The Bunyip: The Monster of the Australian Waterholes
Australia's inland waters are a country of paradox: rivers that run backwards or not at all, lakes that appear once a decade, and the billabong —the dark, still, tree-hung oxbow pool that keeps its water when the river that made it has shrunk to sand. In those pools, said the peoples who knew the continent for hundreds of generations before the ships came, lives the bunyip . The word entered English from the languages of the Victorian tribes—among whom it carried senses shading from "devil" to "spirit"—and the being it names refuses, magnificently, to hold one shape: witnesses and traditions give it a dog's face, a crocodile's head, dark shaggy fur, flippers, tusks like a walrus, a horse's tail, an emu's neck; the colonial papers of the 1840s ran sober woodcuts of utterly incompatible bunyips within a few years of each other. What never varies is the voice and the address : the bunyip dwells in the deep still waters—billabongs, swamps, the bott...