The Thing in the Reeds

The Recorder
Wyrdlore Society

Fieldnotes — the Riverina, dry season

The first time I heard the word bunyip spoken in earnest, it was not from a book but from a stockman leaning against a fence outside Deniliquin, in the drought light of a late afternoon, warning me off a particular bend of the river where the water ran black even in flood. He offered no description, only a caution, and I have come to think that caution sits closer to the truth of the thing than any of the drawings that followed it into the colonial press.

The bunyip belongs, properly, to the many Aboriginal nations of the Murray-Darling basin and the south-east more broadly. The word itself is usually traced to Wemba-Wemba or a neighbouring Victorian language, though it travelled quickly across group boundaries and changed shape as it went. In some tellings it is a devourer of the unwary, waiting in a billabong or waterhole to pull down anyone foolish enough to swim after dark. In others it is closer to a keeper of a particular pool, less an appetite than a warning made flesh, bound up with law about which waters could be approached, and when, and by whom. The versions disagree with one another, and I no longer think that disagreement is a flaw in the record. It is closer to how a country this old, and this large, would actually keep its water-lore: locally, unevenly, and without any need to agree with the next language group along the river.

What the bunyip looks like changes almost as often as who is telling it. Dog-faced, or bird-faced, or something between a seal and a bullock. Dark and shaggy, tusked, sometimes with a mane, sometimes with flippers where you would expect claws. When colonial settlers began collecting these accounts in the nineteenth century they wanted a single beast pinned to a single hide, and the wanting shows in the record. Bones of extinct megafauna, diprotodon skulls turning up along the riverbanks, were shown around the colonies as bunyip bones, and for a while the creature had a genuine foothold in natural history, discussed in the newspapers with something like the seriousness given to an unclassified species. It never stayed still long enough to be classified.

By the middle of the century the word had slipped its water altogether and gone to work in ordinary speech. To call an institution a piece of bunyip aristocracy was to call it a fraud dressed up as a marvel, grand on the outside and hollow within. That the word could do both jobs at once, name a genuine danger in the reeds and mock a pompous man in a drawing room, tells you how thoroughly it had settled into the colonial imagination, even as its origins remained, and remain, Aboriginal knowledge that colonial collectors only partly understood and never owned.

I went looking for the billabong the stockman meant and did not find anything fit for a specimen jar. What I found was the kind of water this lore is always found near: still, dark, fringed with reed and red gum, giving back no bottom to the eye. Whether anything waits under it is not a question I can settle, and I have come to suspect it is not the right question to be asking. In every account I trust, the bunyip is less a creature to be caught than a reason to keep your children, and yourself, back from the edge.

The Recorder keeps the Society's archive, writes the framing pieces and the seasonal notes, and signs nothing personally. Whether the role has been held by one person or several is not recorded, which the Society considers appropriate.