Detail map

Australia

3 entries in 3 subareas: 2 at grade A, 1 at grade C. The points fall where the entry was collected, not where the story is set. Hover a point to see the subarea, click it to open the entry.

Murray-Darling basin; the specimen that gave rise to the documentary episode was found near Balranald, in New South Wales

ABunyipAustralia — Murray-Darling basin; the specimen that gave rise to the documentary episode was found near Balranald, in New South Wales

Channel Country, western Queensland; the road between Boulia and Winton

AMin Min lightsAustralia — Channel Country, western Queensland; the road between Boulia and Winton

New South Wales: nineteenth-century attestation in the Blue Mountains and on the south coast, modern corpus in south-eastern Queensland

CYowieAustralia — New South Wales: nineteenth-century attestation in the Blue Mountains and on the south coast, modern corpus in south-eastern Queensland

The entries, in brief

The folklore of Australia documented in this atlas: Bunyip, Min Min lights and Yowie. Every entry is placed on the map at the point where it was collected or attested — not where the story is set — and carries its declared grade of documentation (2 at grade A, 1 at grade C), with the sources it comes from. The 3 subareas are not an administrative division: folklore lives in cultural areas, which rarely coincide with state borders.

Bunyip A
In the source languages banib denotes a spirit being bound to water — watercourses, lagoons, billabongs — within a frame of reference that the colonial recorders did not share and did not describe. Of that content this entry…

Min Min lights A
A nocturnal luminous object, discoid, with blurred and shifting edges, of apparent diameter between a quarter and half the full Moon; white, or else green, yellow, red or blue; suspended a little above the horizon. It seems to…

Yowie C
In the modern corpus it is a hairy hominid two metres tall, which leaves enormous footprints in the forests of south-eastern Queensland. In the nineteenth-century corpus — the only one that is really documentable — it is…

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