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The
bunyip crosses over into white folklore
During the nineteenth
century, hardly a year went by without someone in Australia writing
to the papers with a tale about some bizarre encounter. Consider
the following two reports:
My attention was
attracted by a creature casting up water and making a noise, in
sound resembling a porpoise ... it had the appearance of a bulldogs
head, but perfectly black
Sydney
Gazette, 1821
The next month a
different creature appeared:
Its neck was long,
apparently about three feet [one metre] out of the water, and about
the thickness of a mans thigh
Sydney
Gazette, 1821
These reports contain
the first suggestion (which later gained popularity) that there
were two distinct types of bunyipsthose resembling large dogs,
and those with very long necks.
By 1866 the idea
of the bunyip was sufficiently familiar to the colonial mind for
it to be depicted on the front cover of a local version of Punch
magazine. The image featured the familiar comic figure of Punch
sailing into Sydney Harbour on board Ye Bunyipe.
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