The story

Told as it is shared

Tiddalik was the biggest frog alive, and he was thirsty. He drank: the creeks, the billabongs, the rivers, the lakes, the dew on the grass. When there was no water left anywhere, the animals gathered, dry and desperate, around the swollen frog.

The wise ones worked it out: make him laugh, and the water must come back. The kookaburra told jokes; nothing. The kangaroo jumped; nothing. Then the eel danced — slowly, impossibly, unravelling her long body until she folded into knots — and Tiddalik laughed. And laughed. And the water burst from him, running back into the rivers and the lakes, and the country drank.

The story's law is the law of water: no one may take more than their share, because the share belongs to everyone and everything downstream.

Country & context

The land that holds it

Tiddalik is a story of Gunai/KurnaiKurnai — Gunaikurnai: a man, a person country in Gippsland — the lakes, rivers and coastal plains of south-eastern Victoria, where water is wealth. The Gunai nations held the waterways, the fish and the eel runs, and their law governed who could take what, and when.

Art & memory

Painted, woven, sung

Tiddalik has become one of the most widely told Australian stories in the world — published as picture books in dozens of languages, performed in school halls across the country. Each telling carries, quietly, the law of the original: water is shared, or it is lost.