Long before the first European set boot in the Australian interior, the peoples of the Murray, the Darling and the great river systems of the south-east told of a creature that lived in the still, dark waterholes — the billabongs — and ate anything that came too close to the edge. They called it, in various languages, the Bunyip.
Descriptions vary wildly, which is part of what makes the Bunyip so unsettling. Some accounts give it the head of an emu and the body of a seal. Others describe a creature like a giant amphibian with tusks, glowing eyes, webbed feet and matted dark fur. Almost every version agrees on two things: it lives in the water, and it bellows. The Bunyip's roar — a deep, resonating boom heard across the floodplain at night — was used by Aboriginal storytellers to keep children away from dangerous waterholes long before any settler decided to give the legend a name in English.
In the 19th century the Bunyip became one of the first 'cryptids' of the colonial press. Bones were dug up, declared to be Bunyip skulls, and put on display in the Australian Museum in 1847 — only later identified as deformed cattle skulls or the remains of extinct Pleistocene marsupials like Diprotodon. That last explanation is the one folklorists like best: a folk-memory, passed down through tens of thousands of years, of a real giant marsupial that once lumbered between the waterholes when the continent was wetter.
Whether ancestral memory, ecological warning, or genuine outback monster, the Bunyip is the one creature whose voice is supposed to carry across the dry country at dusk. Wear the Bunyip and you wear the oldest warning in Australia — never drink alone at the edge of a still, dark water at night.