Edwin Stocqueler's bunyip sightings on the Murray and Goulburn rivers (1856 to 1857)

In the 1850s the bunyip was a colonial puzzle. A fossil at Geelong in 1845. A misidentified platypus on the Yarra in 1847. Everyone had heard of the creature. Nobody had pinned it down.

Edwin Roper Loftus Stocqueler was an artist and amateur naturalist, about 27 years old. Around the middle of 1856 he set out with his mother, Jane Stocqueler, to sketch the rivers of the colony and the creatures frequenting them. He travelled several hundred miles up and down the Murray and Goulburn rivers in a canvas boat.

The first report reached print on 2 January 1857. Stocqueler was about twenty-five yards away. The animal lay placidly on the water, about two feet of it showing. He put its length at five to six feet, and then it noticed him. "On being observed, the stranger set-off, working his paddles briskly, and rapidly disappeared."

A fuller account appeared in the Border Post at Albury and was reprinted across the colonies. Stocqueler described a large freshwater seal, with two small fins at the shoulders and a head like a dog. "A curious bag hanging under the jaw, resembling the pouch of the pelican." Hair like the platypus, glossy black.

He saw no less than six of them at different times. Near McGuire's punt on the Goulburn, where Shepparton now stands, his boat was within thirty feet of one. He fired. He missed.

The largest exceeded fifteen feet, its head the size of a bullock's head and three feet out of water. The animals moved against the current at about seven miles an hour. He might have come closer. The stories of the natives about the power and fury of the bunyip held him back. So did a single-barrelled gun and a very frail boat.

He drew the neck and shoulders. Never the whole animal. Several Aboriginal people of the Goulburn studied the drawing and declared it "Bunyip's brother". An Albury writer saw a hybrid between the water mole and the great sea serpent. The great bunyip question, it seemed, was about to close.

It did not. On 3 July 1857 the Bendigo Advertiser printed his letter. "In the first place, I did not call it the Bunyip, nor did I ever say positively the size of it … as I never saw the whole of one." "I am no wonder-maker." Yet he withdrew nothing about seeing an unknown animal. He promised a full account once his diorama, with an almost life size portrait of the beast, was painted.

Captain Cadell, who never saw the animal, suggested the "Musk Drake". The male musk duck carries a leathery lobe beneath its bill and floats low in the water. Stocqueler dismissed it: "nor is it anything like a musk-drake." Charles Fenner later argued that seals straying up the Murray explain many bunyip reports. Rob Cornes weighed several seal species and leaned that way, while noting none fits every detail. Others suspect the press inflated the numbers. No one has accused Stocqueler of a hoax.

A named witness, a drawing shown to the river's own people, a shot fired at thirty feet. And then a witness who refused the very word the newspapers gave him. That account never appeared. The diorama, the portrait and the sketch are all lost. What swam past McGuire's punt has never been settled.