 1904. Lang’s wife Leonora modified many of the non-European stories in the Fairy Book collection to make them more suitable for children. The patronizing approach of British readers to stories from less advanced cultures is reflected in her introduction to the story: ‘The Bunyip’ is known to even more uneducated [than “Red Indian”] little ones, running about with no clothes at all in the bush, in Australia… They have no lessons except in tracking and catching birds, beasts, fishes, lizards, and snakes, all of which they eat. But when they grow up to be big boys and girls, they are cruelly cut about with stone knives and frightened with sham bogies—‘all for their good’ their parents say—and I think they would rather go to school, if they had their choice, and take their chance of being birched and bullied.
Lang’s source for The Bunyip was a story of the same name collected from local natives fifty years earlier and published under the name W. Dunlop in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1899.
The Bunyip – Andrew Lang Original Text / PDF (1,300 words)
The Bunyip – W. Dunlop Original Text / PDF (1,650 words)
General Comments
There are two points of significance in the original (Dunlop) version of the story. First, it gives a location (Mustons Creek in Victoria), which indicates the aboriginal peoples (the Eastern Marr) from which the story may have been derived. Additionally, the added emphasis on the magical transformation of the tribespeople into birds suggests that rather being a ‘bogeyman’ story to scare children, as suggested by Lang, the main purpose of the story may have been to explain the existence and behavior of black swans.