Excerpts from "Mysterious Australia".. All rights reserved.
For thousands of years, the former Dharuk tribal Aborigines of the central coast, north of Sydney, preserved traditions of enormous reptilian 'water monsters' which, they told early European settlers last century, inhabited the nearby Hawkesbury River.
Their ancient cave art along the river includes depictions of these mystery creatures, which they called "Mirreeulla" ("giant water serpent"), described as having a snakelike head, long neck, a large body with two sets of flippers, and a long eel-like tail.
The Aboriginal description of these animals also matches that of European sightings of the creatures since last century, from Wisemans Ferry at the western end of the river, eastward to the Broken Bay-Brisbane Waters expanse at the river's mouth.
I have had a 30-year-long fascination with the`water monsters' of the Hawkesbury River, during which time I have gathered over several hundred reported sightings of the creatures dating from last century to the present-more than enough to convince me that they are no mere mythical Aboriginal 'bunyip', but living survivors from geological times.
My researches into these mysterious creatures many years ago led me to coin the name "Hawkesbury River Monste? in describing them, and the name has stuck.
The general physical description of the "Mirreeulla" is unmistakable: they resemble the plesiosaurus, or some ancient marine reptile very much like it.
Scientists who ridicule the plesiosaur survival theory, and dismiss outright our very own Hawkesbury River "Nessie" as nonsense, should recall the coelacanth, the fish once thought extinct since dinosaur times until a living specimen was caught off the African coast in 1938. This fact leads zoologists to speculate that many more species of long-thought-extinct or as-yet-unknown species of sea life still await discovery in the ocean depths.
That a form of marine reptile from the age of dinosaurs could still survive in the Hawkesbury River must, understandably, seem absurd to many people. Yet, when one considers the often enormous widths, the great depths, the length of the river (up to 120 kilometres) and its many branches snaking off in all directions, there is more than enough room for such creatures to have survived and bred undisturbed for centuries, as the following case histories suggest.
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