Bunyip Bust, Australian Water Cryptid

The bunyip comes out of Aboriginal oral traditions across south eastern Australia, told long before anyone wrote any of it down. It lives in the swamps, the billabongs and the still water, and the thing every account agrees on is the sound: a bellow coming across the water after dark, from something you cannot see.

Nobody agrees what it looks like

When the colonists started writing the accounts down in the 1840s, the descriptions came back contradicting each other flatly. A dog’s head. An emu’s neck. Flippers. A tail like a horse. Something the size of a calf with tusks. Something closer to a seal that had come a very long way up the river.

They were not confused. They were describing a thing that is defined by being heard rather than seen, and the shape was always going to be whatever you brought to the water with you.

The skull that was not

In 1846 a strange skull was pulled out of the bank of the Murrumbidgee and put on display in Sydney as the proof. Crowds came. It was eventually identified as a deformed horse or calf. The bunyip has been doing this to people for a very long time.

So this is one version, and it says so

We went with the tusked, heavily maned animal from the colonial descriptions, because it is the version those written accounts most often reach for and because it is the one that works as an object. It is not the definitive bunyip. There is no such thing and that is the whole point of it.

What the sculpture does

The best fur we have ever printed. Short and dense across the muzzle and brow, lengthening into a heavy mane down the sides of the head, then falling away under the jaw into long hanging strands. Every lock follows the muscle underneath, which is why it reads as a wet animal rather than a textured surface.

The face is deliberately still. Small deep set eyes under a heavy brow, a broad flat nose, and two tusks curving up from the lower jaw. It is not roaring at you. It is looking at you the way something looks at you from a riverbank, which is worse.

Left unpainted

Bare bone-white, which is the only honest way to show a sculpt where every detail is depth. A hand-finished version with a dark wash driven down into the fur is coming, and on this piece that wash will do more than on anything else we make.

The numbers

• Printed and finished by hand in Australia.
• WEIRDO 010. That number belongs to this design and will never be given to another.
• Height to be confirmed.

Looking after it

The tusks stand forward of everything else and they are the part that will break. Lift it by the mane or the base, never by the muzzle, and give it a shelf where a sleeve will not catch the front. Dust with a soft dry brush, because a cloth will snag in the fur and pull. Out of direct sun, because PLA softens around 60 degrees.

Ordering one now

Made to order. Order it and yours goes into the next batch, usually within a fortnight, and you are emailed when it goes on the bed and again when it ships.

Change your mind before it is printed and we refund it in full without asking why. After that you still have every right you have under Australian Consumer Law, which we cannot exclude and would not want to.