How Canberra teacher Adam Duncan's bunyip story became a National Museum picture book The Bunyip and The Stars

No one can quite pinpoint when they first learned about the bunyip, but still, it's communal knowledge for many Australians.

So when Adam Duncan was looking for a mythical creature to put in his kids' story, it only made sense that the bunyip would call his very Australian tale home.

Originally, Duncan's story - that would become to be known as The Bunyip and the Stars - was an oral tale that he told in his daily life as an early childhood teacher at Wiradjuri Pre-School and Child Care Centre at the University of Canberra.

One cohort was particularly interested in space, and in a bid to incorporate Aboriginal use of the stars within the lesson, Duncan came up. The structure followed similar prompts as traditional First Nations stories - "we went from a point of time before the stars, to a time after the stars". But the teacher realised it was missing something. There needed to be some sort of conflict.

So, after he sought input from his students, he knew that something had to be something mythical.

"The children, they wanted a dragon - there are a lot of mythological creatures that children have as touchpoints in their media, and it was always a dragon," Duncan says.

"And I was like, well, there's this story about this creature that lives in the Australian bush called a bunyip. The cool thing about the bunyip stories in Australia is not only do Aboriginal cultures from all around Australia have stories about bunyips, there are postcolonial stories.

"Colonisers heard and shared and were scared of these creatures that lived in the freshwater bodies of water in Australia."

Understandably, the bunyip was a hit, and the story would be brought out every year to a new class of students.

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Then, when the National Museum of Australia was looking for a bunyip story for its Tim and Gina Fairfax Discovery Centre, as a member of the advisory board Duncan brought the story out again. Since the centre opened last year, it was the only place outside of Duncan's class where you could what the story.

That is until the release of his new kids' book hits shelves next week. It is the first in a series of five picture books featuring stories inspired by the discovery centre.

"I had a lot of apprehension about the recording of this oral story that has continued to morph over the years ... but I'm excited with how the book has turned out," Duncan says.

"It sits within a unique part of the landscape of these stories - there are some traditional stories that have been shared by First Nations people with the museum, but mine sits slightly separately in that it's a contemporary story. This is important for everyone involved because there are a lot of sensitivities around the sharing of traditional knowledge and who can and who can't.

"And so it sits very much within the same kind of narrative structure as how the kangaroo got its pouch story that's here. But it's wholly new, and it's wholly invented by this contemporary Australian community of young people."

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