My Yowie Hunt: The True Story of Australia’s Hairy Man…
Finn Connolly |13/10/2023| 15 min read - 37 min listen
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUGFLMOfzrM&ab_channel=FinnC_WS
Background Music via: www.fesliyanstudios.com/
Yurri, Yaori, Quinkin, Yahoo, Yowie. The many names attributed to Australia’s legendary hairy man…
Australia is covered in dense bush land, a lot of which remains untouched by human hands. While I was never taught by my parents to fear the bush, I was always told to be careful, considering how many people have gone missing in the area where I grew up. There are a million reasons why that could happen. Landslides, heat exhaustion, snake bite. Some of these people are eventually found. A few never are…
It is always a tragedy when someone dies like that, but in the cases where a body is found we can at least determine what happened to them, grieve and then learn.
Which is why the cases of people vanishing completely have always terrified me.
While it could have been like any of the other accidents that happen in the bush there is no way to be 100% sure…
That void where certainty belongs, demands to be filled… And for many it is filled by a monster. The Yowie
Like most staples of Australian culture, the Yowie is rarely taken seriously. To many the Yowie is a ghost story and to many more, a discontinued brand of chocolate. But to a few the Yowie is very real part of Australia’s ecosystem… A tall, hairy creature that on occasion preys upon humans and kills them.
Sightings of The Yowie have taken place across Australia’s history, from the present day to early colonial times and further back still into stories of the dreaming. Since colonisation these sightings have often been written off as tall tales. However, upon reviewing the history of Yowie sightings, I began to see that nearly every account describes near to the same thing…
The sounds of crashing trees followed by an intense smell and an overpowering sense of dread…
And then from the bush emerges an 8ft tall mass of red, brown fur…
Whether there is such thing as a Yowie, there must be an explanation for the Yowie phenomenon. Across the vast history of our continent why do Australians keep seeing these hairy men? Who are they? What are they? And if this creature does not exist, then what are people seeing? And why?
Is the Yowie a monster? Or an attempt to explain the unexplainable?
Here is my hunt for the Yowie and what I discovered about Australia’s most enduring cryptid and man’s fear of the unknown
While I entered this investigation a sceptic I was willing if not wanting to be proven wrong. Explaining disappearances as the fault of a monster was terrifying and yet in my mind, it was comforting, compared to no explanation at all.
During my search for information on the Yowie I came across the work of Dean Harrison, a Yowie expert and survivor.
After surviving several Yowie encounters Dean has since pledged his life to finding definitive proof of the Yowie’s existence. Dean also runs the Australian Yowie Research website which serves as a database of Yowie sightings and a forum for witnesses to discuss their experiences.
I reached out to Dean to ask what the Yowie is and what evidence supports its existence. I was surprised to learn that it is the theory of many Yowie believers that the monster could be an unrecorded species of ape.
According to Dean the Yowie has dark red fur, large, long arms and a flat face which some people have compared that of a baboon or orangutan. The Yowie also stands at around 8 feet tall and uses its powerful arms to swing from tree’s.
While this was a certainly more believable description of the creature than that of a phantasmagorical spectre or a green skinned gremlin it still posed a number of questions?
There are no recorded fossils of primates in Australia yet.
And how can an ape get so big?
Fortunately, Dean had answers to both my questions. Here is the Yowie expert case for the Yowie or rather Australia’s great ape…
Gigantopithecus was a giant hominid or ape that lived anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. It is believed to have been able to stand at 8 feet tall, have been covered in red or brown fur, have a flat face like that of an orangutan (which is a living ancestor) and had long powerful arms. A nearly identical description to the many Yowie sightings. Yet Gigantopithecus has been dead for over a hundred thousand years…
Dean reminds me that Australia was once connected to the rest of the world by a land bridge. Supposedly one of the many giant apes living in Asia at the time could have crossed into Australia long ago, evolved in the bush and eventually would have been isolated from the rest of the world when the land bridge disappeared 7,000 years ago.
Following that information, I asked that if Yowie’s are in fact such large creatures then why are they not seen more often living or dead?
Dean tells me that if we are operating with the theory the Yowie is indeed an ape, it is safe to say it is social and intelligent. The theory is that Yowie’s likely operate in clan-based societies like other primates, living and hunting together. If one were to die another Yowie would be nearby to bury it. While the burying of dead is not something that has been observed as common practice among modern primates, Dean refers to the Neanderthals and how they buried each other hundreds of thousands of years ago.
This begged the question, what of the odd few who die away from the group? Bodies of ancient humans have been found unburied after being killed out in the wild, why not Yowie’s?
Dean is quick to remind be that Australia is a large continent, similar in size to the United States of America. Where as the United States has 300 million people, Australia has under 30 million. Much of our country remains uncharted and even more unsettled. As such it is Deans belief that the discovery of Yowie remains is only a matter of time.
While many details from the Yowie’s description match with that of ancient apes, there are some common details in sightings that even Dean admits are unexplainable. Many survivors, including Dean have described being overwhelmed by an overpowering sense of dread, being confronted by the smell of rot or sulphur and sometimes even a pair of glowing eyes…
While this more supernatural part of the Yowie phenomenon could not be explained, Dean states that these abilities could still be possible considering how many other animals in Australia have adopted strange, almost supernatural traits.
I began my research as a sceptic and remained so after talking to Dean, yet in my mind, his points made a fair deal of sense. Australia once had a land bridge in the north and giant apes did once reside close to it. In my mind the suggestion that a giant ape such as Gigantopithecus could cross into Australia and live in the bush did not seem totally implausible. Even near supernatural abilities such as glowing eyes did not seem completely impossible when considering the many other strange animals that live in Australia and their even stranger niche’s.
However, I could not be certain that a giant ape roamed the bush yet. I decided to test the giant ape theory and ran it by paleo biologist Herve Bocherens to determine whether a gigantic hominid from thousands of years ago could have come to Australia…
Herve Bocherens is a Paleo Biologist and professor at the University of Tubingen. He had this to say about the giant ape Yowie theory…
“The current consensus is that there was never a terrestrial land bridge between Asia and Australia but always a significant sea way to be crossed to reach Australia from the landmass of Asia, even when the sea level was at its lowest, during the peak of glaciations. Otherwise, many more terrestrial species would have migrated from Asia to Australia, and this is clearly not the case”.
“Moreover, during the low sea level (glacial) periods, the vegetation was more savanna than forest, and Gigantopithecus was restricted to forest habitats”.
Based on expert opinion it seemed as if, gigantopithecus, my theorised Yowie culprit most likely could not have crossed into Australia. While other giant Hominid’s such a Meganthropus existed close by it does not change the fact that what is considered the land bridge was likely, for the most part, underwater. Even if it the land bridge was in fact land there would be little reason for a forest creature to cross it.
It should also be noted that it is believed giant Hominids such as Gigantopithecus went extinct as there was no longer enough food to support its massive size. Herve states that while there is always a chance Gigantopithecus could have found the food it needed to support itself in Australia, we cannot be sure. More importantly there is likely no way for it to have crossed into the country in the first place.
I felt like something like this was coming and yet a part of me still held on to hope that the giant ape was in fact the explanation for the Yowie phenomenon… Unfortunately, according to science that theory is unlikely…
However, if a giant ape does not in exist in the Australian bush then what are people seeing? And why are the descriptions almost always the same?
Across history people have had similar visions all over the continent, but why?
I decided to review the history of Yowie sightings once again to see if there was some explanation for the mass phenomenon that is the sightings of the hairy man…
Recorded sightings begin in the 19th century with the creature known as the Yahoo. According to Dean the Yahoo is now considered another name for the Yowie. A piece in the Australian Town and Country Journal from 1876 details the Yahoo phenomenon.
“Who has not heard, from the earliest settlement of the colony, the blacks speaking of some un-earthly animal or inhuman creature, that inhabited some part of the wildest, inaccessible, rugged and sequestered haunts of Rocky Mountains and gorges in the colony namely—the Yahoo, Devil -Devil, or the Hairy Man of the Wood—which to this day they stand in fearful awe and terror of”.
Following this article, Naturalist Henry James McCooey claims to have spotted the creature in Batemans Bay in 1882. He describes the creature as “Tailless with very long black hair, which was of a dirty red or snuff colour about the throat and breast”.
McCooey’s account and the piece in the Australian Town and Country Journal suggest that by the late 19th century, the Yahoo was a topic that was discussed throughout the country . In a 2003 Journal article, Historian Graham Joyner supports this, stating that there are accounts from 1842 of Naturalists debating the creature’s existence. The piece also refers to First Nations accounts of the Yahoo, suggesting that sightings have in fact occurred long before Europeans came to Australia.
Graham Joyner who wrote the 2003 Journal article “Scientific reaction to evidence for the yahoo or 'Australian ape” has also written several articles and books on the Yahoo/Yowie including “Monster, Myth or Lost Marsupial? The Search for the Australian Gorilla in the Jungles of History, Science and Language”, an infamous text among Yowie hunting circles. Throughout his work as a historian, Joyner has explained how the Yahoo was in fact, a story introduced by Europeans.
According to Dean the word Yahoo is an indigenous word. However, Joyner states that the term Yahoo was brought over to Australia by Europeans and introduced to First Nations Australians who would go on to repeat the phrase, making it appear indigenous. According to Joyner there is no evidence to suggest the term “Yahoo” came from an indigenous source, however it has been used by Europeans since before the British landed in Australia.
The term “Yahoo” famously appears in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel “Gulliver’s Travels”. The protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver encounters a race of violent, hairy men called the Yahoo in an undiscovered country. At the time Gulliver’s travels was an incredibly popular book with English Dramatist John Gray stating “It is universally read from the cabinet council to the nursery”. As such many European settlers would have likely been familiar with the story and the phrase Yahoo.
While the term Yahoo may have been introduced by Europeans, it is not enough to prove that the Yahoo story was fabricated by them also. There exist many First Nations stories that are similar to the Yahoo that the myth could have come from. If Joyner is correct and Yahoo is an introduced word, there is still a chance First Nations people had a similar the hairy man myth before the arrival of the English, but called the creature by a different name.
It is believed that one of these names is “Dulugal”. Dulugal is a word that has appeared in Dhurga and Dharawal languages, the meaning of which, according to some linguists is “Gorilla like legendary creature”.
While this term could be a description of a creature like the Yahoo, Joyner claims that this phrase is in fact mistranslated. Joyner states that all available examples of the word “Dulugal” were not considered and that upon reviewing every source the word was found not to have an exact equivalent in English. According to Joyner Dulugal refers to something akin to ghosts or spirits. A giant ape, sought after by Europeans would be called Dulugal by Dhurga speaking people because it is elusive or mythical. However, a few linguists have interpreted that to mean that because Dhurga speaking people refer to the European ape myth as Dulugal then Dulugal must mean giant ape.
Joyner refers to an example of a linguist speaking to a Dhurga informant. The linguist asked why Dulugal was like a gorilla to which the informant replied, “He is the gorilla type, but we call him in our (tribe) Dulugal, see.”
In defence of the Dulugal, hairy man theory, the Dharawal story “Wattun’goori the Story of the Hairy Men. How the Banksias Came to Be” mentions a group of tall hairy men called the “Dooligah”. Dharawal elder, Francis Bodkin has written the story in her book “Dharrawal dreaming stories”, in which the tall, hairy Dooligah’s, driven by hunger in a time of drought, kidnap a few Dharrawal children to eat them. The day is saved by another group of small hairy men called the Kuritjah’s who prevent a war between the Dharawal’s and Dooligah’s by luring the hairy men into hollow Kurrajong tree’s and trap them there. The Dooligah people remain trapped in the trees while the little hairy Kuritjah’s keep watch on the branches and over time, become the banksia flower. The story ends by reminding the audience that the Dooligah’s are constantly trying to escape and that the only thing holding them back is the watchful Kuritjah’s.
According to Joyner Dulugal was found in the Dharawal language of which the very similar Dooligah exists in. Furthermore, it’s description as a tall hairy man is very similar to the Yahoo or Yowie. However, Bodkin reminds the audience in a foreword that these traditional stories exist to teach people how to live harmoniously with the land stating “The stories do not in themselves act as an instruction manual - rather they point the way and encourage the People to think, to learn and to live. It is hoped that by sharing our stories, you too may be able to think, to learn and to live in This Land”.
The hairy men exist in this story to remind people that nature is protecting us in the form of Banksia flowers and that by disrespecting nature by cutting down trees we may unleash a monster such as the Dooligah.
Even in this instance, where a “hairy man” story does exist in Indigenous culture, the guiding moral of the legend is far different from modern tales. The story of the Dooligah has a message about looking after the earth for our own good whereas the 19th century Yahoo craze and modern Yowie myth just tell of a simple hairy monster. Furthermore, at the end of the story the Dooligah is trapped inside a tree unlike the Yahoo or Yowie which continues to roam the bush.
While this could mean the word “Dulugal” may still refer to a hairy man as well as ghost or spirit, the moral of the original story is hardly present in today’s telling. In either case it’s part in the Australian ape theory is either the result of the mistranslation of language like Joyner suggests or the misinterpretation of a story.
In my mind the Yowie theory’s remaining credibility hinged on the thousands of years of alleged witnesses. In the case of Dulugal and Dooligah, these accounts of supposedly giant apes were likely the result of a misunderstanding. I began to wonder how many First Nations accountings of great, ape like monster were just stories that were simply misunderstood on the part of Europeans. The supposedly vast history of Yowie sightings was beginning to narrow.
But what of the word Yowie? Is it an indigenous word, meaning monster or giant ape or a misunderstood term like Dulugal?
Rex Gilroy, who is often credited as the “father of Yowie research” famously helped popularise the term “Yowie” on the Australian Broadcasting Commissions radio show “A.M” on the fifth of May 1975. Graham Joyner claims in “Monster, Myth or Lost Marsupial” that before this radio show the Yowie did not exist as a word or concept.
However, authors Tony Healy and Paul Cropper have incidentally countered this argument, claiming in their book “Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia” that an instance of the word Yowie appears over 10 years before Gilroy’s interview. This 1964 account comes from amateur historian Percy J Gresser who claims to have heard the term used by the Mulgoa and Burragorang people and by other First Nations individuals throughout the Blue Mountains and toward Bathurst. Gresser states that the word was used to refer to “hairy giants” that lived nearby.
I decided to investigate the claims put forward by Healy, Cropper and Gresser to determine whether the definition of Yowie truly refers to giant hairy men and if the term Yowie actually existed before Gilroy’s 1975 interview.
Firstly, Joyner has theorised in “Monster Myth or Lost Marsupial” that Gresser’s encounter with the word Yowie is in fact an isolated use of a phrase that has descended from Yahoo. As previously discussed, Joyner has also stated that Yahoo is a word that was introduced by Europeans.
The languages spoken by the Mulgoa and the Burragorang people are that of the Dharug and Gundungurra nations respectively. Healy and Cropper claim Gresser took interest in indigenous groups in the Blue Mountains and further West toward Bathurst, which is all Dharug and Gundungurra land. I attempted to reach out to experts in the Dharug and Gundungurra languages. I sought to determine whether the word Yowie is used in these languages and whether or not the term could have been introduced.
While I was unable to find an expert in the language of the Gundungurra people, I managed to contact Jasmine Seymour, a Dharug author who is currently running the Dharug Dhalang revitalisation program. The word Dhalang means language.
I was told that the program has not discovered any evidence to suggest that the word Yowie is of the Dharug language. Apparently, the word Yowie has been used by Dharug people before in reference to hairy men, but Jasmine suspects that the word has likely been borrowed. Currently it is unclear where the word was borrowed from.
While I was unable to confirm whether this was also the case in the language of the Gundungurra people, Gresser has claimed to have heard the term “Yowie” in areas that are Dharug country. If Jasmines theory is correct, then many instances of the word “Yowie” which Gresser heard could have been introduced terms, supporting Joyner’s claim.
As Joyner details in “Monster Myth or Lost Marsupial” there are little to no credible examples of the word Yowie being used before 1975. The only other word that sounds similar to Yowie that translates to “hairy man” also, would be Yahoo.
Healy and Cropper do make mention of three other words, Yowrie, Yourie and Yowroo which they claim was used by people in the Batemans Bay and Bega areas as far back as 1930. However, they have provided no sources to support this claim.
If the only instance of the word Yowie as a term for “hairy men” before 1975, is Gresser’s account, then it is quite possible that this case of the word “Yowie” has descended from Yahoo. The word Yowie is believed to be introduced to the Dharug language, of which Gresser would have most likely heard the term used in.
As such it is quite likely the word Yowie was either created by Rex Gilroy as Joyner suggests or is derived from the term Yahoo, a term that has been used by Europeans since before the English set foot in Australia.
There does exist another possible source for the word Yowie. While the word may not come from the people Gresser spoke with, Yowie could still have originated from an indigenous source. A possible origin for the word “Yowie” is the language of the Yuwaalaraay people from North-western, New South Wales.
The Australian National dictionary states that the word Yowie is derived from the Yuwaalaraay word Yuwi, which means dream spirit. I reached out to Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay Guladha to determine whether this definition was accurate. Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay Guladha is an online resource for learning and preserving the Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay languages. Its members provided me with multiple sources
According to the book Grammar of Yuwaalaraay, the word Yuwi does mean spirit or dream.
However, in the 2002 Gamilaraay/Yuwaalaraay dictionary the word “Dhuwi” translates to spirit or dream.
Lastly there exists the word Yawi which is pronounced almost the same as the term Yowie. According to Yuwaalayaay, the language of the Narran River, Yawi means “a person’s soul or spirit; said to hang around the body for 3 days after death; visible as a light at night, and heard as a ‘noise like thunder”
While the word Yowie may have roots in the Yuwaalayaay language, the translations do not resemble anything close to the 8-foot-tall ape of legend.
It is also worth noting that the definition of these words is very similar to the definition of Dulugal. Again, a word that has been attributed to the existence of a giant ape has actually meant something intangible like a spirit or dream. As such, if the word Yowie is indeed borrowed from the Yuwaalaraay language there is every chance that the word has come to mean “giant ape” much the same way Dulugal has.
The possible origins of the word “Yowie” are most likely the result of non-indigenous people misinterpreting a word or inventing a word entirely.
It would appear the supposedly long history of the Yowie has actually been rather short. The stories of hairy men told by First nations people differ greatly from the monstrous creature that supposedly stalks the bush today. The Yowies manner, history and even its name appear to be corrupted by colonial influences. To me it seemed as if Australia’s hairy man was sustained only by continual misunderstandings of First Nations stories, culture and language. And yet through all my research I still had not answered the main, driving question behind my investigation. Why do we keep seeing the Yowie?
A psychological study of every living human who claims to have seen a Yowie was a bit out of my reach considering my lack of resources and expertise. While investigation could not produce an answer, it has developed a theory…
The modern Yowie exists, not as a creature made of flesh and blood but rather one of our minds. It is not sustained by kangaroo meet and the flesh of unfortunate backpackers but rather by our oldest, most primal fear. The fear of the unknown. To understand how the Yowie has been conjured into existence I decided to examine a very similar myth, the Yeti.
The Yeti is believed to be a hairy biped that lives in the Himalayas and has been theorised by some to be the ancestor of a great hominid. “Imagining the Wild Man: Yeti Sightings in Folktales and Newspapers of the Darjeeling and Kalimpong Hills” Is an article written by David Torri and Anna Sawerthal in the book “Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands: Kalimpong as a contact zone”. The article details the different Yeti myths and how foreign influence transformed a piece of humble folklore into a global phenomenon.
There exist many cultures in the Himalayas, as such there are many different traditional stories of the Yeti. While most of them regard the creature as a dangerous beast that can kill or kidnap humans, some cultures revere the Yeti as a mountain deity or a patron god of the hunt.
This traditional story would be twisted in newspapers written in English. Across the region there were still English-speaking people, descended from colonial roots. Torri and Sawerthal describe how newspapers written in English such as the Himalayan times pushed a sensationalist narrative of the Yeti. The authors use an extract of a 1952 article from the Himalayan times as an example
“They (native Tibetans) say the female is larger and more savage than the male. In hushed, lilting voices, they tell how the Snowwoman woos her mate and kills him if he refuses. And sometimes she kills him if he does not refuse. That is the legend of the Tibetan peasants”
However, Torri and Sawerthal describe how Yeti stories in Newspapers written for a native Tibetan audience such as “The Melong” showed little interest in the Yeti phenomenon. News about the Yeti only appears twice with the only other coverage relating to foreign attempts to find the creature.
The authors state that after the Yeti myths were covered by English newspapers in the Himalayas it would become a topic discussed in western newspapers as well. Western explorers and naturalists would soon set off to find the creature and determine its place in the animal kingdom. Before long the modern “Abominable Snowman” legend was born.
There are clear parallels in the history of the Yeti and Yowie phenomenon. While both stories have roots in the folklore of Indigenous peoples, they have both been adapted by Europeans and changed to create a hyperbolic narrative. All the while the original story has been lost in translation.
While legends of “hairy men” or strange entities exist in both cultures it is difficult to see where the modern telling starts and the orginal telling ends. Much of what we know of the Yeti comes from sensationalist articles written by English newspapers. As for the Yowie there is a chance much of the lore surrounding the creature was in fact fabricated by Europeans or exits as the result of the misinterpretation of First Nations stories and language.
In the cases of both, the Yowie and the Yeti, the indigenous peoples have a distinctly different relationship with the creature compared to the colonials.
In the Himalayan Times and the Australian Town and Country Journal a horrific monster that is known by the native population, is described to an English speaking audience. Yet for all the creature’s ferocity, as detailed in the Himalayan times, the Melong suggests that Tibetans were uninterested in the beast compared to English speakers. Meanwhile in Australia, legends of the hairy man such as the Dooligah exist to teach a lesson, rather than tell of a creature that continues to roam the bush, hunting human beings.
While Europeans have not fabricated either story entirely, it is clear that the traditional stories from Tibetans and First Nations Australian’s have changed after colonisation.
Unlike the indigenous telling’s of either story, the European versions are defined by a quest to find and prove that the creature exists as an animal.
In Tibet it was “Yeti Mania”, a craze that saw so many explorers come to Tibet that the Tibetan government needed to introduce higher fees for expeditions. Meanwhile in Australia hunts for the Yahoo and the Yowie have occurred since the 19th century.
In the words of Torri and Sawerthal, “A mysterious wild being was therefore also perceived as a possible threat: in the imperial epistemology, there is no room for a blank space”.
Based on what I have learned on my Yowie hunt, I have come to believe that the modern Yowie myth is a monster created by non-indigenous people as a means of coping with an unfamiliar country. While First Nations hairy man stories do exist, they are far different compared to the modern Yowie craze. The case of the Yeti demonstrates how European settlers have appropriated characters from indigenous folklore before. Stories which have meant to have functioned as a lesson have been changed into a mission to hunt, capture and catalogue an animal.
How can we be sure the Yowie does not exist?
We can never be 100% anything does or does not exist. However, it is the opinion of experts that the giant ape theory is highly unlikely. Also, after considering the number of First Nations accounts of hairy men that have been mistranslated, misunderstood or appropriated, the supposedly long history of “Yowie” sightings is questionable at best.
But why do so many people see the same creature?
While the descriptions of hairy men in First Nations stories may have helped to create a shared image of the creature, popular media has likely also played a part in constructing the Yowie’s image. Gulliver’s travels would have drawn an image of the Yahoo for a wide audience much the same way Gilroy’s interview would have illustrated the Yowie. While there is no definitive proof it is not unreasonable to suggest that an early Australian settler, who had read about the Yahoo’s in Gulliver’s travels would connect the creature in the book with a story he had heard from an Indigenous person, especially after coming to a new country much like Gulliver.
News media also has had a part to play in creating the modern Yowie. Newspapers have given descriptions of hairy men across Australia’s history. The Yahoo and Yowie phenomenon has been accompanied with regular reporting on the creature which usually describes its appearance. As such, most Australians would likely have near to the exact same image of the Yowie in their head.
The fact that so many people have claimed to have sighted similar creatures across history may seem strange. Yet when you consider how the description of the Yowie has circulated newspapers, radio and general conversation for almost 2 centuries, it hardly seems strange at all.
But why has this creature been created?
The Australian continent is vast and mysterious. Even today much of the country remains unsettled. Since the first fleet arrived people have been trying to make sense of the many unexplainable things that can occur in Australia’s vast wilderness.
Put yourself in the shoes of an English settler or convict. You have come from the other side of the world to an uncharted land. The tree’s, animals, climate are alien compared to the grey skies and green fields of Europe. The venomous spiders, the sweltering heat, the infinite expanse of trees all appear hostile to you and on occasion someone disappears while wandering out beyond the settlement. You may encounter something out in the bush, something that your limited knowledge cannot comprehend. To be confronted with the realisation that are things beyond the knowledge of European science and reason, would be terrifying.
Desperate to fill the void created by uncertainty, the settlers constructed a monster.
Patched together with pieces of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s travels, First Nations stories and pseudo-scientific theories, this motley monster has been assembled.
As I said before, a flesh-eating monster, roaming the wilderness is terrifying concept and yet it may serve as a small comfort when confronted by the unknown. Thanks to the Yowie every disappearance has can have a culprit and every anomaly an explanation. In my opinion people don’t believe in this creature out of fear or vigilance but rather out of hope that it exists.
Even today much of Australia remains untouched. In the modern age of internet and instant information, a person may still walk into the bush and be confronted with something they cannot comprehend. Desperate to make sense of what happened they turn to the Yowie, the centuries old explanation.
The attempts to find the creature and prove its place in the animal kingdom are an extension of the old colonial desire to tame the unknown and give order to nature. If the Yowie can be found and catalogued, then nature can at last be tamed.
I have to confess; I am also guilty of thinking this way. Although I began my hunt a sceptic, I was driven by the frustration of not knowing what truly goes on in the deepest parts of the bush. Since I was a child the great mystery of the wilderness on my doorstep has always been confronting and I wanted to decode it.
When I learned the Yowie could have been an ape, I felt excited, but most of all I felt, relieved. For me as a journalist it would have been a major discovery. For me as a person, I would have finally had the comfort of knowing.
However, the reality of the Yowie took a lot more time and effort to find… I can now see that I also wished for the Yowie to be real, not because it would have made the world bigger but rather it would have made it smaller and more palatable for that part of my European brain that still fears all things unfamiliar.
It all changed when I thought back to something Dean Harrisson said. He reminded me that our country is tremendous in size and yet our population is so small. In the great expanse there could be a clan of giant apes and we would never know. The chances are incredibly slim but never impossible. The fact that Australia continues to have so much untouched land, that the existence of giant ape clans can still be a matter of discussion is in fact beautiful. While the bush is colossal and enigmatic it
Perhaps an ape could have existed a long time ago. The furthest estimates of humans living on the Australian continent goes as far as 120,000 years. This means that there is at least a chance humans encountered giant apes on their journey to the Australian continent and recorded it in story. When I ran this idea by Herve Bocherens he told me that although we had no evidence, it was not impossible. Additionally, First Nations stories often serve as an oral history. In an article on the Australian Museum website, archaeologist and First Nations woman, Jacinta Koolmatrie speaks of the links between the megafauna, Diprotodon and a monster from a story she grew up with called the Yamuti.
Perhaps hairy man stories such as the Dooligah’s and the Kuritjah’s are historical accounts as well as tales with a strong message.
The island of Java in Indonesia is also home to a few hairy man stories. Java is also the island were the giant, prehistoric hominid, Meganthropus once dwelt. Perhaps these stories could also be accounts of a long dead ape?
However, until something definitive is found I think it is best that we make our peace with the unknown. Those of us whose ancestors hail from abroad are not this countries owner but rather its guests, and as human beings we are not the lords of nature but rather part of it. For as long as we exist on the earth, the secrets of nature will continue to evade us.
The Australian bush is unexplainable because it is still, in many places untouched by humans. Instead of attempting to conquer and reduce this great land like the British Empire we should be content with what remains of our beautiful environment. The bush doesn’t need an explanation but rather quiet appreciation. We will never fully understand it and that is okay. While it lasts, we should be grateful that much of our country remains beyond our reach and understanding.
So, does the Yowie exist? Honestly… Probably not… But we can never be a hundred percent sure. And that is okay.
