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THE BUNYIP MYSTERY THE BUNYIP MYSTERY The large aquatic animals seen in Australia's inland water systems by Aborigines and European pioneers may have been remnant megafauna from Pleistocene times. uring a very hot January in 1982 I was staying with a friend, Lee Kelly, his mother, Heather, and his grandmother at their farm at Macarthur near the Eumeralla River in western Victoria. Lee's grandmother had spent much of her life on the farm and while reminiscing about life on the land mentioned the bunyip that once lived on the property. It inhabited a large swamp that was connected to the Eumeralla River during times of flood. She had never actually observed the animal itself and did not even regard it as anything particularly unusual, for she had long grown accustomed to its strange roaring call at night—until the swamp was eventually drained and turned into pasture. I asked her if she had ever seen a brown bittern (Botaurus poiciloptilus), a secretive, solitary bird with streaky variegated brown and buff plumage that enables it to hide and nest in the dense cumbungi reed beds. I told her that it has a voice like a deep, distant foghorn and has a double "woomph-woomph" call. She replied that she had not observed or even heard of such a bird and did not believe that it was the call that she was once familiar with. She knew only of the creature's haunting roaring call and that it was known as a "bunyip". Sixty-three kilometres north of Macarthur I stayed overnight at the historic Bunyip Hotel in the town of Cavendish. I asked the publican how the hotel had received its name and he replied that it had been named after an animal that once lived in the nearby Dundas River, though he had no idea what the animal looked like. Some time afterwards I discovered that the respected Australian Museum scientist Gilbert Whitley had written an article, published in the Australian Museum Magazine in March 1940, entitled "Mystery Animals of Australia",' in which he noted that a large brown animal with a kangaroo-like head, a large mouth and an elongated neck with a long shaggy mane had been reported in 1848 to live in the Eumeralla River near Port Fairy. An early settler, Mr I. Best, and his son were recorded as having observed in the Merri River near Warrnambool in either 1844 or 1845 a large black hairy animal 10 feet (3 metres) long, which Best believed to feed on the "rank herbage" by the river and which made a terrible noise at night in the swamps, "enough to frighten the strongest nerves, similar to a bullock having a dreadful cough". Whitley further recorded similar descriptions by the Aboriginal people of the Port Phillip district of an aquatic animal with a body that varied from the size of a calf up to a bullock. It had an elongated neck and head, resembling an emu, with a mane like a horse, flippers like a seal and a horse-like tail, and they knew it as the tunatpan. The first European known to have lived in Victoria was the convict William Buckley, who escaped from the earliest settlement under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Collins in 1803. Buckley was a stonemason turned soldier who was apparently falsely arrested during an army uprising. After his escape, the settlement was abandoned and he lived for 32 years with the Wothowurong Aboriginal people in the Geelong area until the next attempt by Europeans to settle Victoria in 1835. He guided the first settlers around the district, described the cultural life of the tribal peoples that inhabited the land and gave information on the plants and animals. He also described his attempts to identify the large unknown aquatic animals that he often observed:? "...in this lake [Modewarre] as well as in most of the others inland, and in the deep-water rivers [including the Barwon], is a very extraordinary amphibious by Gary Opit © 2001 PO Box 380 Mullumbimby NSW 2482 Australia Telephone/fax: +61 (0)2 6680 5466 Email: garyopit@mullum.com.au NEXUS +59 EARLY SIGHTINGS IN VICTORIA by Gary Opit © 2001 DECEMBER 2001 — JANUARY 2002 www.nexusmagazine.com