Weedah, Voice-Mimicking Killer

Overview

Weedah builds more than twenty grass shelters and lights fires before them. Moving between shelters, he imitates babies, children, women and men so rapidly that travellers imagine a populated camp. He draws solitary visitors toward a large fire, dismisses their hearing as confused and throws them into the flames.

Mullyan the eagle-hawk follows his missing cousin’s tracks and notices that many trails enter but none leave. Pretending to accept Weedah’s deception, he instead throws the killer into the fire. Weedah’s head bursts with a thunderlike sound and a mocking bird emerges. Parker’s narration links its head mark, grass playgrounds and vocal mimicry with this transformation; the bird is not presented as Weedah’s original bodily form.

The deception exploits both curiosity and the appearance of a community: each empty shelter has a fire, and the voices include different ages as well as different speakers. Weedah offers natural explanations for what visitors heard, attributing apparent crying to wind in the trees and apparent women’s laughter to another bird. His stated purpose is to gain the surrounding country by killing neighbours. Mullyan’s missing cousin is named Beeargah; the eagle-hawk tracks him from the kangaroo hunt toward the false camp and identifies the one-way trails as evidence of danger. In the ending, the bird emerges specifically from the remains after the back of Weedah’s head bursts; the narrator connects a hole in its head with that event.

Origins & earliest records

K. Langloh Parker, Australian Legendary Tales (London: David Nutt, 1896), Weedah the Mocking Bird, pp. 30–34.

Records & interpretation

Complete selected English retelling directly read.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

1. 01

   Australian Legendary Tales: Weedah the Mocking Bird, pp. 30–34

   K. Langloh Parker, collector and English reteller; individual storyteller unassigned · 1896

   Complete selected tale inspected.

2. 02

   Australian Legendary Tales: Weedah the Mocking Bird

   K. Langloh Parker · 1896

   Complete hosted English narrative supplies the additional deception, Beeargah tracking and precise emergence details; digital text not guaranteed to follow one specific paper edition.

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

1. Primary collected textParker 1896: Weedah the Mocking BirdResearch access: 2026-10-05
2. Primary historical collected narrativeParker: Weedah, hosted complete narrativeResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.