Fabulous Creatures Challicum Bunyip First White Sighting Skull of a Bunyip Popular Culture Folklore of Fear Picture the Bunyip

Stories of bunyips stopped colonial children wandering off into the bush.

Click for detail

Nineteenth-century parents in Australia used the story of the bunyip to good effect. Its presence in cautionary tales warned children about an alien environment.

The average bush youngster has a horror of darkness, and talks in awe-struck whispers of hairy men, ghosts, and bunyips. This fear is inculcated from babyhood. The mother can’t always be watching in a

Click for detail

playground that is boundless ... so she tells them there is a bunyip in the lagoon.

Life in the Australian Back-Blocks, 1911

Traditional figures from European folklore did not settle readily into this new land. Goblins, fairies, banshees, brownies, elves and their kin seem not to have survived the long sea voyage. It was Aboriginal folklore which best suited the strange new land.


The bunyip soon became a potent character in the imagination of the white Australian.

Click for detail

Everyone who has lived in Australia has heard of the bunyip. It is the one respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast. The old world has her tales of ghoul and vampire, of Lorelei, spook and pixie, but Australia has ... her Bunyip ... the bushman will warm to his subject as readily as an Irishman to his banshee.

The Bunyip, Mrs Campbell Praed, 1891

Ethel Pedley’s classic children’s book was first published in London in 1899. It introduced an international audience of children to the bunyip.

“Dot,” panted the kangaroo, “make a noise!” Dot screamed … Then what seemed to Dot a very terrifying thing happened … from the gully in darkness below came the sound of a bellowing … The Bunyip! The Bunyip!

Back to Exhibition Entry   Back to Evidence