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

The bunyip crosses over into white folklore

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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 bulldog’s 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 man’s thigh …

Sydney Gazette, 1821

These reports contain the first suggestion (which later gained popularity) that there were two distinct types of bunyips—those 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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