Dadididi the bunyip of Djerriwarrh Creek, is the first part, of the first draft of Kyamah's story.
Click on the follower icon and complete your details. You will then be able read her next instalments. Until then, take a look at today's first few paragraphs. Pretty good effort for a nine year old.
Dadididi the bunyip
of Djerriwarrh Creek.
The Melton valley golf course now surrounds
the deep waterhole where he has lived from a time before man walked upright
until this very day. He has seen many changes, but the greed he’s witnessed dismays
and angers him. His beautiful, quiet tree lined creek now ruined by the town. The
creek, which once had once sparkled and glimmered in the sunlight, was now gooey
and slimy from all the rubbish thrown in there. These settlers had trashed his
home.
Electric
eels formed the hair on his head, sparking every time he shook the water from
his body as he rose from the creek. His bloodshot eyes glowed in the darkness
of the moonlight. Once the child is close to the ledge of the waterhole
Dadididi would slither out his tongue that fast it would go blurry. He slurps on
the children’s bones licking them clean with his rough tongue, swallowing them
whole keeping them in a sack in his stomach for exactly one hundred years until
he regurgitates them as solid gold skeletons complete with opals for teeth and
emeralds for eyes.
He
stores the bones under a rocky ledge forming a large watery tomb, but he keeps
the skulls to look out for any trespassers. He rises only at midnight on a full
kapi (moon) every December
***
It was midnight,
there was a full moon, being December, and this was a religious time for manypeople. The tribe had camped near the billabong. Children slept in a separate camp away the adults, but closer to the creek. A young girl Kiama, thirsty from the day’s trek, and not wanting to wake her
mother, went to drink at the water’s edge. She didn’t know this was the home of Dadididi, the fearsome bunyip. Cupping her hands she scooped up cool amba (water), not noticing the circle of bubbles rising from the blackened pool. Before she could taste the sweet water, the stinging roughness of the unknown creature’s sticky tongue plucked her into his foul and cavernous mouth, leaving her with no means of escape.
The
tribe woke to the frightful screams of Kiama being swallowed whole, her flesh
dissolving in the creature’s mouth. The water still again, Dadididi had slipped
beneath the surface without a trace. The only thing they could find were Kiama’s
tracks and her dillybag on the sandy bank. For
weeks, the men searched and the women sobbed, Kiama’s mother had lost her only
daughter and it was a time of great sadness. The men made markings and formed
stones into circles to warn any passersby of the dangers that lurked in the Djerriwarrh
creek.
This is a great story, Kyamah, and good enough to win any competition. Well done.
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