A tall steel bunyip beside the Burnett Highway in Mulgildie, depicting the legendary local creature with a cow skull in one arm and a lungfish in the other.
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Site-level location · 24.9647° S, 151.1311° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The bunyip at Mulgildie holds a cow's skull in one arm and a lungfish in the other, which tells you it is not a generic monster. It is this district's monster.
The Bunyip Hole is a real waterhole near Mulgildie and the subject of long-standing local legend – the stories vary, but the recurring element is cattle that go into the water and do not come out. The cow skull is that legend, made explicit. The lungfish belongs to the Burnett River system nearby, one of the few places on earth the species lives.
Brett Benecke made the sculpture over about eighteen months, and the craft is worth understanding. It is built from six-millimetre plate mild steel, forged and shaped to form the scales – that is, each scale worked in heavy plate rather than cast or moulded, which is an enormous amount of hot work for one figure. He looks, by the local description, like a cross between a crocodile and a small dinosaur.
It was dedicated on 20 November 2010, and it commemorates two anniversaries at once: eighty years of service by the Mulgildie branch of the Queensland Country Women's Association, and Queensland's 150 years as a state. A mural was added behind it and unveiled at the Mulgildie Bunyip Festival on 12 November 2011.
Mulgildie is a rural village in the Upper Burnett, 120 kilometres west of Bundaberg and ten south of Monto, with a hotel, a grocer, a primary school and a sawmill. A monster on the highway is a considerable asset for a place that size.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Mulgildie Bunyip is a tall steel sculpture beside the Burnett Highway in Mulgildie, depicting the legendary bunyip with a cow skull in one arm and a lungfish in the other, built from 6 mm plate mild steel. It is linked to the local Bunyip Hole legend, and current Queensland and North Burnett tourism continue to promote it.
ACCESS
The sculpture is beside the Burnett Highway at the Hughes Street corner. Specialist visitor guidance identifies roadside parking and a picnic table; approach cautiously and use the established roadside stopping area rather than stopping in the highway traffic lane.
