ABSTRACT

The popularization of authentic indigenous narratives and dreaming stories about the bunyip from the mid-twentieth century contrast with the appropriation of Aboriginal mythology into white literary production, children’s literature, and folklore. Anthropologists investigating and preserving the culture of indigenous Australians had been recording myths about bunyips and similar creatures from as early as 1824, and authors such as Catherine Langloh-Parker (1856-1940) and W. Ramsay Smith (1859-1937) had published popular collections. Publications by indigenous Australians about Aboriginal myths, such as Kath Walker’s “The Bunyip” in My People (1970) and her Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972), as well as Kevin Gilbert’s “Nooni’s Bunyip Story” in his 1978 book People Are Legends: Aboriginal Poems, increased starting in the 1970s. Jean A. Ellis’s From the Dreamtime: Australian Aboriginal Legends (1991) includes the short story “Beware of the Bunyip!” and Gadi Mirrabooka: Australian Aboriginal Tales from the Dreaming, by Pauline E. Macleod, June E. Barker, Francis Firebrace, and Helen F. McKay, includes “The Little

Koala and the Bunyip” and “The Bunyip in the Forest.” Overall, bunyips in Australian literature and film have evolved from indigenous oral legends, to frightening folktales, into a children’s fairytale.