By NOEL MURPHY
SAVAGE talons, a cruel cross-cut serrated beak, powerful jaws, four metres in height – anyone doubting the fearsome nature of Australia’s bunyip might want to think again.
Mythical or not, the home-grown monster terrified indigenous folk for millennia – and more than a few early white settlers, too.
Right now, artworks depicting just what kind of physical horror the bunyip might have actually presented are on show at Geelong’s National Wool Museum as part of its Rumour Has It exhibition.
Among the offerings are whimsical emu-headed beasts, mutant dodos, crocodile caricatures and ghostly long-snouted creatures.
Museum director Padraic Fisher said the show was driven by a competition to depict bunyips, with more than 170 entries included in a large slide show on the museum’s floor.
Gillian Turner won the competition with a striking ephemeral water colour of the bunyip, Mr Fisher said.
“That picture came in and we were all really gob-smacked,” he said.
Mr Fisher said the exhibition and its bunyips were proving popular.
The bunyip tapped the interesting pseudoscience of cryptozoology, the study of animals supposed not to exist, he said.
“This includes looking for living examples of animals that are considered extinct, such as dinosaurs; animals whose existence lacks physical evidence but which appear in myths, legends or are reported, such as bigfoot and chupacabra, and wild animals dramatically outside their normal geographic ranges, such as phantom big cats.”
