Australian myths such as the Yowie shed light on a complicated history

These cryptids or mythical animals have captured Australia's imagination and the mystery has been spurred on by livestock mutilation and the furtive darkness of the Australian bush.

Federation University historian and folklorist David Waldron said the tales had dominated Australian folklore since European settlement. It revealed a narrative on Australian identity and early encounters with Indigenous knowledge of the land.

"It re-enchants the bush," he said.

"It makes the bush mysterious and magical and has a sense of danger to it."

Reports of large cat-like predators on mainland Australia started to emerge during early settlement in the 1830s and these tales continued to excite Australians.

The Penrith Panthers rugby team owe their name to the infamous story of the big cat that locals claim has lurked around the Blue Mountains area for more than a century.

Locals in Gippsland and the Grampians occasionally report big cat sightings with entire Facebook pages devoted to chronicling cat sightings.

Dr Waldron has written extensively about mythical big cats on the loose in the countryside in regions such as Gippsland, the Otways and Penrith.

"Myths of big cats have been around really since first colonisation in Australia," he said.

"The early idea was that Australia had a large marsupial predatory cat, this was replaced after the gold rush with the idea that circuses and immigrants from Asia had brought big cats over with them and they got loose and bred, like rabbits."

Dr Waldron said legitimate fears on introduced species running amok such as cane toads and rabbits drove the hysteria in early folklore.

"You combine all those together and you've got a bit of a perfect storm in folklore around the myth of big cats in the bush," he said.

Creatures like the Yowie and the Bunyip are thought to have arose from miscommunication as colonial Australians encountered Indigenous folklore.

The word 'Banib' referred to a creature known to the Wemba Wemba people of north western Victoria and the Riverina region. A similar creature also appeared in the stories of the Wadawurrung people around Port Philip bay.

The myth of the Banib became known to white Australian society as the bunyip which is generally said to be an amphibious monster, dark in colour, found lurking in swamps, creeks and billabongs.

"The tricky thing is we have a story from a particular Indigenous people about a particular mythology that white people have interpreted in terms of their ways of knowing, and then applied across all of Australia," Dr Waldron said.

"People have taken the word and gone off looking for a particular animal, and gone to other Indigenous communities, asking them about bunyip.

"The white people think they're using Indigenous terminology, but the Indigenous people think they're hearing a white word."

"Then all these different mythologies get shoehorned into the word bunyip, when it's a variety of different water creatures from different language groups and communities," he said.

One phenomenon driving the big cat mythology is livestock mutilation.

When cattle or sheep were killed in ways that were particularly vicious or left strange carcasses it added to the mystery of large predatory animals, he said.

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Animal mutilation inspired a satanic panic in the 1980s in the United States and other Western countries as people theorised animals were being used for bizarre rituals.

"People get upset and distressed when they lose stock in a manner that doesn't seem to fit the experiences they're familiar with caused by feral dogs," Dr Waldron said.

"Our folklore draws attention to traumas in the past to reconnect with. Think about the trauma caused by the chaos and destruction wrought by rabbits and by feral animals in the countryside. This gets manifested around the figure of the big cat.

"Folklore is important to us. It's the way we connect with the past."