The Brungle Creek Bunyip Carcass (1883)

The lagoons about the valley of the Tumut had a reputation. In 1883 the Nepean Times put it plainly. They "have long been accredited as the favorite haunt of the beast." The beast was the bunyip. Brungle Creek feeds the Tumut River in Wiradjuri country, in the Riverina, near the village of Brungle, about 20 km north-east of Tumut.

Bunyip stories were already old by then. In 1845 the Geelong Advertiser reported a bone identified as a bunyip's. Soon after, a skull from the Murrumbidgee went on show at the Sydney Museum. Naturalist William Macleay identified it as a deformed foal or camel.

The first report is dated 4 September 1883. Some time before that, on the bank of Brungle Creek, Henry Wilkinson found "the headless trunk of a strange animal." "The body, which is covered with short, strong hair, has a porcine appearance, while the terminal appendage curls inwards, and resembles the tail of a huge lobster."

Word spread. A number of people came to examine the remains, and the Herald's Wagga Wagga correspondent reported that they judged them "of a very curious nature." "The carcass resembles somewhat that of a seal, but it has evidently been as large as that of a bullock, and has a long piece of flesh extending from the hind quarters which is pronounced to have been used as a kind of tail."

One local pushed a knife into the carcass. He struck no bone. Others swore that no carrion birds had come near the exposed flesh.

The remains were to be dried and sent to the Sydney Museum, which reportedly asked Wilkinson for them. No record shows they ever arrived. The story travelled. Between 6 and 15 September it ran in several newspapers, among them the Nepean Times and the Adelaide Observer. Under the heading "Another Bunyip," one report likened the find to a strange corpse seen "some time since" by Mr. H. Hoad of Tumut. The coverage also carried a living bunyip. A party of bushmen were quietly smoking round their camp one night when a bunyip suddenly appeared. Its "unearthly roar" sent them fleeing to the neighbouring hill.

In his 1931 book Lo!, Charles Fort revived the case. Citing the Adelaide Observer, he wrote that "Mr. Hoad, of Adelaide" had found the headless, pig-like trunk, and wondered whether these were the remains of a strange animal "teleported to this earth from Mars or the moon." The "of Adelaide" is probably a slip. Hoad seems to have seen an earlier, similar corpse, not this one.

No one ever alleged a hoax. In 2021 Brent Swancer called the story probably "sensationalized journalism with uncertain factual basis." His retelling adds a length of around 30 feet and an elephant's trunk in place of a head. No 1883 wording supports either detail, and both echo the Trunko story from Margate in 1922. The 1883 details also invite a plainer reading. A badly decomposed pig or bovine would lack a head, look porcine and yield to a knife without bone, its "tail" a length of protruding flesh. The Herald's own comparison with a seal recalls an old idea, that stray seals lie behind bunyip tales, though no source has applied it to Brungle.

Bunyip sightings around Tumut and Brungle continued into the 20th century. The carcass itself vanished from the record. What remains is a few lines of newsprint, a tail like a lobster's, and a creek bank where something no one could name once lay.