Bunyip

The name renders a Wemba-Wemba word colonists wrote down in the 1840s, from
people who had used it long before. The water in question is the lower
Murrumbidgee around Balranald in western New South Wales, and later Lake
Alexandrina in South Australia. The descriptions do not converge. Some make it
as big as a bullock, with a head like a dog; some give a long neck and a bill;
a third describe no animal at all, only a low booming from the reeds after
dark that carries over still water.

In 1846 a skull was taken from the bank of the Murrumbidgee near Balranald and
sent to Sydney, where the Australian Museum displayed it the following
January. It drew queues for two days. The naturalists who examined it divided
between a deformed horse and a calf. The skull was withdrawn after a letter from the colonial secretary, and appears in no later inventory
the company has consulted. The museum kept no photograph and no accession
number, only the newspaper columns of people who stood in line to see it.

Filings thin through the 1860s and stop almost entirely after 1890. The
holdings are documentary: newspaper accounts, three settler letters, and a
magistrate’s note. The one physical object ever recovered left the record in
1847 and has not been located since. The file is sealed on that basis — not
because the accounts failed a test, but because the thing that would have
tested them went missing before museums photographed what they held.