Bunyips Are Purely Mythical

Aboriginal traditions across an extraordinary geographic range, the Murray-Darling, the Tasmanian highlands, parts of WA, southwest Victoria, all describe a large water-dwelling creature with similar features: bellowing voice, thick fur or scales, lives in deep waterholes, dangerous, often associated with specific named lakes and rivers. Colonial naturalists in the 1800s assumed it was nonsense. Then in the 1830s, large bones started turning up at Lake Bathurst and other sites, identified by Richard Owen and others as Diprotodon, the largest marsupial that ever lived, around three tonnes, last alive perhaps 40,000 years ago, contemporaneous with the earliest waves of human arrival in Australia. The current scientific consensus is that bunyip stories are unlikely to describe a still-living animal but may carry oral memory of Diprotodon and other extinct megafauna across an extraordinary span of time, possibly longer than any other documented case of cultural memory anywhere on Earth. The actual bunyip is mythical. The reason every region has one might not be.