Giants From the Dreamtime the Yowie In Myth And Reality

Sussex Inlet About 1910

Large hairy Beast

During the course of a 1979 Yowie investigation on the NSW far South Coast, I was told the following early settler tales by Mr. Alf Collier of Sussex Inlet, who will figure prominently later in our search for the 'hairy man'.

The tradition concerns his father-in-law, Mr. Norman Alsop who, as a 10 year old child, lived on his families property at the foot of Sassafras Mountain near Sussex Inlet about 1910. One day he and his brother carrying a bucket and accompanied by their two Kangaroo Dogs went to get water from a nearby creek. Suddenly they were surprised by a large hairy beast which ran across the track in front of them, from out of surrounding bush, frightening them. The dogs ran off terrified, their tails between their legs.

When the boys ran home they thought it had been their father playing a trick on them. "Ah, we saw you Dad," they said, but the father who was a tall man denied having left the house, and although the boys thought he had dressed up in a kangaroo skin he firmly denied it. As their had apparently been a number of reported sightings claims in the district of big, hairy humanoid creatures their father thereafter never again allowed them to go for water alone.....

Mount Victoria ,Victoria Falls, Grose Valley 1890's-1900's

Hairy gorilla-like male creature 1910

Mount Victoria residents at the time recalled that, during the 1800's, early settlers believed, on the basis of sightings, that a 'family' of yowies lived in the bush on the Victoria Falls road three miles east of the township above the Grose Valley. It is said in about 1910, two men were bushwalking in the Victoria Falls area when a three-metre-tall, hairy gorilla-like male creature charged at them from out of dense scrub.

He had a large rock in his hand which he hurled at the men, hitting one of them and killing him instantly. His companion somehow managed to run from the monster. The next day, a party of men with guns and dogs returned to the scene with the survivor, but apart from some blood on the ground his companion's body was nowhere to be found. It was assumed his body had been carried off by the man-beast.....

Ally Valley Forests 1910

Young Gigantopithecine

One peaceful, sunny morning in 1910, deep in the Allyn Valley forests, two men were engaged in sawing a cedar log in half. [Note: The old crosscut saw method of sawing meant a lot of time was spent in a recumbent position on one knee, sometimes both, and the head in such a position as to restrict the viewing area.] They suddenly got that eerie feeling that they were not alone. Pausing a moment, they could hardly believe what they saw.

"Strewth, when we saw what it was we actually believed for a few moments we'd taken leave of our senses"....., said one of the men years later when recounting the incident. Standing behind, and only about 1.6 m away from one of them was the weirdest creature they would ever meet up with in a lifetime spent in the bush.

"Scarce four feet tall, but tremendous width and thickness of body, covered with short, jet black and very curly, coarse looking hair, arms that reached to well below its knees; feet big enough for any three or four ordinary men, bull neck whereon rested a head and facial features like those big apes you see in the kids books."

"Dunno how long we gaped at it, but it made no sound nor offered to go for us, its big black eyes seemed to say it was just as flabbergasted as we were. When we got our wits back we left everything and went as fast as we could for the camp, about half a mile away."

Having arrived back at camp and having no firearms, they stayed just long enough to eat a hurried meal, pack food and other belongings, then left for home, fully expecting to see or hear their uncouth looking visitor arrive any minute and perhaps start after them, or perhaps even worse, arrive with others of its kind! What had these men seen? Their description, if accurate, seems to suggest something closer to an ape than the more human-like Yowie. A young Gigantopithecine perhaps?

New England Ranges 1910

Human-like Giant

Around 1910, outside Tamworth in the foothills of the New England ranges, two men hunting in mountains behind the town found two enormous footprints imprinted in soil. Exploring further in the direction of the footprints, they came upon "a human-like giant about 7 ft in height". It had, they said a powerful muscular body and arms and short light coloured hair on it's head and body. The manbeast moved off into scrub.

"We let him walk away without shooting him, because we feared we might be shooting a man that had gone wild when he was a young bloke", they said later. The men went for help in the town and later returned with other bushmen; but apart from the large tracks, the mystery hominid was nowhere to be found.

Today the 'hairy man' remains a prominent feature of local [New England] folklore, and recently made stone implements lately coming to light in the mountain country behind Nundle certainly suggest these hominid primitives from another age are still with us.

The interesting fact about these recently-manufactured stone implements is that they differ little from other, far more ancient 'dawn tools', lately beginning to turn up around the shores of long vanished, ice-age lakes in the New England and Central Western districts of NSW, and which resemble those once manufactured in Asia by Homo erectus, the ancestor of modern humans.

Atherton District 1910

Stone-age Peoples

One former bushman who took an interest in these traditions was the late Lou Jessup of Rockhampton, who in 1970 wrote to me with the following stories, gathered in Far North Qld and the Northern Territory in the course of his travels. He writes: "I am convinced that old blackfellow's legends of a race of giant Aborigines is based upon fact, and that some of these stone-age people survived into quite recent times."

"I once saw an old 'Young Australians' annual of 1910. In a chapter on life in the Qld bush, I read a story of an incident that took place in the Atherton district, inland from Cairns in 1897, when a party of 'several native men of prodigious height, and three black women of slightly smaller proportions and their piccaninnies' were seen on the edge of a property by the owner, a Mr Bayley and two jackaroos."

Sumatra 1910

Sedapa

Spread throughout the Malaysian subregion, which comprises the foot of the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo and Java is a mass of Asian folklore concerning small to giant-size hominids reminiscent of Australian Homo erectus-type races. In Sumatra there is the 'Orang Pendek', or 'Sedapa' meaning "Little man".

He is described by Sumatrans as being man-sized, very hairy, walks and runs like a human, although it is said to have a face more ape than man in appearance. Its legs are also shorted than a normal human's, and it has longer arms.

This description was give of one of these creatures in 1910, by an overseer on an estate, who was it while surveying a large tract of forest land in the Barisans Mountains near Loobuk Salasik. He observed the creature at a distance of 15 yards. The mystery manimal gave the man and his workers a disagreeable look, then retreated back into the bush.

New Zealand - Coromandel 1910

Male hominid Giant-2m Tall Female

Back in 1910 a hairy male hominid giant a good 3m tall was claimed seen standing in a field by a Coromandel farmer, Some months later a 2m tall female, ape-like creature appeared on a creek edge at another nearby farm and was seen by the startled property owner, his wife and children.

The amount of information obtained from this region has encouraged Heather and I to make repeated visits here. It is an area where Moehau encounters with Europeans date back over 100 years.