BUNYIPS
Australia's Folklore of Fear
By Robert Holden and Nicholas Holden
National Library of Australia Press, 226pp, $29.95

Reviewed by Ken Gelder

This fascinating book is all about a monster that Australia can call truly its own: the bunyip. These days, living in a country that seems to locate most of its horrors elsewhere, we may barely begin to appreciate just how haunted Australia itself has been by this strange, shape-changing creature. This book is a fine reminder of this potent heritage.

The bunyip was never just a creature of folklore. In fact, it attracted commentary and interest from all sorts of people, some respectable and some not, to produce a many-faceted local monster that could speak to a wide range of cultural anxieties.

The word "bunyip" has Aboriginal origins, but its modern capacity lies in its ability to move across cultures, time and place. For the authors of this book, in fact, the bunyip served as a point of cultural transmission between Aborigines and white settlers: they reproduce a touching 1882 sketch showing two white children listening to an Aboriginal elder telling them about bunyip lore.

The book is full of sketches, as well as stories, of bunyips and related Australian monstrosities. Many of these developed out of real predicaments: the scientific interest in the "preposterous" platypus during the 1790s, for instance. Australian palaeontologists charted links between early, unexplained dinosaur fossils and bunyip fantasies. The subsequent disentangling of the two marked (for the authors) the "coming of age" of Australian natural history.

Links between other extinct animals and bunyips were also forged; in the meantime, other, related monsters were imagined, like the yahoo or the banksia man, a frightening character made famous in Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918). The Holdens have an excellent chapter on the role of the bunyip in the nursery, moving from colonial children's tales to Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), through to the stories of Patricia Wrightson and others. In many cases, the bunyip worked both as a frightening creature and a regulator of children's behaviour - sometimes even cast against type as gentle and nurturing. But the Holdens mostly talk up the creature's potential for inciting fear, and so run the risk of sounding a little cliched ("man's basic fear of the unknown"). Nor are some links fully pursued: for example, the connection between bunyips in watering holes and the persecution of Aborigines who took cattle from settlers (explaining the cow-like characteristics of a number of bunyip descriptions).

The book works well in giving a sense of the range of the bunyip in the Australian imagination. It examines anthropological interest and the rise (but not the fall) of the discipline of Australian folklore studies, partly the result of a need to make a "new world" country appear antiquarian.

There is also a good discussion of the bunyip in Australian literature, reminding us of just how productive and wild the 1890s were - with more fantasy and bizarre literary speculation than we've seen since. The Holdens quote A.D. Hope's sceptical review of Patrick White's The Tree of Man: "The word has got around that Mr White's book is, in fact, the genuine Bunyip." The word, by this time, was well and truly linked to hoaxes and fakery - a number of which are charted in this book.

A chapter on bunyip pictures returns to the nursery with Michael Salmon's Alexander Bunyip, a popular figure who first appeared in 1972 in the book The Monster that Ate Canberra.

Fear and kitsch come together nicely here: this might, indeed, be an Australian monster worth investing in.

Ken Gelder is the co-author of Uncanny Australia (MUP,1998).

• Story originally published by:
Sydney Morning Herald / Australia - Oct 27.01

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