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

The bunyip has been a source of inspiration for Australian children’s book illustrators.

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Two of Australia’s renowned children’s book illustrators are Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and May Gibbs. The bunyip makes an appearance in Outhwaite’s Mollie’s Bunyip (1904) as a ghostly spirit of the bush.

Another depiction of the bunyip occurs in May Gibbs’ comic strip Adventures of Bib and Bub. It was inevitable that these two bush babies would meet something large and threatening in the Australian bush. This threat was initially realised in the creation of the big bad Banksia Man. Then, in the 1920s, a bunyip made its first and only appearance in the miniature world of the gumnut babies.

The bunyip has always been something of a shape-changer.

Artists and illustrators over the past century have imagined the bunyip in a variety of ways that range from the frightening to the comic.

In 1907 the popular magazine The Bookfellow held an Australia-wide competition for the best drawing of a bunyip. The results provided an entertaining menagerie of fanciful as well as ferocious creatures. Selected entries were published throughout four issues of the magazine and the winning entry was judged to be this bizarre creature by an anonymous illustrator.

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