Through much of the chapter on Cryptids, I’ve been viewing them through the lens of modern Western science. Do these creatures exist? Is there empirical evidence for them? Is that evidence credible? Does it point to an actual, verifiable animal, or can it be explained as a misidentification of another, known animal?
New animals are discovered all the time, either new to science or new variations on known animals. Occasionally a species thought to be extinct is found to still exist. This is especially exciting when it’s a species known only through fossils, though there’s something both heartwarming and hopeful about the discovery of hitherto unknown populations of animals thought to have been rendered extinct within human memory.
These “Lazarus species” are a hope and dream of cryptozoologists. So are species hitherto unknown to science, but known through legend and folklore and eyewitness accounts. To find just one of these, to produce physical evidence, will make a career, and prove that all the hunting and hoping and searching was worth it.
But there are other ways to look at the concept. I touched on it in an article on the monster of Lake Okanagan in Canada. Eli Watson and Jason Hewlett’s recent documentary devotes fair amount of air time to interviews with Coralee Miller. Miller is First Nations, and she has a quite different take on the monster than we see in more Western-focused analyses.
It’s not about proving the existence of an animal, she says. The creature that’s been turned into a tourist attraction and given a name from a silly song, Ogopogo, has a much older and deeper history. The original inhabitants of the area call it N-ha’a-itk, which translates to “Sacred Spirit of the Lake.”
She goes on to explain what this means both culturally and spiritually. In her culture, it’s not about proving the animal’s existence. It’s about understanding its place in that part of the world and its significance to the people who have been living in it for hundreds and thousands of years.
Western culture is very, very young in the grand scheme of human existence. It goes back reliably about five thousand years, and the dominant culture is only a handful of centuries old. Contrast this with indigenous traditions that go back ten thousand years or more—sometimes very much more.
That brings us (finally!) to Australia. Australian Aboriginal culture is, to the Western mind, unimaginably ancient. Estimates of its age vary widely, from 30,000 years all the way back to 100,000. Humans have lived on the Austrialian continent literally for time out of mind.
And they remember. The stories go back and back, but they’re not static. They’re alive. They’re being told now, by living people, passing on from generation to generation.
One of these stories has been appropriated by modern Australian colonist culture. The Bunyip is everything from a cryptid, complete with cryptozoologists and monster hunters, to a children’s story and—of course—a tourist attraction. But the story is very old and not at all simple or silly or cute.
Cryptozoologist Oliver Bennett has posted a thorough examination of the lore and legend of the Bunyip. He looks at it both as a scientist and as a cultural scholar, both as a possible real animal and as an expression of themes important to the tellers of the stories.
The name originates in Victoria, Southeastern Australia, in the Wemba-Wemba or Wergaia language. Its contemporary meaning is, more or less, “devil” or “evil spirit,” but that’s an oversimplification and probably a misinterpretation through the lens of modern Western culture. This version of the creature describes it as a monster that haunts the wetlands, the rivers and streams, and preys on women and children.
As such, it’s a cautionary tale. It’s a warning to stay away from the water. You can drown, or something in the water can rise up and eat you. Could be a fish, could be a predator—an elephant seal, maybe, or a leopard seal, wandering up the river from the sea.
That would explain the common description of the creature as horse- or hippo-sized, hairy, dark or brown, with a doglike or horselike head, a heavy, rounded body, and flippers. Or it could be a bird of some sort, emu-like with shaggy feathers and a long, supple neck. Or, possibly, it’s an ancient memory of extinct megafauna, which died out (Bennett notes) around 40,000 years ago.
But that’s not all it is. As with the spirit of Lake Okanagan, it’s something more. It’s an integral part of the world. It’s a guardian or protector of the land and particularly the waters—and maybe humans, too, in that it’s a warning against dangerous places and things.
It’s complex and layered and not easily explainable in Western cultural terms: in that way, emblematic of the problem of cultural appropriation. Its name and some of its characteristics have been taken over without understanding. It’s been turned into a mascot of sorts, but with a scary side, because we like our monster stories.
One thing it’s done to my Western mind with its deeply ingrained Western sense of time and space, is make me think of how we define very, very old. I can remember studying ancient history as a child and being in awe of stories and places that go back five thousand years. We were taught then that the dawn of time, the “first civilization,” was Sumeria and Ur of the Chaldees. And then Egypt, and then various histories and cultures till we got to the Greeks and the Romans. And that was ancient history.
Eventually I learned how narrow that view is, and how tightly it’s focused on the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. Even there, we now know, there are cultures we’ve long forgotten. Gobekli Tepe is mind-blowingly old to past me (and present me is pretty impressed, too) at close to 12,000 years.
It’s interesting to me how some of the icons of genre fantasy (and science fiction—for example, Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series) gravitate toward roughly that span. Tolkien’s Ages from the time before time to the end of the Third Age total just about 12,000 years. Beings who were alive and awake and considered to be unimaginably ancient were, in the time of Frodo and Aragorn, about 10,000 years old.
George R.R. Martin in building Westeros did a similar thing. His culture is around 12,000 years old, and there’s a whole history behind the events of A Song of Ice and Fire. But the parts we see, especially in the television series, are a very Western span of time, just a couple of hundred years, with references to events one or two thousand years in the past. As a viewer of the series and reader of the first few volumes, I never got the sense of the long stretch of time, or of the culture as being particularly ancient. It’s narrowly focused on one particular period, with a point of view that distinctly resembles the history of Western Europe. It’s medieval-ish but with a background memory of, essentially, Gobekli Tepe.
No wonder we have trouble comprehending the sense of time in First Nations stories. The culture they’re born in is tens of thousands of years older than ours. Their world goes beyond our perception of the deeps of time. The beings that inhabit it, both physical and otherwise, can’t be reduced to a linear or empirical concept of either history or story.
That’s where the Bunyip lives. In the wetlands, the rivers and lakes and the billabongs, but in the mind and the spirit as well. Like the place/time/concept labeled, in English, the Dreamtime, it’s a whole world of meaning beyond the empirical or the concrete.
Bunyip! Are you going to do yowies, yara-ma-yha-who, and drop bears?
I have done the Yowie in the section on Bigfoot, but the others sound intriguing. I’ve made a note. Thank you!
Hey Judith: You point out how you view cryptids through the lens of modern science. But there is also Pop Cryptid framework. It seems like the Bunyip fits in well with that framing. And it expands the scope and potential research options for mysterious creatures of all kinds (real or fantastical). https://sharonahill.com/pop-goes-the-cryptid/
And I’ve made another note. Again with thanks.
We often mask the magnitude of stretches of time with convenient labels like “ancient” or “classical”. Then we get reminder of how big those stretches really are, like finding out that the Great Pyramid of Giza was older to Julius Caesar than he is to us. Folk wisdom that reaches back 40,000 years is like a picture of a sequoia, where suddenly the little dot at the base of the tree is recognized as a full-sized tour bus. Deep, deep time, indeed.
<em>”Western culture is very, very young in the grand scheme of human existence.
It goes back reliably about five thousand years, and the dominant culture is only a handful of centuries old.
.</em>”
‘Western Culture,’ to the extent that is a real thing and as it is understood today, is massively and repeatedly deracinated, which is why it produces the kind of mental state described (Note that I’m also a product of it,). Mostly what people mean when they talk about the West is Europeans who haven’t gotten over having been a part of the Roman Empire and are convinced that it was a good thing. On top of that is the influence of Christianity, which is an inherently colonial religion that’s destroyed history and culture wherever it’s spread. Following after that were European nationalist consolidations (like most of Iberia coming under the crown of Castile-Aragon, and the French Sun Kings, and others), followed after that by enclosure of the commons and capitalism forcing people off their land and into factories or distant cities, etc. Followed in turn by the entire construction of whiteness opposed to the various later victims of colonialism: whiteness is an anti-culture, a sucking void where meaning goes to die, and everything that used to be our various European traditions transmogrified into a machine for turning value into trash.
<em> Contrast this with indigenous traditions that go back ten thousand years or more—sometimes very much more.</em>”
That’s a very broad generalization, and not by any means universally correct; e.g. human habitation in Aotearoa* or Hawai’i is newer than Notre Dame de Paris, for instance.
“<em>That brings us (finally!) to Australia. Australian Aboriginal culture is, to the Western mind, unimaginably ancient. Estimates of its age vary widely, from 30,000 years all the way back to 100,000. Humans have lived on the Austrialian continent literally for time out of mind.</em>”
Humans have live in Eurasia for several times that, and in Africa for longer still. What’s unusual isn’t the length of habitation but the fact that at least some degree of recognizable cultural continuity has persisted over that length of time.
*Speaking of whom, the Māori tell stories of the pouākai, a type of giant eagle that ate people, which their ancestors destroyed. Westerners dismissed these as legends until they were presented with the bones of what’s usually called in English the Haast’s Eagle, an enormous eagle that preyed on moas (like ostriches, but way bigger), and could very well have eaten humans too
Thank you for your input, and the reminder of the giant eagle.
On an SFF note, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series is set in an alternate early 19th century with dragons (various varieties of whom are found throughout Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas), features bunyips as the Austrialian equivalent, which are wingless and build extensive burrows. They hunt like trapdoor spiders, and are able to create and drain oases by digging to the water table. Dragons in this setting are sapient and capable of speech. Bunyips are almost certainly sapient, and definitely can communicate with each other. They probably could communicate with humans, but appear uninterested in doing so.
“could be a predator—an elephant seal, maybe, or a leopard seal, wandering up the river from the sea.”
Two species very well adapted to the Antarctic cold finding themselves navigating warm inland rivers in Australia? That, frankly, more incredible than the stories of bunyips!