I remember the first time I came to Australia reading about a mythical creature from Australian folklore called the Bunyip. According to the account I had the Bunyip was some sort of ‘devil’ or ’spirit’, a monster that according to legend lurked in swamps, billabongs, creeks, riverbeds and waterholes, emerging at night to produce a chorus of blood-curdling and unnatural sounds. Common anatomical features in Aboriginal drawings of the Bunyip include a horse-like tail, flippers, and walrus-like tusks or horns - though an image produced for a series of Australian stamps (copied left) looks to my mind more like an armoured beaver (indeed the Bunyip legend is thought to be attributable to seals that occasionally got caught in the higher reaches of Australia’s vast river systems, calling and rising out of the water before disappearing again). Still, I’m not sure I’d want to meet even one of these more furry versions of the Bunyip in the middle of the night…

I was thinking about the Bunyip a few days ago when I went to a remnant area of marsh and paperbark eucalypts in Sydney’s Centennial Park called Lachlan Swamp and was met with the most extraordinary chorus of calls and vocalisations I think I’ve ever heard. An eerie mix of drawn-out sighs, moans, and almost alien yodels the calls were coming from a group of Pied Currawongs Strepera graculina and Australian Ravens Corvus coronoides giving their vocal chords a work-out in the early morning.

Pied Currawong Strepera graculina

I’ve heard some odd sounds before - I always think that the wealth of new auditory stimulation is one of the ‘perks’ of travelling so much - but I really can’t remember coming across anything so peculiar before. With my eyes closed, and imagining how wild and isolated the area must have looked several hundred years ago to the first Europeans (early settlers and convicts sent to Australia for often trivial crimes, eg Irish catholics were transported for simply looking “suspicious” and political reformers sent for trying to form unions), it was all too easy to imagine how Aboriginal legends like the Bunyip were picked up and carried into the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries. What on Earth, I wondered, would I have made of these ungodly sounds reverberating out of the depths of a swamp if I’d spent months at sea being told about the Hell that awaited me and had then pitched up on these strange shores for however long the rest of my life would last?

Local Aboriginals would have known that these particular unearthly calls were coming from birds not swamp monsters - but hundreds of years ago without the benefit of familiarity (let alone binoculars and field-guides) I can just picture how hearing these calls for the first time must have felt to exhausted people more used to robins and thrushes. I’ve a feeling I’d have been absolutely terrified…