Regular Episode
#178 – THE BUNYIP SEAL OF APPROVAL
This is the second episode in what Blake cheerfully admits has been a slow-moving Australian cryptid trilogy — drop bears got there first, somehow — and the Bunyip turns out to be far richer, and far more historically layered, than its reputation as a children’s-book boogeyman suggests.
🗺️ What Even Is a Bunyip?
Ask an Australian, Paul-Michael suggests, and you’ll get a shrug followed by a vague sense of dread. Ask a classroom of primary-school children and you’ll get wildly different drawings — crocodiles, ghosts, bears, aliens. That’s not a failure of imagination; it’s a symptom of how thoroughly the original myth has been diluted and remixed.
The Bunyip, Paul-Michael argues, was not a pan-Australian Aboriginal concept. It originated as a specific, quite literal creature known to the Wadawurrung (Wathaurong) people of the Geelong and Ballarat region of Victoria. Once colonial newspapers spread the word, other settler communities grafted the name onto whatever strange local things they encountered — crocodiles in Queensland, ghost-like figures borrowed from Wandjina imagery from Broome in Western Australia — and the myth metastasized into a shapeshifting catch-all. Paul-Michael draws an explicit parallel with the word kangaroo: a Sydney-region Aboriginal word that colonists carried to Victoria, where local people had never heard it and assumed it must be the “white person” name for the animal.
📜 William Buckley and the Word Itself
Most scholars have traced the word bunyip to Wemba Wemba country on the Murray River — because that’s where a sensational “Bunyip skull” surfaced in the 1840s, the first time the word appeared in a colonial newspaper. Paul-Michael disagrees. He thinks the word’s true home is Wadawurrung country, and his key witness is William Buckley.
Buckley was a convict who escaped a penal camp on the Victorian coast in 1803, hoping to walk to Sydney (roughly 1,000 kilometers of desert away). Instead he spent 32 years living among the Wadawurrung people, learning their language and culture — including accounts of the Bunyip. Crucially, Buckley once attempted to hunt the creature at Lake Modewarre (Lake Motowari), a vast volcanic swamp on Wadawurrung country. His people forbade him: in their belief system, encountering a Bunyip brought sickness and death to the tribe. Buckley managed only a fleeting glimpse of the creature’s back — dark brown or dark grey, possibly fur, possibly feathers — before it disappeared.
The Wadawurrung, Paul-Michael notes, spoke of the Bunyip not as urban legend but as a real and present danger in their specific landscape. That’s a meaningful distinction from neighboring groups for whom it was more of a cautionary abstraction.
🦭 The Seal Hypothesis
Here is where Paul-Michael’s original research comes in, published in the Journal of Cryptozoology. Anthropologist Eldo Masola visiting the Chalicum geoglyph in the 1950s was the first to suggest it: what if the original Bunyip was a leopard seal?
The geoglyph — a 12-to-15-foot earthwork in Djabwurrung (Jaburung) country near the Grampians, traced by generations of mourners around the body of a Bunyip killed after it dragged a boy from a waterhole — points at both ends and widens in the middle, with small flipper-like appendages. Read one way it resembles a plesiosaur (a 19th-century colonial interpretation). Flip the orientation and it looks remarkably like a seal.
The clinching detail comes from an unpublished 1975 dictionary of the Wadawurrung language compiled by amateur anthropologist Lois Lane, now held at Deakin University. In that dictionary, two separate words appear: kortoman for seal (fur seals and the like), and barnip for leopard seal. Leopard seals are genuinely dangerous — they kill penguins and, on occasion, people. And Geelong is a coastal city connected inland by a chain of swamps and billabongs stretching hundreds of kilometers. Seals do occasionally — and sometimes in large numbers — swim up Australian estuaries and get lost far inland. During Paul-Michael’s own research period, a seal turned up on a farm near Bega in New South Wales, and around 100 seals traveled hundreds of kilometers up the Murray River from South Australia.
An inland community with no prior concept of a seal, encountering one — especially after it killed someone — would have every reason to build a powerful oral tradition around the event and warn others away from that waterhole.
🌀 Geoglyphs, Oral Tradition, and Deep Memory
The Chalicum geoglyph is also a window into how Indigenous oral traditions actually work — and why they’re more durable than outsiders assume. Paul-Michael describes a system in which stories are tied to physical landmarks, dance sequences, and star positions, creating layered mnemonic structures that allow complex data to be transmitted with high fidelity across generations. (MonsterTalk listeners may recall a similar argument from guest Lynne Kelly, who has written about Stonehenge and other monuments as memory-palace devices.)
The geoglyph survived into living memory: anthropologist Masola documented it in the 1950s. It was destroyed in the 1960s when local farmers removed the protective fencing and let cattle graze over it. Paul-Michael’s supervisor, Professor Ian Clark, published a 2018 paper — “Bunbury, Latrobe, Wathen, and the Jaburung People” — examining colonial visitors to the site and their records of the tradition.
📰 The 1845 Skull, Colonial Science, and the Spreading Flap
The famous “Bunyip skull” first appeared in colonial newspapers on 2 July 1845, in the Geelong Advertiser, under the headline “Wonderful Discovery of a New Animal.” Found on a farm on the Murray River, it was passed around scientists and exhibited in museum windows and curiosity shops before eventually being identified as the skull of a malformed, miscarried foal. Paul-Michael notes that photographs of it still circulate online — and it is genuinely strange-looking, with misaligned teeth and a fused eye socket.
The broader lesson is that 1840s science had good reasons to take the possibility seriously: Australia was producing animals (platypus, kangaroo) that defied European categories, and a large unknown semi-aquatic creature seemed no more absurd than a beaver with a duck’s bill. Once the newspaper article circulated verbatim across every Australian colony, a classic monster flap followed: settlers primed to look for a Bunyip began seeing one everywhere, producing sightings in Tasmania, New South Wales, Queensland, and beyond — a gestalt that Paul-Michael likens to the geographic spread and semantic dilution of the chupacabra story.
🎭 Taking the Piss: Aboriginal Responses to Colonial Credulity
One of the episode’s most entertaining passages concerns how Aboriginal people responded to settlers’ obsessive questions about the Bunyip. The creature was culturally taboo — not just dangerous to approach physically, but dangerous to discuss, part of a layered initiation system in which knowledge was strictly rationed by ritual status. Colonial observers couldn’t comprehend why people wouldn’t just answer the question.
Some Indigenous people, Paul-Michael recounts, simply took the opportunity to have fun at the settlers’ expense. One account describes an Aboriginal man with traditional initiation scarification across his chest — horizontal keloid lines earned through ritual — who solemnly informed colonial interviewers that yes, he had encountered a Bunyip, had been attacked by it, and that the scars were proof of its claws. He was, as Paul-Michael puts it, clearly taking the piss. The newspaper reported it with complete credulity, calling him “an intelligent black” — a phrase that both granted him anomalous authority and implicitly denied it to everyone else. Aboriginal testimony was at the time inadmissible in Australian courts on the grounds that Indigenous people were deemed, under a pseudo-scientific racist framework, constitutionally incapable of learning. The irony was not lost on the people being interviewed.
📚 Further Reading
– Tales from Rat City podcast with David Waldron, Tom Hodgson, and Katrina Hill (includes photographs of the “Bunyip skull”)
– Ian Clark, “Bunbury, Latrobe, Wathen, and the Jaburung People” (2018) — on colonial encounters with the Chalicum Bunyip tradition
– 📚 Snails from the Tea Tree 💵 by David Waldron — includes the Tantanoola Tiger case study
– 📚 The Memory Code 💵 by Lynne Kelly — on mnemonic functions of geoglyphs and ancient monuments
🔗 Related Links
– Bunyip (Wikipedia)
– William Buckley, escaped convict and Wadawurrung adoptee
– Wadawurrung (Wathaurong) people
– Leopard seal
– Kelpie (Scottish water cryptid/myth) — the cultural parallel Blake mentions in the introduction
– Grampians National Park (Gariwerd), Victoria — location of the Chalicum geoglyph
– Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) — mentioned as a parallel case of cryptozoological optimism
– Euhemerism — the idea that myths preserve memories of real events or creatures
– Cane toad invasion of Australia — the episode’s affectionate coda on real ecological monsters
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode, we go down to the billabong to look for a monster indigenous to Australian folklore and myth — but perhaps with a foot (-er flipper?) in the real world: The Bunyip. We are joined by cultural history professional Paul-Michael Donovan for a fascinating look at the legend (and a possible non-monstrous explanation) for this famous chimeric creek critter.
Related links
- Tales from Rat City podcast
- The “Bunyip Skull” photo discussed in the episode.
- Kelpies (Scottish water cryptids/myths) — not the Australian dog
Previously Down Under on MonsterTalk
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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