Does the Bunyip Really Roam Austraila's Wetlands?

A cryptid with a fearsome bellow, the bunyip is said to stalk the unwary who swim or walk alone at night in parts of Austraila and New Zealand. Learn about the potential real-life inspirations for the bunyip in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/strange-creatures/australian-bunyip.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here. When you enter the right wetlands in
New Caledonia, New Zealand, Tasmania or mainland Australia, you might
just come across a tan and speckled heron that's got
the voice of an electric bass. You're more likely to

(00:23):
hear it before you see it in the flesh or
in the feathers, as it were. The booming cry, deep
and resonant of male Australian bittern birds when they're ready
to breed sounds like it could have been ripped straight
out of an eighties horror movie. That unsettling sound is
why the Australian bittern is also called the bunyip bird,

(00:44):
after a legendary cryptid with a similarly frightening bellow that's
said to prey on humans and live in the remote
billabongs and wetlands of Australia. Legends about the bunyip began
in Aboriginal communities as cautionary stories to warn people against
things like going in the water alone, taking more fish
than they needed, or wandering alone at night. Don't do it.

(01:07):
The bunyip will get you. Lots of people's had similar
stories about local water spirits, like the Mulawonk of the
Narringerry people love southeastern Australia. The word bunyip is thought
to derive from the Wergaya language word anib, the name
of a fearsome emu like river spirit from neighboring people.

(01:28):
The legends morphed as they moved amongst different peoples, and
again as European colonists picked them up. In the eighteen nineties,
a novelist by the name of Rosa Campbell Prade, who
had grown up in Queensland, wrote a short story called
The Bunyip, now considered a classic work of Gothic horror.
In it, she wrote, the bunyip is said to be

(01:50):
an amphibious animal, and is variously described, sometimes as a
giant snake, sometimes as a species of rhinoceros with a smooth,
pulpy sk and a head like that of a calf,
sometimes as a huge pig, its body yellow crossed with
black stripes. But it is also said to be something
more than an animal, and among its supernatural attributes is

(02:12):
the cold, awesome, uncanny feeling which creeps over a company
at night. When the bunyip becomes the subject of conversation.
Over time, the bunyip further evolved. In the nineteen seventies,
the city of murray Bridge received a somewhat fearsome, mechanical
bunyip named Bert that, for a charge of twenty cents,

(02:33):
could be observed emerging from the water and bellowing. It's
since been rebuilt to look more friendly and renamed Bertha.
You can now visit her free of charge, and today
there's a whole subgenre of children's books about the bunyip,
ranging from classic cautionary myths to tales of friendly, if
misunderstood monsters. Whatever the difference is in the details, the

(02:57):
beast is usually said to have a mighty roar, hence
the Australian bitterns awesome nickname. In nineteen forty six, Australian
geographer Charles Fenner wrote, the mysterious booming sound made by
the bittern a very shy bird, has become associated with
the bunyip, but actual observers have usually described the sound

(03:18):
of the latter as a roar or bellow. The tales
of the bunyip flourished during Fenner's lifetime, as Europeans further
settled Australia, unfamiliar with the sounds of the bush, many
colonists were convinced of the bunyip's existence as an undiscovered animal.
To this day, there are those who believe the legendary

(03:38):
bunyip could be a one hundred percent real, undiscovered species
lurking in the wetlands of the vast Australian continent. Wildlife
experts aren't sold, though, especially because no verified corpses or
other remains have ever come to light. A skull that
supposedly belonged to a bunyip went on display in eighteen

(03:59):
forty seven at the Colonial Museum of Sydney. However, a
naturalist examined it and revealed it was actually the head
of a deformed horse. Another famous bunyip head, this one
complete with fur, found its way to Sydney's Macclay Museum,
alas it turned out the specimen came from yet another horse.

(04:20):
Australia has no shortage of genuine animals that seem too
weird to exist, like the duck billed platypus. Equally amazing,
if a bit less strange, are the multitudes of seals
and sea lions that can be encountered on the nation's beaches.
We should also acknowledge the saltwater crocodile, a semi aquatic
predator that stocks Australian waterways and coastlines. Capable of weighing

(04:42):
two thousand, six hundred pounds that's one two hundred kilos
and reaching lengths of over twenty feet or six meters,
it's the biggest reptile alive today. Could any of these
beasts have contributed to bunyip lore? Perhaps also a chance
that the storytellers of ancient Australia were inspired by the

(05:04):
now extinct rhino sized herbivore Diprotodon, a marsupial that roamed
the continent during the last Ice Age. However, paleontologists have
questioned this idea too, on the grounds that Diprotodon doesn't
neatly align with most descriptions of the bunyip. Whatever its origins,
the bunyip, like other cryptids, holds a very real place

(05:27):
in our collective imagination, especially should you find yourself alone
by the water on a dark night. Today's episode is
based on the article does the bunyip really haunt the
Australian Wetlands on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Mark Mancini.
Brain Stuff was production of by Heart Radio in partnership
with how Stuffworks dot Com and as produced by Tyler Klang.

(05:49):
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