The Yarra Bunyip opposite the Custom House, Melbourne

The mid 1840s were bunyip years in the Australian colonies. In 1845 the Geelong Advertiser published a fossil report that is usually treated as the start of the craze. In January 1846 a settler on the Murrumbidgee found a strange skull. Explorer William Hovell called it a "katen-pai" and wrote about it in the Sydney Morning Herald on 9 February 1847. It went on show for two days at the Australian Museum in Sydney.

Melbourne was then the main town of the Port Phillip District, still part of the colony of New South Wales. On the Flinders Street customs reserve stood the Custom House. Two storeys of stone, finished in 1841. It faced the river and the Queen's Wharf turning basin.

The day was not recorded. The words were. A creature, "a bunyip or an immense Platibus," was seen "sunning himself on the placid bosom of the Yarra, just opposite the Custom House." It lay on calm water, basking.

"Immediately a crowd gathered." Three men took a boat out "to secure the stranger." The animal stayed where it was as they came on. When they were "about a yard from him," it disappeared. The report does not say whether it dived, sank or swam away.

No one was named, not the people in the crowd, not the three men in the boat, not even the writer. The writer's phrasing, "placid bosom" and "the stranger", reads as light and playful. Still, the scene is unusual. Most early bunyip accounts came from Aboriginal testimony or from lone settlers in the bush. This one played out in the middle of a colonial town, in front of an audience.

The story is known through a reprint. A column of Port Phillip news ran in The South Australian, an Adelaide paper, on 2 March 1847, page 7. The original Melbourne paper has not been identified. The town had several at the time, among them the Port Phillip Gazette, the Port Phillip Patriot and Morning Advertiser, the Port Phillip Herald and the Melbourne Argus.

Retellings disagree on the date. Many follow Wikipedia and place it in March 1847, probably taken from the date of the Adelaide reprint. One blog puts it in March 1846, which looks like an error. The news had to travel from Melbourne to Adelaide, so the sighting itself came before 2 March, quite possibly in February.

The reporter offered the first answer in the same breath. A platypus. Platypuses lived in the Yarra, and were still seen as far down as Burnley Gardens, Richmond, in the 1950s. A basking platypus that vanishes as a boat draws near fits the behaviour. The word "immense" fits less well.

Then there is the mood of the moment. The bunyip was news across the colonies, and a strange shape on the river had a ready name. That same year the craze began to deflate. By July 1847 W.S. Macleay and Richard Owen had identified the Murrumbidgee skull as the deformed foetal skull of a foal or calf.

No inquiry followed, and no specimen, track or picture survives. The case lives on through Wikipedia's article on the bunyip, which quotes the report in fragments, and through the blogs and wikis that repeat it. Whether Robert Holden and Nicholas Holden discuss it in Bunyips: Australia's Folklore of Fear (2001) remains unconfirmed. What endures is the scene: a calm river, a crowd on the bank, three men a yard away, and a stranger that would not be secured.