Giants From the Dreamtime the Yowie In Myth And Reality

Snowy Mountains Investigations 1991

Many sightings reported occur around June

In January 1991 my wife Heather and I made an extensive visit to the Snowy Mountains, during which we climbed Mount Kosciusko to investigate the locations of many reports I have received from this region over the years. It is a barren, desolate, windswept and generally inhospitable place for humans to be trapped in. How, then, are our Australian man-beasts able to survive among the rocks of this rugged massif? It may seem unlikely but they do.

The Snowy Mountains region has produced a great many hairy man-beast encounters. Observations reported to me by property owners of the Providence Portal area near Cabramurra have confirmed my own research findings which show that many of these reports occur about June, following the first winter snowfall, when the animal life of the high country migrates into the lower regions to escape the excessively cold conditions of the mountain tops.

It is at this time that sightings of man-beasts or discoveries of their footprints, often on snow covered ground, are most prevelant.

Homo erectus Discoveries 1991

Stone Implements

It was while on a visit to the Nundle State Forest area, east of Hanging Rock, together with my wife Heather, on January 21st, that I stumbled upon an open area atop a deep gully overlooking a vast wilderness that stretched to the eastern horizon. Scattered about the area I found a number of what were undoubtedly only weeks old, crudely flaked stone tools; scrapers, choppers and other implements.

Within a few days I had found another site containing crude choppers and scrapers, once again situated in a very remote, out of the way area of dense bushland; tools that appeared to be only a few months old. I have seen primitive implements of identical appearance over the past few years at other locations, scattered about the former shoreline of a long-vanished giant lake system that covers a vast area to the west of Tamworth, and which had been part of an extensive series of inter-connecting lakes extending north-west to Moree and southward down towards Mudgee during the last ice-age.

Yet the crude implements found around this former lake pre-dated any Aboriginal examples and are identical to those manufactured by Home erectus in Java and China. The massive lake systems in question dried up within the last 15,000 years, although deposits near Attunga, to the north of Tamworth, where the first Homo erectus tools were identified by me in 1991, date back around 400,000 years.

Covering many hundreds of square kilometres, these great water supplies would have attracted primitive Homo erectus people and later humans, who fed upon the abundant fish, giant marsupial and other fauna that roamed the shores. I theorise, based upon the available evidence, that wandering groups of Homo erectus people, having entered Australia over a vast period of time, penetrated the Central West/New England region, to congregate around the shores of these vast lakes, and gradually evolve into the first modern humans, who in turn eventually spread northwards beyond Australia.

That this region was the very epicentre of modern human evolution is a proposition which only future archaeological discoveries can vindicate. Yet wherever that 'epicentre' was, there can be little doubt that it was somewhere on this continent.

Panklanka People 1991

Ferocious man-Eaters

It was from Alice Springs Aborigine, Jack Adams that I learnt the following information in 1991: "The Panklanka People relish the taste of aboriginal flesh, and will kill any aboriginal man, woman or child that happen to cross their path, and they also kill and eat any white people they catch too."

"They carry big wooden clubs with which they kill their victims. If they eat them raw on the spot they will cut them up with big stone knives. These monsters are so big and tall that they are able to tuck the bodies of people they have killed into belts of hair-string around their waist if they want to carry them back to their camps for cooking."

"Before they cook an Aborigine they crush the bones with their big, powerful hands, or pound away at the body with a club. Then they break the back into sections and remove the intestines, and bury the body in an earth trench. A fire is then lit above it just like we cook kangaroos."

"After the body is cooked it is dismembered; first by breaking the spine, and then removing the chest and ribs with a big stone knife. Sometimes those big blokes won't eat the head right away. Instead, they stick it in the fork of a tree high up above the ground to eat later."

Brodribb River 1991

Large dark long-haired man-like Creature

Bushwalker Robert Littlemore, of Melbourne, informed me that, one day in January 1991, he was hiking on the Brodribb River north of Orbost, when he met with three other campers walking hurriedly along a bush track. They told him they had just seen a large, dark long-haired, man-like creature further up the track at a creek.

Robert said he was a sceptic about such things at this time and only ridiculed their story, continuing on along the track. However, when he reached the creek bank he came upon a number of large "man-ape" [as he called them] like footprints in the mud. They were at least twice the size of a normal adult human foot.

"There was also an almost overpowering decaying stench about the area, but I couldn't see any dead animal. It was then that I began to get an uneasy feeling. There were sounds of snapping foliage in the nearby scrub, and I caught sight of a tall, dark figure moving among the trees." "I waited no longer and quickly retreated the way I had come.

Although I have been a sceptic in the past about paranormal and unexplained mysteries, I'm a little more open-minded now, particularly on the subject of the Yowie." Robert later collected a number of local ancient Aboriginal traditions of the 'hairy man' of north-eastern Victoria; but when he consulted university anthropologists about them, these 'scientists' dismissed them as nothing more than mere superstitious ramblings.

Yet such Aboriginal narratives are not to be so light-heartedly dismissed as mere primitive superstition.

Northern Victorian tribes once spoke of a race of primitive, stone tool-making people that roamed the Kow district of northern Victoria, and who differed physically from the Aborigines. In 1967 archaeologists excavated fossil remains at Kow Swamp of a people whose skulls displayed facial features of Homo erectus [Java man] appearance [see Chapter Four].

And, I would like to further point out, many Aboriginal oral traditions have a base of scientific fact. The great flood theme, when the ice-age withdrew 85 m of water from the oceans, to form land-bridges between continents and then, later, when the ice-caps melted and inundated the land-bridges, is one.

Hanging Rock Area 1991

Tall hairy male Creature

Then in March 1991 a lone tourist while bushwalking above the gorge near 'Hanging Rock', sighted a tall hairy male creature about 2.6m in height, as it ambled along a bush track in a gully below. He watched the creature with binoculars for a few minutes until it moved out of sight among the trees. Most of the locals need little convincing of the existence of these primitive, hairy hominids in the wilderness around them and have many personal experiences to relate.

Cameron Mountains 1991

Man-ape Footprints

In the Cameron Mountains, inland from the south-west tip of South Island, during November 1991, campers found several 45cm long, 'man-ape' footprints in dense forest. The tracks were barely an hour old, so the men abandoned their camp and moved elsewhere.