The Mulgara and Aboriginal ‘hairy man’ traditions in Central Australia

Record summary

Central Australian Aboriginal traditions concerning hairy men, dangerous bush beings and human-animal transformations were recorded in twentieth-century ethnography and popular writing, sometimes under regional names such as mulgara or related ‘wild man’ terms. The material is useful for comparing European werewolf assumptions with Aboriginal narrative categories, where spirit beings, ancestral figures and human disguises may not map neatly onto shape-shifting. The exact identity and spelling of beings vary by language community, and popular cryptozoological retellings often detach accounts from their cultural context.