Morning Myth - Bunyip

Yes, there is a creature named the bunyip. This comes from downunder, in Australia. It is a legendary beast from an aborigine group, the Wemba Wemba, of northwest Australia. There were no 'written' records amongst the aborigines of Australia prior to contact with Europeans. Information regarding bunyip prior to that time is subject to interpretative data, accounts, and oral traditions accumulated since then. 

The bunyip is a monster that lives in lakes, rivers, swamps, and any similar bodies of water. The depictions that I could find are quite varied. They range from seal like creatures covered in fur to dog like creatures with fins and owl faces. All of the descriptions are of something very large, perhaps five to ten feet in length. All descriptions depict is as dangerous and malevolent that makes a keening or bellowing noise at night that is quite frightful.

Interpretations of the creature's origin suggest that it is an ancestral recalling of some extinct animal like the diprotodon or even a seal that managed to travel upriver. Whatever the case, that is modern scientific/cladistic/taxonomic manner of understanding the bunyip. I find these to be missing the point of legends or myths or tales of this nature.

Sure, the creature may have its origins in a sighting of some animal (almost every legend is built off of something known) but its resonance through time morphs any sighting and its rendering into something far more important. The bunyip becomes real with time. It exists and lives and breathes as surely as anything else and, like any endeavor to understand how the world works, this legend acts as a sign post and, in this case a warning, about the world at large.