‘Is The Bunyip ready for bed yet?’ I ask.
‘The Bunyip is not,’ my seven-year-old answers.

We use this nickname when he is being cheeky. He always responds in third person. This Bunyip persona provides a narrative distance for me to negotiate the banal battles of bedtimes and tooth brushing. 

Bun-yip. Sommeliers describe the ‘mouthfeel’ of wine, but I think some words also have appealing mouthfeel. To me, bunyip evokes something simultaneously cute and annoying. 

However, when I encountered the unsettling bunyip specimen in the Chau Chak Wing Museum, I realised my conception of a bunyip was misconstrued. 

Penny Edmonds writes that this specimen – a deformed horse skull mistaken, or storied, as a bunyip – is a “jarring and disruptive object.” The bunyip is a swamp creature from Aboriginal lore, and sparked terror in early settlers. The horse, a colonial import, is an alien species in the Australian landscape and was implicated in early conflicts with Aboriginal people. In Edmonds' words, this specimen “performs the uncanny rapture of the Anthropocene.” 

I went hunting for the bunyips of my childhood, to understand how I have mangled this complex myth. I found Bunyip Bluegum in the Magic Pudding book, a seemingly benign but fundamentally racist koala. A Commonwealth Bank bunyip moneybox from the time of my early childhood stirs no memories, but is the right kind of cheeky. Although I can’t clearly remember The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek as a book, the potbellied, droopy-eared main character surfaces in my memory, floating in a blank void like a natural history specimen sketched in isolation from its ecosystem. 

The most convincing monsters are assemblages of many things.

Object details
Equus caballus Linnaeus, 1758
Alternate name: Horse, yerramin (Mutti Mutti)
Description: Skull of juvenile horse with cyclopic deformation
Mammal, skeletal specimen
NHM.45.1

Related story: ‘The Bunyip in Balranald’ https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/#search-results&view=details&id=39e6&modules=enarratives&irn=355