Austraian Folklore: the Yowie

Australian Folklore

The Land Down under is full of fascinating myth's and Legends, today we talk  about The Yowie AKA  The Bigfoot of the Outback.....


The yowie is usually described as a hairy bypidl  ape-like creature standing upright at between 6 ft 11 and possibly  upward of 12 ft in height.

The yowie's feet are described as much larger than a human's, but alleged yowie tracks are inconsistent in shape and toe number, and the descriptions of yowie foot and footprints provided by witnesses are even more varied than those of the North American cryptid Bigfoot.

The yowie's Call's / Screams are often described as flat or wide.

The Yowie, like most other living things seems to vary in widly in both personality and behavior with  some report saying the creature is timid or shy,
and Others describe it as sometimes violent.

According to an articale published in The Sydney Morning Herald back in 1987, columnist Margaret Jones wrote that the first Australian yowie sighting that was said to have taken place as early as 1795. Though Aboriginal legend's date back hundreds of years earlier...


Rex Gilroy has been studing/ hunting the yowie since the mid-1970s.

Gilroy claims to have collected over 3000 reports over the years.

Mr Gilroy believes that the yowie is related to the North American Bigfoot. Rex Gilroy along with his partner Heather Gilroy,  have spent fifty years amassing his yowie collection, claiming to have  identified at least four different species of yowie, which he believes are a sub-species of Homo erectus.

Another well know yowie researcher called Tim the Yowie Man. Is a published author and claims to have seen a yowie in the Brindabella Ranges in 1994.

Since then, Tim  has investigated yowie sightings and other paranormal phenomena in varied fields. He also writes a regular column in Australian newspapers The Canberra Times and The Sydney Morning Herald.

In 2004, Tim the Yowie Man won a legal case against Cadbury, a popular British confectionery company known for the (Cabbury Cream Egg's) popular arond Easter.
Cadbury had claimed that his moniker was too similar to their range of Yowie confectionery.


Yowie sightings in the 1800's......


In the 1870s, accounts of an "Indigenous Ape" appeared in the Australian Town and Country Journal.
The earliest account dating back to  November 1876 asked there readers; "Who has not heard, from the earliest settlement of the colony, the blacks (Aboriginals) speaking of some unearthly
animal or inhuman creature ... namely the Yahoo-Devil, or hairy man

In an article entitled "Australian Apes" appearing six years later, amateur naturalist Henry James McCooey claimed to have seen an "indigenous ape" on the south coast of New South Wales,
between Batemans Bay and Ulladulla.

MaCooey-- A few days ago I saw one of these strange creatures ... on the coast between Batemans Bay and Ulladulla ... I should think that if it were standing perfectly upright it would
be nearly 5 feet high. It was tailless and covered with very long black hair, which was of a dirty red or snuff-colour about the throat and breast.
Its eyes, which were small and restless, were partly hidden by matted hair that covered its head ... I threw a stone at the animal, whereupon it immediately rushed off ..

McCooey offered to capture an ape for the Australian Museum for £40. According to Robert Holden, a second outbreak of reported ape sightings appeared in 1912.
, The Yowie

the yowie appeared in Donald Friend's Hillendiana,  a collection of writings about the goldfields near Hill End in New South Wales. Friend refers to the yowie as a species of bunyip.

Holden also cites the appearance of the yowie in a number of Australian tall tales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.




Other Yowie Sightings .....

In 2010, a Canberra man said he saw an animal described as "a juvenile covered in hair, with long arms that almost touched the ground" in his garage.
A friend later told him it could be a yowie.

A few Accounts of  yowie sightings in the New South Wales area

In 1977, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald reported that residents on Oxley Island near Taree recently heard screaming noises made by an animal at night.
Cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy was mentioned in the article as soon to arrive in the area in search of the mythological yowie.
   
In 1994, Tim the Yowie Man claimed to have seen a yowie in the Brindabella Ranges.
   
In 1996, while on vacation a couple from Newcastle claim to have seen a yowie between Braidwood and the coast. They said it was a shaggy creature, walking upright, standing at a height of at least 2.1 meters tall, with disproportionately long arms and no neck. similar to a lot of Bigfoot sightings..

   
In August 2000, a Canberra bushwalker described seeing an unknown bipedal beast in the Brindabella Mountains. The bushwalker, Steve Piper, caught the incident on videotape.
That film is known as the 'Piper Film'.
   
In March 2011, a witness reported to Ne South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service seeing a yowie in the Blue Mountains at Springwood, west of Sydney.
The witness had filmed the creature, and taken photographs of its footprints.

   
In May 2012, a United States television crew claimed it had recorded audio of a yowie in a remote region on the NSW-Queensland border.
   
In June 2013, a Lismore resident and music videographer claimed to have seen a yowie just north of Bexhill.

In the mid-1970s, the Queanbeyan Festival Board and 2CA together offered a AU$200,000 reward to anyone who could capture and present a yowie: the reward is yet to be claimed.



Australia, Northern Territory..

In the late 1990s, there were several reports of yowie sightings in the area around Acacia Hills. One such sighting was by a mango farmer named Katrina Tucker who reported in 1997 having been just meters away from a hairy humanoid creature on her property.  Photographs of the footprint were collected at the time.

Sightings in Queensland

The Springbrook region in south-east Queensland has had more yowie reports than anywhere else in Australia.

In 1977, former Queensland Senator Bill O'Chee reported to the Gold Coast Bulletin he had seen a yowie while on a school trip in Springbrook. O'Chee compared the creature he saw as looking similar to Chewbacca from Star Wars.  He told reporters that the creature he saw had been over 3 meters tall.

Reports in the 2000's

A more resent account is that of the Mulgowie Yowie, which was last reported around  2001.

In March 2014, two yowie searchers claimed to have filmed the yowie in South Queensland using an infrared tree camera, collected fur samples, and found large footprints.
Later that year, a Gympie man told media he had encountered yowies on several occasions, including conversing with, and teaching some English to, a very large male yowie
in the bush north east of Gympie,  and several people in Port Douglas claimed to have seen yowies, near Mowbray and at the Rocky Point range.


Other names for the Yowie......


Wawee, Yaroma, Jimbra, Noocoonah, pangkarlangu,  and tjangara.

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More cryptid post's coming soon...

Have a great day.