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Paper short abstract

At Sõrve Estonian Children’s Summer Camp, the elusive ‘Bunyip’ is introduced to under-eights during a bushwalk. This paper examines the walk as a narrative device through which storytellers and campers collaboratively imagine the Bunyip in dialogue with nature across generations since 1962.

Paper long abstract

The Australian-English term ‘bunyip’ in folklore refers to a shapeless, amoebic entity that has radiated from First Nations Dreamings into colonial pan-Australian folklore. This spirit-being-cum-monster, popularly built upon 19th-century colonial interpretations of south-eastern Australian Indigenous Dreamings, has since found a unique role in the collective imagination of Sõrve, an annual week-long Australian-Estonian Summer Camp located on the shores of Awaba at Point Wolstoncroft, NSW, since 1962.

Literally emerging from the ‘Lilypond’ as the enigmatic Sõrve Bunyip (known also as the loom, bunjip, soovana, suulvane), its role as a magical and elusive guardian figure of the camp is described to its youngest campers via a supervised walk for children under the age of eight. Through this walk in nature, the Sõrve Bunyip emerges as a figuration of collective narrativisation through encounters negotiated through improvisation and collaboration with children (and their accompanying parents) through nature.

This paper asks how the Lilypond walk is constructed as a narrative, and what role nature and camp elanikud (residents) play in co-creating the Bunyip vis-à-vis encounters with the Bush. Through seated and on-site walking interviews and archival breadcrumb trails, I consider how these stories draw upon a cultural bricolage of Aboriginalist, colonial pan-Australian, and Estonianised mythologies, while affording children’s encounters with the Bush and serving as a moment of generative, collaborative storytelling.