A Bunyip outside Broken Hill is occupying a nearly waterless waterhole and telling surveyors, through guttural honks, that it got here first. Council has no current response to that.

A Bunyip currently occupying a dried-up billabong approximately fourteen kilometres outside Broken Hill, New South Wales, has formally declined — or produced sounds that surveyors are interpreting as formal declination — to vacate the site following three rounds of council relocation offers. The billabong retains, by most accounts, approximately forty centimetres of standing water at its deepest point. The Bunyip retains, by all accounts, the position that this is sufficient and that the matter is settled. As of this broadcast, twenty-one individuals have witnessed the animal, the waterhole, or both. I have the field reports in front of me. The radio is running about two tones lower than this morning. I note this without further comment.

What the Surveyors Heard, and What They Are Choosing to Believe It Means

Council contractors from the Far West Lands Assessment Office attended the site on Tuesday for what was logged as a routine environmental inspection. They left after approximately twenty-five minutes. Lead surveyor Dennis Quail filed a report that described, in sequence: a smell like wet wool and warm iron, a series of low honking vocalisations emanating from the reed bed, and a feeling he characterised as being ‘evaluated.’ His report does not use the word Bunyip. His report does, however, note that the site occupant appeared to have been there longer than the current administrative records for the parcel suggest anything has been. Quail submitted the report. He has not returned to the site.

Community Notice

It honked at the relocation paperwork specifically. Not at us. At the paperwork. I don’t know what to do with that.

— Dennis Quail, Lead Surveyor, Far West Lands Assessment Office

The Broken Hill Municipal Council issued a statement Wednesday morning describing the situation as ‘an ongoing dialogue with a protected-status site occupant’ and noting that no further site visits are scheduled at this time. The statement does not specify what protected status applies. Council spokesperson Meredith Falk told a local radio station that the council is ‘exploring all available frameworks,’ which is language I have heard before in situations where no framework has yet been located. I wrote this paragraph with a fresh pen. The box is at eight. We are fine.

The housing crisis framing is not, I want to be clear, language that WTC introduced. It is the interpretation offered by at least four of the twenty-one witnesses, three of whom are residents of Broken Hill and one of whom drove out specifically after seeing a post on a community Facebook group titled ‘something is living in the dry billabong off the Silverton road and it seems mad about it.’ The fourth witness, a retired hydrologist named Pat Garvey, noted that the billabong in question has been losing water volume steadily for eleven years due to a combination of drought conditions and upstream diversion. Garvey’s position is that the Bunyip was there before the water started going and has simply declined to acknowledge that the situation has changed. I find this, professionally and otherwise, a coherent position.

The water’s been going for over a decade. Whatever’s living there has watched it go. That’s not a creature that wandered in. That’s a creature that stayed.

— Pat Garvey, Retired Hydrologist, Witness #7

I made my coffee before the morning script today, which is not my usual order. The percolator ran the same as it always does. There is something about a thing that continues to function in conditions that should not support it that I find, depending on the day, either reassuring or instructive. The Bunyip outside Broken Hill has forty centimetres of water and no apparent intention of moving. Council has frameworks it has not yet located. The surveyors have filed their reports and gone home. The radio is low and steady. We will continue to monitor this situation and bring you updates as the conditions warrant. This is Hal Ridgeway. WTC News. Stay with us.