Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

In an extended study of weird animal traditions in Australia, folklorist Bill Scott noted: ‘There is certainly a very strong folk belief in this country of the existence of such an animal, which is usually described by witnesses as a “panther” or a “big cat”.’ Scott went on to identify a number of these beasts from his own fieldwork and reports by others. These included the Emmaville Panther and the Kangaroo Valley Panther (New South Wales), the Waterford Panther (Queensland), the Dromana Mountain Lion (Victoria), the Marulan Tiger (New South Wales), and the Guyra Cat (New South Wales). To these could be added the Tasmanian Tiger, the Nannup Tiger (Western Australia), and the Kyneton Cat (Victoria), among many others. In Queensland, there are said to be cougars around Townsville, Mount Spec and Charters Towers. In September 2008, a leopard was reported on the northwestern edge of Sydney, the latest of many similar sightings in the Blue Mountains and along the Hawkesbury River.

  Most reports of this type involve, as well as descriptions of some variety of ‘big cat’, an explanation, often venerable, of how such a creature came to be prowling the Australian bush. Often, the animals are said to have escaped from a circus. Another common theme is that a pair of panthers (or cougars, or mountain lions) were brought to Australia as mascots for American troops during World War II and released into the bush after the war. Convincing documentation of such animals, however, has yet to be produced. Big cat sightings nowadays are often ‘irrefutably proven’ by a photograph or video footage. As with the yowie video of 2000, these invariably turn out to be murky snaps that could show almost any animal at all.

  Another feature of big cat (and yowie) lore is outsized, backward-pointing or otherwise odd tracks. Plaster casts are often made of these prints for examination by ‘experts’ whose task seems to be to vindicate the claims of the cat seekers. The experts’ findings, however, rarely see the light of day.

  Naturally, farmers who find their stock mauled to death want to know what did it. Reports of big-cat attacks on sheep and cattle have surfaced regularly since the nineteenth century. Around Busselton, south of Perth, for example, a series of unexplained sheep losses in 1997 and 1998 were blamed by some locals on a wild cougar. A cast of a suspected paw print was given to Perth Zoo for inspection. Its specialist was ‘unable to determine what had left the print, but said it was not large enough to be a cougar’, according to a report in Perth’s Sunday Times. ‘The claws have the characteristics of a cat,’ the specialist said. ‘But I would not like to put my money on it being a big cat, it could even be a large dog.’

  In the mid 1970s, reports of pumas in Victoria’s Grampian Ranges were investigated by environmental science students at Deakin University, who collected casts of footprints, fur, bone, and even faeces. Puma experts in Colorado who examined the specimens found them consistent with pumas. The outcome ‘was tantalising but not conclusive’, Professor John Henry, who had been in charge of the investigation, later said.

  Henry decided to probe further. He had heard the story that the US Air Force had released big cats into the Grampians during World War II. Now he tracked down six former members and quizzed them about it in writing. Some of the ex-servicemen recalled hearing stories along those lines, but that is as far as any of them would go. Henry’s final (2001) report on the case for pumas found there was ‘sufficient evidence from a number of intersecting sources to affirm beyond reasonable doubt the presence of a big-cat population in western Victoria’.

  In 2000, there was another sighting of a mysterious creature in the area, and this time video ‘evidence’ was screened on television. Officials in Victoria’s Department of Natural Resources thought the animal was probably a feral cat. A spokesman told The Weekend Australian: ‘We remain sceptical of the exotic cat theory until field evidence comes along rather than hearsay of sightings.’

  The Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus (pouched animal with a dog’s head), became extinct in 1936, but many have hunted in vain for it since. A descendent of the carnivorous marsupial is widely believed to roam the mainland’s far southwest and is still pursued in Tasmania. Reports of the beast, known as the Nannup Tiger (or some variant of that name), seem to date back almost to the earliest European settlement of Western Australia, but were especially frequent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when wet winters supposedly forced it into the wooded areas around Nannup. Various attempts were made to capture the Nannup Tiger, without success. As with the bunyip and the yowie lack of evidence has not prevented this and other Alien Big Cats from taking up residence in Australia’s monster menagerie.

  The Min Min lights

  The Min Min lights are a Queensland version of an eerie phenomenon reported elsewhere in Australia and around the world. Ghost lights were reported by explorers in southeastern Australia from the 1830s. The Wongagai people of Australia’s northwest believe the night lights they sometimes observe on the plains are spirits luring humans into the desert with evil intent. Several of these apparitions, as they were often called in the nineteenth century, are associated with tales of haunting. People in Hay, New South Wales, for example, used to see a light that appeared to be on a mail coach travelling across One Tree Plain. No matter how fast men rode after the light, no one was ever able to catch up with it. But while the Phantom Mail is a legend known mainly to locals, the story of the Min Min lights has become widely told.

  Min Min was the Aboriginal-derived name of an inn built in the late nineteenth century, about 100 kilometres east of the town of Boulia, in the channel country of north-central Queensland. The pub thrived as the Queensland frontier expanded, and a small township grew up around it, but the population gradually dwindled, and during World War I the pub burned down. Since at least the time the hotel was built, however, there have been reports of strange lights dancing through the night skies in the area. The lights are described in a bewildering variety of ways: as small, large, single, numerous, of one colour, changing in colour, standing still, moving slowly, moving fast, or sometimes following startled travellers.

  There are many scientific and pseudo-scientific explanations for the Min Min lights. Probably the most frequent is that they are a form of marsh light, or ignis fatuus (Latin for foolish fire). Also known as will o’ the wisps, these are caused by phosphorescent gases rising from swampy ground. Min Min lights have also been attributed to mirages, weather effects, the ghosts of massacred Aborigines and, inevitably, UFOs. One sceptical scientist has even managed to reproduce the lights in his laboratory in a probably futile attempt to quash the notion that they are somehow supernatural. The legend of the Min Min lights arose from a mingling of Aboriginal, British and Australian settler traditions, with a romantic gloss provided mostly by the press.

  Even before European settlement, Aborigines seem to have witnessed the lights; a number of the local Pitta Pitta people averred that they were or of unearthly origin, in some cases associated with the spirits of stillborn children. They have also been said to be linked to an Aboriginal burial ground. A variation on this theme is that the lights first appeared after a number of Aborigines were killed by settlers. This is possibly a reference to the incident at Battle Mountain near Mount Isa in 1884, when as many as several hundred Kalkadoon people may have been killed; or it may refer to other reprisal killings of Kalkadoons by settlers. Queensland oral tradition contains many massacre stories that have never been historically confirmed.

  When settlers first saw the lights, they generally interpreted them as marsh lights. These are often explained in British folklore as ghosts or disembodied souls, sometimes referred to as ‘corpse candles’. Similar phenomena around the world are also widely associated with ill luck, evil and death.

  The earliest accounts of the Min Min lights generally have them arising from the cemetery behind the hotel. This establishment apparently gained a bad reputation for encouraging bush workers to ‘lamb down’, or drink down, their pay cheques, giving no change and plying them with rotgut alcohol. In some versio
ns of the Min Min tale, patrons of the hotel were sometimes drugged and robbed or murdered. This embellishment added an extra dimension of spookiness to the legend; perhaps the lights were the vengeful ghosts of murdered men.

  The first coherent account of the lights comes from Henry Lamond, a station manager, who saw them in 1912:

  During the middle of winter—June or July—I had to go to Slasher’s Creek to start the lamb-marking. I did not leave the head station until about 2 a.m., expecting to get to Slasher’s well before daylight . . .

  After crossing the Hamilton River, 5 miles wide with 45 channels, I was out on the high downs . . . 5 or 6, or 8 or 10, miles out on the downs I saw the headlight of a car coming straight for me . . . Cars, though they were not common, were not rare. I took note of the thing, singing and trotting as I rode, and I even estimated the strength of the approaching light by the way it picked out individual hairs in the mare’s mane.

  Suddenly I realised it was not a car light—it remained in one bulbous ball instead of dividing into the 2 headlights, which it should have done as it came closer; it was too green-glary for an acetylene light; it floated too high for any car; there was something eerie about it. I ceased to sing, though I kept the mare at the trot. She stopped that: she propped her four legs wide, lifted her head, pricked her ears, and she snorted her challenge to the unknown!

  The light came on, floating as airily as a bubble, moving with comparative slowness—though I did not at the time check its rate of progression. I should estimate now that it was moving at about 10 m.p.h. and anything from 5 to 10 feet above the ground . . . Its size, I would say, at an approximate guess, would be about that of a new-risen moon. That light and I passed each other, going in opposite directions. I kept an eye on it while it was passing, and I’d say it was about 200 yards off when suddenly it just faded and died away. It did not go out with a snap—its vanishing was more like the gradual fading of the wires in an electric bulb. The mare acknowledged the dowsing of the glim by another snorting whistle: it must have been at least five miles or so ere I lifted up my voice again in song.

  Lamond’s recollection of this incident was not published until twenty-five years later, on 1 April 1937—not a date to engender confidence in the veracity of the story. But many other people also reported seeing a similiar light, or lights.

  In May 1981, Detective Sergeant Lyall Booth, of the Police Stock Investigation Squad at Cloncurry, was camped at a waterhole about 60 kilometres east of Boulia. Waking at around 11 p.m., he saw what looked like a car’s headlight on the road. Police Commissioner Norriv Bauer later published a report of Booth’s statement on the sighting. He quoted Booth as saying the light ‘appeared to be moving but it did not seem to get any closer (I know that’s hard to grasp, but that is how it appeared)’. He described the light as ‘white in colour, similar to the light thrown by a quartz iodide headlight’. He went back to sleep but woke about 1 a.m., and saw another light about 1000 metres southwest of where he’d seen the earlier one.

  It was not as bright as the first light and had a slightly yellow colour to it. It was about the colour of a gas light which is turned down very low and is about to go out, but it was of much greater intensity than that type of light.

  It appeared to be slightly bigger than the gas light used in the cook’s camp. It seemed to be from 3 to 6 feet from the ground, and moved only several yards from west to east and then remained stationary. It illuminated the ground around it, but I was too far away from it to see any detail. I could, however, see the cook’s camp.

  Booth watched it for another five or six minutes, ‘and then it suddenly dived towards the ground and went out. It may even have gone out on contact with the ground. I did not see it again.’ Bauer quoted Booth as saying he was ‘at a loss to explain in physical terms the lights that I saw. My enquiries lead me to believe that they were not caused by man.’

  Despite the inconsistencies among (and within) reported sightings, the scepticism of scientists and the existence of a number of possible natural explanations, the notion that the Min Min lights are supernatural in origin lives on. Tourism promoters refer to them, and UFOlogists investigate them. Whatever their origin, the lights have become one of Australia’s most persistent tales of the unexplained.

  MUCH LORE AND legend is closely tied to places. Such stories often help to forge and maintain a common sense of identity. They may not be widely known outside the locality where they arose, though some are local variants of tales told around the world. A few, however—like that of the Min Min lights—manage to spread widely without losing their links with the places of their birth.

  Place-specific stories often contain explanations for the names of local landmarks or for local customs. A large group of these type of legends concerns buried, or otherwise lost, treasure.

  The man who sold his Dreaming

  Australia’s earliest local tales are, of course, those of the first Australians. And as this next one shows, they are not necessarily set in the mythological world before European settlement. Collected by Roland Robinson from an Aboriginal man named Bob Turnbull, it is a good example of the way indigenous and settler traditions often coalesce. As well as explaining how the local town got its name, it is a cautionary tale about giving up what is most important to you. The term jurraveel, introduced near the end of the story, means ‘a sacred place’, to which Frank Jock was connected by his totem, a bird similar to a bantam rooster.

  You know that water-hen with the red beak? He sings out ‘Kerk’, and ‘Kerk’, well, that bird is my totem. Every dark feller has a totem. It’s his spirit. It looks after him and warns him of any danger. In my tribe, the Bunjalung tribe of the Richmond River, his name is geeyarng. And our native name for a totem is barnyunbee.

  I want to tell you about a totem that belonged to a dark feller named Frank Jock. Frank Jock had a totem that was something like a little bantam rooster. Everyone would hear this bird singing out. They’d go to look for him, but they could never find him.

  Away on the mountain in the lantana, he’d be singing out. He was sort of minding that place, looking after it, you’d say.

  Well, the mayor of Coraki wanted to make a quarry in that mountain. There was the best kind of blue metal there. He sent the men of the council to that place. They put three charges, one after another, into the rock. But not one of those charges would go off.

  There was a dark feller in the gang by the name of Andrew Henry. He told the mayor of Coraki that he’d have to go and have a talk to Frank Jock. The mayor would have to ask Frank if he could do something so that they could blow up this mountain and make a quarry in it.

  The mayor sent for Frank Jock, he said he wanted to see him. ‘Look,’ the mayor said to Frank, ‘can you let us blow this mountain up?’

  ‘All right,’ Frank said, ‘but you’ll have to pay me.’

  So the mayor gave Frank five gold sovereigns and two bottles of rum to let the council blow up the mountain.

  The council men went back to the mountain and they put in one big charge. When it went off, it blew the side right out of the mountain. The explosion shook Coraki. A big spout of black water rushed up out of the mountainside. The council had to wait a long time until all the water cleared away before they could work the quarry.

  The little bantam rooster, he disappeared. He didn’t sing out any more. Jurraveel I can see you know all about this black-feller business.

  Well, after the mountain was blown up, Frank Jock, the owner of that jurraveel, began to get sick. In three weeks he was dead. You see, like it says in the Bible, he’d sold his birthright. It was the same as killing him. He sold his jurraveel to the mayor of the town.

  That’s why we call it in our language Gurrigai, meaning ‘blowing up the mountain’. That’s how Coraki got its name.

  After Bob Turnbull had finished telling the story, he said to Roland Robinson, ‘You know, I’ve
been looking for years for a feller like you to write these stories down. These stories are dying out. They’re lost to the young people. I’d like to think that one day the young people will read these stories and say, “These stories belong to us.”’

  Naming places

  The American humorist and travel writer Mark Twain visited Australia in the late 1890s. A master yarn spinner and teller of tall tales himself, Twain was mildly sceptical when told by a local liar that the Blue Mountains of New South Wales had been thrown up by the rabbits then plaguing the country. Tongue in cheek, Twain wrote that the rabbit plague ‘could account for one mountain, but not for a mountain range, it seems to me. It is too large an order.’ Whether this was the origin of the long-running joke about Australians outdoing Americans in the size of their lies, the rabbit-pile theory certainly fits into it.

  In 1989, folklorists collected at least six different stories about the origins of the Queensland town of Ravenshoe. These included the suggestion that someone had once seen some ravens or crows playing with an old shoe on the creek bank—despite the fact that the name is pronounced Ravens-hoe. (Hoe, or Hoo, is the name of a place in Norfolk). There was also an elaborate story about how local streams, when viewed from the air, meet in the shape of a crow’s foot. Many of the people who supplied these stories thought the town’s original name, Cedar Creek, was a much better choice.

  Locals say Crows Nest, Queensland, is so named because Aborigines called the place something like ‘home of the crows’. A more colourful version of this story holds that during the early days of settlement, an Aboriginal man lived in a hollow tree in the town, from which vantage point he provided directions to bullock drivers and cedar getters as well as acting as an unofficial post office. It is said that the settlers called him Jimmy Crow and his tree Jimmy Crow’s Nest, a contraction of which became the town’s name.