The word bunyip is usually translated by Aboriginal Australians today as " devil " or " evil spirit ".

George French Angus may have collected a description of a bunyip in his account of a " water spirit " from the Moorundi people of the Murray River before 1847, stating it is " much dreaded by them … It inhabits the Murray ; but … they have some difficulty describing it.

" Robert Brough Smyth's Aborigines of Victoria of 1878 devoted ten pages to the bunyip, but concluded " in truth little is known among the blacks respecting its form, covering or habits ; they appear to have been in such dread of it as to have been unable to take note of its characteristics.

Antiquarian Reynell Johns claimed that until the mid-1850s, Aboriginal people made a " habit of visiting the place annually and retracing the outlines of the figure the bunyip which is about 11 paces long and 4 paces in extreme breadth.

Another suggestion is that the bunyip may be a cultural memory of extinct Australian marsupials such as the Diprotodon or Palorchestes.

Another connection to the bunyip is the shy Australasian bittern ( Botaurus poiciloptilus ).

During the breeding season, the male call of this marsh-dwelling bird is a " low pitched boom "; hence, it is occasionally called the " bunyip bird ".

The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek is a contemporary Australian children's picture book about a bunyip.

There is also a coin-operated bunyip at Murray Bridge, South Australia, at Sturt Reserve on the town's riverfront.

It is suggested that diprotodonts may have been an inspiration for the legends of the bunyip, as some Aboriginal tribes identify Diprotodon bones as those of " bunyips ".

" ( The bunyip is a mythical beast of Aboriginal legend.

Located on the Main St of town is the bunyip and district community house.

Near the confluence of the Murray River with Lake Alexandrina is Murungun ( Mason's Hill ), home to a bunyip called Muldjewangk.

A large number of bunyip sightings occurred during the 1840s and 1850s, particularly in the southeastern colonies of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, as European settlers extended their reach.

In his 2001 book, writer Robert Holden identified at least nine regional variations for the creature known as the bunyip across Aboriginal Australia.

They did not call the animal a bunyip, but described the remains indicating the creature as very much like a hippopotamus or manatee.

Writing in 1933, Charles Fenner suggested that it was likely that the " actual origin of the bunyip myth lies in the fact that from time to time seals have made their way up the ... Murray and Darling ( Rivers )".

The origin of the word bunyip has been traced to the Wemba-Wemba or Wergaia language of Aboriginal people of South-Eastern Australia.

However, the bunyip appears to have formed part of traditional Aboriginal beliefs and stories throughout Australia, although its name varied according to tribal nomenclature.

However, this translation may not accurately represent the role of the bunyip in Aboriginal mythology or its possible origins before written accounts were made.

According to the report, the bunyip had been speared after killing an Aboriginal man.

An 1882 illustration of an Aboriginal man telling the story of the bunyip to two White children

" The account noted a story of an Aboriginal woman being killed by a bunyip and the " most direct evidence of all " – that of a man named Mumbowran " who showed several deep wounds on his breast made by the claws of the animal ".

* Legends of the bunyip within Australian Aboriginal mythology have been associated with extinct marsupial megafauna such as Diprotodon or Palorchestes.

Visitors flocked to see it, and The Sydney Morning Herald said that it prompted many people to speak out about their " bunyip sightings ".

When Wentworth proposed creating a hereditary peerage in New South Wales, Deniehy savagely satirised it: " Here ," he said, " we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a " bunyip aristocracy.

Some modern sources allude to a linguistic connection between the bunyip and Bunjil, " a mythic ' Great Man ' who made the mountains and rivers and man and all the animals.

" The word bunyip may not have appeared in print in English until the mid-1840s.

By the 1850s, bunyip had also become a " synonym for imposter, pretender, humbug and the like " in the broader Australian community.

The term bunyip aristocracy was first coined in 1853 to describe Australians aspiring to be aristocrats.

The word bunyip can still be found in a number of Australian contexts, including place names such as the Bunyip River ( which flows into Westernport Bay in southern Victoria ) and the town of Bunyip, Victoria.

The Challicum bunyip, an outline image of a bunyip carved by Aborigines into the bank of Fiery Creek, near Ararat, Victoria, was first recorded by The Australasian newspaper in 1851.

Non-Aboriginal Australians have made various attempts to understand and explain the origins of the bunyip as a physical entity over the past 150 years.

When confronted with the remains of some of the now extinct Australian marsupials, Aborigines would often identify them as the bunyip.

During the early settlement of Australia by Europeans, the notion that the bunyip was an actual unknown animal that awaited discovery became common.

Early European settlers, unfamiliar with the sights and sounds of the island continent's peculiar fauna, regarded the bunyip as one more strange Australian animal and sometimes attributed unfamiliar animal calls or cries to it.

It has also been suggested that 19th-century bunyip lore was reinforced by imported European memories, such as that of the Irish Púca.

The newspaper continued, " On the bone being shown to an intelligent black ( sic ), he at once recognised it as belonging to the bunyip, which he declared he had seen.

Had the situation been reversed, had, for instance, England been the enemy in 1898 because of issues of concern chiefly to New England, there is little doubt that large numbers of Southerners would have happily put on their old Confederate uniforms to fight as allies of Britain.

It became the sole `` subject '' of `` international law '' ( a term which, it is pertinent to remember, was coined by Bentham ), a body of legal principle which by and large was made up of what Western nations could do in the world arena.

If a work is divided into several large segments, a last-minute drawing of random numbers may determine the order of the segments for any particular performance.

On the one hand, he does not work for a large agency, but is almost always self-employed.

Although we continue to pay our conversational devotions to `` free private enterprise '', `` individual initiative '', `` the democratic way '', `` government of the people '', `` competition of the marketplace '', etc., we live rather comfortably in a society in which economic competition is diminishing in large areas, bureaucracy is corroding representative government, technology is weakening the citizen's confidence in his own power to make decisions, and the threat of war is driving him economically and physically into the ground ''.

Third, the United States is pressing forward in the development of large rocket engines to place vehicles of many tons into space for exploration purposes.

In this domain the simple fact of coexistence in the same local, national, and world community is enough to guarantee that we cannot refrain from having some effect, large or small, upon Gentile-Jewish relations.

This is in large part a code of behavior and a glossary of values: what is it that people do and should do and how one should regard it.

If we are to believe the list of titles printed in Malraux's latest book, La Metamorphose Des Dieux, Vol. 1 ( ( 1957 ), he is still engaged in writing a large novel under his original title.

But it would greatly strengthen any Mayor's executive powers, remove the excuse in large degree that he is a captive of inaction in the Board of Estimate, increase his budget-making authority both as to expense and capital budgets, and vest in him the right to reorganize city departments in the interest of efficiency and economy.

We believe that autism, like so many other conditions of defect and deviation, is to a large extent inborn.

Decca is not the only large commercial company to impart instruction.

For the first time in history the entire world is dominated by two large, powerful nations armed with murderous nuclear weapons that make conventional warfare of the past a nullity.

In any event, the yearly sacrifice of 40,000 victims is a hecatomb too large to be justified by the most ardent faith.

The lack of scientific unanimity on the effects of radiation is due in part to insufficient data covering large population groups, from which agreed-on generalizations could be drawn.

For that is the one an increasingly large number of prominent Americans are now proposing.

In the first place, a large part of the discrepancy between President Eisenhower's estimate of a 1.5 billion dollar surplus for the same period and the new estimate of an almost seven billion dollar deficit is the result of the outgoing President's farewell gift of a political booby-trap to his successor.

Our complaint is that in many crucial areas the Kennedy programs are not too large but too small, most seriously in regard to the conventional arms build-up and in aid and welfare measures.

The resulting setup, it was declared, `` would be similar to that which is in successful operation in a number of metropolitan counties as large or larger than Rhode Island ''.

Another effect discovered is the large coefficient of thermal diffusion tending to separate nitrogen from the oxygen when temperature differences straddling the nitrogen dissociation region are present.

Mr. Speaker, for several years now the commuter railroads serving our large metropolitan areas have found it increasingly difficult to render the kind of service our expanding population wants and is entitled to have.