Hi everyone. Back in season one of this podcast I did an episode on the Moehau Man, New Zealand’s equivalent to the North American Bigfoot. I had tried in numerous ways to contact Australian groups who studied the Yowie, their equivalent of the Bigfoot. I was unfortunately unsuccessful. I was pretty gutted about that, as because our countries are so closely tied together, I felt it would be a great opportunity to share about this subject, on the one episode. However; very often our disappointments and frustrations, can bring about even better things. And so it is, in this case.

Now, throughout the world there are stories and legends of huge, hairy, ape-like creatures that have persisted over the centuries, through retellings of cultural myths and legends, and of actual reported sightings of such creatures. These beings go by many different names. In North America, they are called Sasquatch, or the more common name of Bigfoot. Across the ditch in Aussie, as I already mentioned, they are called the Yowie. In parts of Asia and the Himalayans they are call the Yeti, or the Meh Teh…. In Mongolia they are called the Almas. In Sumatra the Orang Pendek. In China, the Yeren. In the jungles of South America they are called the Mapingauri.

On the podcast episode page, on our website www.walkingtheshadowlands.com , in the episode transcript, you can see a link to a page that has a huge list of names for this creature.  So you can see that this being goes by many, many names throughout the world. So this season, I thought I would try once again to contact anyone over there who would be willing to talk about the Yowie. So I sat down and wrote an email to Dean Harrison of the Australian Yowie Research website. Which is also linked from the episode page.  And then I got on with working on the Signs from the Other Side episode.

To my pleasant surprise I got a lovely email from a delightful gentleman, who as it turns out is a pretty well known Aussie Author and Yowie researcher, Tony Healy. He agreed to share with us all his experiences of interviewing hundreds of Yowie witnesses. So, are you ready to return with me into this part of the shadowlands and see what awaits us there? Awesome! Then let’s begin.

Since 1969 Tony has investigated a wide range of unexplained phenomena in every state and territory of Australia and in many other countries. Since the early 1980s he has collaborated with fellow researcher Paul Cropper on many projects, notably in co-authoring Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia (1994), The Yowie: In search of Australian’s Bigfoot  (2006) and Australian Poltergeist (2015).

Until the 1990s Tony was concerned mainly with the world’s many super-elusive, apparently uncatchable cryptids – yetis, sasquatches, yowies, lake and river monsters, out-of-place “black panthers”, thylacines, etc.  Gradually, however, his focus widened to encompass all manner of even weirder and more wonderful phenomena, such as UFOs, Min Min lights, ghosts, “little people” and Blessed Virgin Mary apparitions. In 1998, after a series of fortuitous coincidences, he and Paul found themselves “embedded” in the amazing Humpty Doo, NT, poltergeist episode. That mind-boggling experience was the genesis of their third book, Australian Poltergeist.

During all of his travels through the wide, wide world of weirdness, however, the mysterious yowie has held a special place in Tony’s heart. So, with Paul, he is focussing once more on the shambling Aussie ape-man: they are currently working on The Yowie File, which contains scores of recently discovered eye-witness reports dating from the early colonial era.  After that one’s published, Tony hopes to live long enough to finish his long-neglected book of memoirs (working title: Monster Safari) an account of his forty-odd (very odd) years in this arena. I am thrilled to welcome my guest Tony Healy.

In Search Of the Yowie

Marianne: First of all Tony, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. So the first question I have for you Tony, is this: Can you please tell me what got you interested in the subjects you cover in your books? Most notably the yowie, which is the Aussie version of bigfoot and New Zealand’s own moehau man.  For those listeners who are not in New Zealand or Australia, and that is over sixty percent of you all, you may not have heard of the term yowie before.

Tony: Well, I didn’t hear a peep about the yowie, until about nineteen-seventy-three. Which seems strange, because in the decade up to that, the late sixties, I’d worked in virtually every area of Australia. Well, every state anyway. Every mainland state. And later on, I worked in Tasmania. Didn’t hear a thing about the yowie, ‘cause, of it being very, very similar to the American Sasquatch. But, I was working in Canada on a working holiday in nineteen-sixty-nine, ah seventy. And, I was working in a logging camp up there. At the top of Pit Lake, in British Colombia. And some of the, of my workmates the subject of bigfoot would come up. And you know, I slowly realized they were taking it very seriously and I thought, gee, that’s weird.

And anyway sometimes I’d stay in the logging camp on the weekends, to save money and I’d get my little plastic camera and toddle off around the trails in the forest. Thinking could there possibly be something like this up here? Anyway, when I got back to Australia in late nineteen-seventy, I got a book on the sasquatch. In fact, I started corresponding with John Greene, who wrote several books on the Sasquatch.    

And I got quite obsessed. I got books on the yeti. The Himalayan yeti as well. And I thought, gee, I’ve got to go back. And, I’ll go to North America. And, I’ll go to the Himalaya’s. And, I’d been interested in the Loch Ness monster for many, many years, since I was a kid. So I thought – I’ll go to Loch Ness as well.

So, I started planning this ‘round the world trip. I saved up for actually, two and a half years, and then went right around the world, for two years. Almost exactly to the day, for two years and visited oh, about twelve or fourteen lakes that had a lake monster legend and looked for the hairy ape-man in North America and the Himalayas and in Malaysia. And, in Andros Island, Bahamas. And just prior to going all the way around the world, looking for these other things, I didn’t realize that Australia had a bigfoot legend. And I was only just starting to compile a very slim file on it in nineteen-seventy-eight, when I went overseas for this big trip.

But, when I got back I met other researchers, like Paul Cropper and then started to interview people and finally interview a couple of hundred people, who had seen these things. I shouldn’t exaggerate. Probably about a hundred. We’ve collected probably four hundred eye witness accounts and I’ve interviewed about a hundred people. Paul’s interviewed at least that number. So, that’s how it happened, and then we wrote a couple of books on the subject.

So how did you feel when you first heard about the yowie in Australia? Did that like, make you feel really excited? Or did that perhaps make you feel that these creatures had a world-wide connection?

Yes. Well, it was sort of a funny thing at first I thought oh no, no really don’t tell me that. People saying, they saw these things in Australia, ‘cause, I thought at that time if they exist in North America and the Himalayas, well that’s tricky enough. You know? I mean, it’s just possible they could exist in those vast forests of British Colombia, say. And Alberta. And then in the Himalaya’s, but, I thought – in Australia too? How could this be?  So I …. It took a while for me to take it seriously. But there is definitely, a very, very strong belief among the Aboriginal people in Australia, about these creatures. They call them by various names – The uligal and thuligal, abba, jarawara – many names. And so, we’ve interviewed many aboriginal people since the nineteen-seventies. But, it is strange and it makes you wonder really, how on earth you could have a population of presumably thousands of huge, big ape-men in Australia, also in North America. Also in Himalayas. Also apparently, in Russia. And, in South East-Asia. So,

And New Zealand

And yeah…. So, I started to think (laughing) and I mean, even before I completed my one year in North America seventy-eight, seventy-nine, I started to think there’s something uncanny about these things. They’re supernatural, or paranormal. And in fact the American Indians I spoke to and my research pointed in that direction. The Aborigines they…. I guess, as you know; the Australian Aboriginal people are very spiritual people?  And for them, there’s a very blurry line between what is flesh and blood and solid. And what is from, for want of a better word, another dimension. A spiritual realm, you know?

So, you know, they’ve said things to me like; Well, you can chase these things. They’re real, but you’ll never catch them. You can’t catch them. They’re real but, you know it’s like…. So that’s essentially what the North American Indians were saying as well. And also, the Sherpa’s. They were saying pretty much the same. Although, my experience in the Himalayas was more sketchy than elsewhere, because, you know you have to walk sometimes for miles. Just to find someone who’s apparently seen a yeti and if they’re home – they might be on the other side of a mountain.   

I only interviewed about, what is it? Three or four people who’d seen yeti’s. One European guy. And so, my impression is that they, well, they’re so absolutely scared to death of them – the Sherpa’s and the other tribe’s people. To me it points to the supernatural there too.

Right. So with the Aboriginal people and in fact all the native people you’ve met and spoken with, so they have the idea that the Yowie, or Yeti, or Sasquatch, is an inter-dimensional creature? Like, that can come into and out of this dimension when they want to?

Yes. Well, one American Indian guy used exactly that terminology to me. He was a policeman from the Miccosukee india  tribe in Florida. I went there to enquire about what they call the skunk-ape. They said; “Yeah, they seem to turn up here every ten years or so and they might kill a deer, or they’ll be seen. They might be seen near the houses and they’ll go back out to the everglades, the everglades.” One fellow, the village chief Bobby Tiger, he backed his car out of his driveway and bumped right into one.

Yeah, yeah! And, he was the one who said; “Look, have fun looking for these things, but you’ll never catch them.” He used almost the exact same words, I was told by an Australian, an Aboriginal. But, the local policeman Don Osiola, I spent the evening with him, just sort of patrolling around. And, he said; “Look. Our word for these creatures is…. Our term for the creatures is Yati Usagi.” which means disappearing man, or different man, something like that.

That’s interesting.

Yeah. He said; “Essentially what we are saying is that they can come and go.” He’s saying essentially, you know, if they are inter-dimensional. That’s the feeling. So that’s definitely my feeling, I mean, a lot of Yowie reports – I would say, at least thirty percent of Yowie reports have something distinctly weird about them. Yeah, you know? Strange floating lights, or the creature just appears inexplicably. They might run behind a tree, but the tree’s not really that huge, and then it doesn’t come back out. You know?

This occurs in North America too…. And, then there’s other stories of them…. Witnesses say; “oh well it just vanished – you know? I looked away, or I looked at it and it wasn’t there.” People get terribly, terribly scared. More frightened than you would logically expect. I mean, if you saw a big ape you might be a bit scared but, these people, their terror stays with them. Sometimes for decades! It’s scary.

I wonder if that’s ‘cause of the energy put off by these creatures? But, actually what you said leads into a question I was going to ask you later, but, I’ll bring it up now. And that is, have you noticed that there’s a link between the Yowie or Bigfoot sightings and UFO sightings in the same area?

Yes, yes I have. Yeah. I noticed that quite early in my time…. My second…. My big expedition in America. Some of the younger investigators were saying; “Look, this seems funny, but every second time I go out to investigate a sighting, someone’s talking about UFO’s. Or, floating lights as well.” Some of the older guys, you know, like René Dahinden , or Peter Byrn, or John Green, would say “Oh rubbish!” You know? Or, “Well these are people you shouldn’t take any notice of.”

But American Indians told me the same thing. Down, right down near bluff creek, where the term ‘big foot’ was more or less coined and they’d certainly see, in daylight, these silvery craft over the Clymouth (?) river. And so, I heard that all over the place. Also, I dunno if this will ring a bell for you. I know you have these things in New Zealand.

But, one thing I was stuck by. I went all over Canada and the States, and in six different locations people said; “Are you interested in that other thing we seen around here?” And, I said; “What?” After a while, I knew what they were going to say.   They said; “Oh, these black cougars, panthers.” You know? And I said; “Oh that’s funny.” And of course I checked and there’s no such thing as a black cougar. They don’t come in black. That’s out. But, people would say that they must be, because, we see them here. On two occasions, they were seen on the same farm, in the same fields, where big foot had been seen.

Yeah. And, acting unlike any cougar or wild, big cat would act. You know, just casually walking past them. And then, you may not be surprised to learn, that when I got back to Australia and started investigating the yowie thoroughly, it turns out that there are. Yeah, yeah. Either within a few days, the next day, or possibly months, or weeks, or even years different. But it’s still, it’s beyond the laws of chance that, so many yowie witnesses would have seen these black panthers. Which of course, black panthers and big cats don’t exist in Australia.

Wow, no. That’s the first time I ‘ve actually ever heard of that. Of course, in New Zealand we have our own big cat sightings. There’s the big black panther that’s been seen. Mostly down the South Island. But, there’s also a puma-type big cat that’s been seen as well.

Yes. Yes, yes. I’ve spent a bit of time in New Zealand in twenty-thirteen and sixteen. And, I was down in Canterbury running around. There’s some very good stories and excellent witnesses. Yeah. I didn’t hear of any link between the black panthers and the Moehau down there though. So, in fact, I didn’t hear much about the Moehau at all. I interviewed two guys. One guy and his mate saw a, like a six-foot tall, hair covered, like a bipedal. You know, like an ape-man, near Palmerston North.  This was seen near Linton, which is just south of Palmerston North, by a couple of guys in twenty…. December twenty-fourteen, later on, I realized that they had seen it, just at the foot of the Tararua Ranges. Which the Maori’s say was…. Used to be the abode of a hairy man.

Correct. Yes.

That was interesting. And, only a couple of days before that, I had talked to a guy, Paul Braxton, who told of a really hair-raising experience he had in nineteen-sixty-five. Paul and a mate…. They were only kids…. Were chased by an eight-foot-tall, sort of roughly human-shaped creature, at New Plymouth. Now this is, as Paul says, this is pretty weird and pretty counter-intuitive, because, it was in the…. It was on the beach, in the town! Yeah, yeah. He might be prepared to tell you about it sometime. The fear and the after effect of it has stayed with him ever since. For fifty years!

Oh wow! That’s, that’s a long time.

Yeah. He took me out there and showed me the spot on the beach there. His child-hood home was just around the corner from the beach. This was at night, and again, a strange light featured in this. A strange light was approaching from the sea and he and his mate were saying; “Oh what’s that? If it’s a boat, it’s going to crash on the rocks!” It came closer and closer and closer. And, they realized that it wasn’t a boat. And then this great big giant thing burst out of the scrub on the bank, near the water and chased them. And scared the living daylights out of them. I was just trying to reach over here, where I’ve got the manuscript of the latest book. I could refresh my memory about some of these cases. I won’t be a sec.

That would be great.

Here we are! We’ve divided the cases into ones that occurred prior to nineteen-seventy-four and the ones that have occurred afterwards. Just for ease of…. ‘Cause, we have to keep throwing the manuscript back and forth from Sydney to…. I was thinking of a lady I interviewed just recently…. I was thinking I could …. Paul says, ”Oh why not?” “What about we somehow send Marianne a sound file of a couple of the interviews?”

That would be great! That would be awesome if I could use some of your interview.

Yeah, well, I don’t see why not. One from two-thousand and eighteen is a good one.

Jeanie & Jim 2018

Tony: This is Tony Healy talking to Jeanie in Western Australia. On the third of July 2018.  Yeah, ok Jeanie. It sounds like you got a good look at that thing. Big creature was it?

Jeanie: It was very big. It was like what the photos were like on the internet. It was creamy in colour. We’ve got an Isuzu D-Max and it was a lot bigger than our car. So, it was quite tall. My husband’s here as well, Jim. And, we both saw it. And all the hairs on our arms and all that, all raised when we saw it. We thought oh no! He’s so scary.

Yeah, I could imagine. Jeeze. Yeah so, the location was…. You were going from Perth through Meckering towards Dowerin eh? And had you exited? You’d left Meckering had you? On the road or….?

Yes. It was about five or ten ks in from the Meckering turn-off towards Dowerin. It wasn’t that far in. And it was, when we saw it, it was looking in to the paddock. To the sheep in the paddock. It wasn’t looking, facing towards us. We saw that shape of it. Yeah, it had it’s back towards us. It was standing on the side of the road. 

Yeah, jeeze. I wonder if it was thinking of grabbing a sheep and taking off?

Well, that’s what I thought. I did ring up the shire and let them know what we saw and how we saw that it was, you know, looking to attack the sheep.

Did they, at the shire, did anyone sort of act surprised, or did they…. Have they heard of anything like that?

No. They hadn’t heard of it before.

The area you were going through, was it scrubby, or forested, or open?

 Ah open. It’s like [inaudible] wheat country over here. It was all open.

So, it was wandering around. Where would the nearest forest be, do you think? Or mountains there?

Ah, we don’t have any mountains here. It’s all flatland. Right through this area it’s flatland. It’s like a wheat belt. (Jim yells – “It’s all undulating country!”). It’s all undulating country, my husband’s saying.

So would there be any state forests within coo-ee of where you are? Where you saw it?

State forests? Ah, there’s trees (Jim inaudible in background). I think the closest would be Jarrahdale Forrest. (Jim inaudible in background). Oh there’s quite a big distance though, from that. But, there’s not really any forest around.

Yeah it’s a bit curious. It might be old and senile like me. It might’ve wandered off. But ah, so….

Are they normally found in forests are they?

Well yeah. Or close, close to forested, hilly forested or mountainous areas, usually. But, you know there are reports from way out in the desert too you know? Like in WA (Western Australia) and Northern Territory. But, because there’s fewer people, I think there’s fewer sightings. But the Aborigines all over Australia know about them. So it’s very interesting.

I’ve heard a little bit about the aborigines, especially in the Kalgoorlie area. There’ve been quite a few sightings around there by the aboriginals.

Could you perhaps just go through quickly what you, what happened again – like how far away from the thing you were? And what speed you were going etc.?

(Jim speaking in background; “Well yeah….”) I’ll put my husband on, ‘cause, he saw it as well.

Jim: Well, we weren’t travelling that fast. We were travelling at night. And my wife doesn’t like me travelling fast at night so…. We’d been travelling down the Meckering/Dowerin road, probably for about ten or fifteen minutes. And I had my…. I’ve got those beaut, those big spotties on the front of the car. So they light up everything as we were travelling along. And we saw this thing on the side of the road. Staring off into the paddock and this thing would have been as tall as the car. Ah it would have been probably, oh a good fifteen feet tall. It way bigger than a man. Just you know, the arms, the legs, the torso was just huge!

And it was…. I dunno, like a gray – gray colour. Quite light in colour and we looked at each other and we thought “oh what the hell was that?” And my wife’s saying, “oh! let’s go back? And I, ah no! I don’t tempt fate. [Inaudible] where it was.

Hey, did you just say you thought it was fifteen feet tall? Or did you mean fifteen feet from the car or…?

No.  Well I mean…. Like [inaudible] to the left. So it wasn’t that far from the car. It would have been probably three or four feet from the car when we passed it. I would have been doing probably fifty or sixty kilometers an hour, so I wasn’t really going that fast. Because, it was late at night and it was a road we don’t travel down much and I thought we’d just try it so…. We were taking it quite slowly. And we got a good look at this thing as we went past. And yeah, when you consider the size of my vehicle when I was…. Well the size of my vehicle it’s, you know, it’s six-foot-tall, about my head height or just over six foot, and this thing was way bigger than that.

Oh right, right. Still fifteen foot is like really, really huge! I mean you’d think….

Well yeah, I mean, I mean it may have been…. I may have seen, ok, it may have been seven or eight foot, but I mean, it was really, really big. Up against the car. It looked really big up against it the car. And you know, something like that you know? And, I don’t scare easy, but you know, something like that – I wasn’t going to turn around!

For sure, for sure. So gather it was on the left hand side of the road – looking left?

Yes.

Ah so, you would have passed it pretty close, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, well it was on my wife’s side and you know, she was almost right next to it. That’s what it seemed like.

And with those brilliant lights you’ve got…. And how about in terms of it’s shoulder width and general build. You know? General build, the shape of it?

Yeah well, when you look at, you know – when people say this guy’s shoulders were like an axe-handle width, you know? It wasn’t far from that.

Oh right a big bugger eh!

Yeah, he’s huge!

And did you notice…

The length of the arms was really long, and the legs. Also his torso was quite long. The hair on the body was quite long. Ah what else?

Did you see any detail of it’s hands or feet at all?

No. (Jeanie in background: I saw it’s hands), well my wife did, but I was driving, so she probably got more of a look at it.

And how about the shape of it’s head and neck and so on?

It was full of hair. His neck was all covered in hair as well. I’ve seen pictures of it online you know?  Of the…. The yeti? It was just really hairy all over and its arms were like ours…. His arms were hanging down, but they were really long. I got a better look at it because I was like, it was on my side. He was huge!

You had Jim saying it was seven foot. It was a lot bigger than seven foot. It was just massive and the width of it was really wide, as well. But yeah, so the hair…. It had wide shoulders, sort of a smaller head, but, it was all hair. It didn’t have a very long neck.

Yeah that certainly answers the description of, that we’ve heard many times of Yowie. So, I gather you didn’t see it’s face? It was turned away slightly from you was it? So…

It was looking into the sheep. Into the paddock where the sheep were, so I didn’t. It didn’t turn around or anything.

Jeeze. It was playing it pretty cool. It didn’t seem to be scared of you?

No. It looked like it was going to go and pounce on some of those sheep, you know? It was like, more interested in the sheep. It was looking into the paddock away from us.

Yeah, yeah. And Jeanie, you saw its arms. Did you manage to see its hands at all?

It had like black part in it’s hands. Its hands were facing back to me. But his arm was down, his hands were facing back and he had like black – like paws. Like, you know? Black hands.

Black sort of on the palms of its hands? Or on the back of its hands? Or, I suppose…

On the palms. On its palms.

Yeah, well that agrees with what we usually get told too. Its skin is usually very dark. Black to brown coloured skin. Yeah. That was really something. Was it a straight stretch of road? Or did you come around a bend and see it? Or what?

No. Straight, straight. It was straight. But we had the high beams on, on the lights so…. And we had like the bodies on as well. LED’s I mean, so yeah it was crystal clear. It was like it lights up as bright as daylight. They’re very crystal clear when we saw it.

Yeah you’ve got to have those sort of lights out there with all those ‘roos around

We were coming home late at night. It was about two o’clock in the morning.

Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell you what, that’s a really good sighting.

Steven Kelly, had three sightings near a town called Broke, New South Wales in twenty-fifteen, twenty-sixteen,  and in twenty-seventeen.

Oh wow. Three? Three sightings?

On the same stretch of road. He reported the sightings to Australian Yowie Research, Dean Harrisons site in May twenty-seventeen. And Paul Cropper went up to the town of Broke and interviewed Steven and his daughter later that month. Anyway, the first sighting was between nine-thirty and nine-fourty-five pm on the Broke road. And, this may have been significant, and this may ring a bell with you too?

There was a very large thunderstorm happening. Thunderstorms seem to crop up, not all the time, occasionally. Suspicious, at the same time as yowie reports. And this part of the road where he saw, where they saw this thing was also crossed by high-tension wires. You know? Electricity wires. So that too tends to crop up. People can see yowie in the vicinity of electrical lines. Anyway, he said:

“We were coming down the hill and there was this thing standing smack bang on the left hand side of the road. Right next to the bitumen. I spotted it and thought, oh a kangaroo! But, it wasn’t a kangaroo. It didn’t move, and I thought that’s pretty big and my daughter says; “What the hell was that?” Then it stepped back into the tree-line. It went back, maybe a meter and would have been about three meters from the car as we went past. It was extremely tall. The head and shoulders would have been way above the roof-line of the four-wheeled drive. I looked straight at it. I could see that it didn’t move away. That it turned to face the vehicle. “

So that was the first sighting.

He said:” We had a very good look at its torso. If it was a human, you would say it had been on steroids. Very muscular chest. Very wide shoulders one and a half times my chest size easily. Three feet across the chest, really wide. Not much of a neck. Big muscly shoulders no neck.”

So, dark hair. A lot of dark hair all over the chest and body. Second sighting in June twenty-sixteen.

“Coming down the same road. Came down the hill again, I took my foot off the accelerator, because, there were kangaroos about. There’s an old dam down the bottom of the hill. This was five-thirty pm and not dark. And I could see this yowie, very clearly. Plain as day.”

On that occasion it was just walking away from the road, towards the dam. The third sighting was not so definite, but he crossed the road in front of the car when his wife was in the car.

To see him in the same area so many times – well I’d be scared to go down that road, frankly!

Yes, yeah. But, I think of course that Paul didn’t…. You know, you hesitate to suggest this to witnesses, but when a lot of people go up this road all the time, why should this man see yowie there three times and most people never see them? I think he’s probably a little bit psychic. I think a lot of witnesses who have repeated sightings are a little bit, or very psychic. Some of them don’t realize it.

I think I agree with that actually, yeah.

Perhaps I could tell you one story off the top of my head, because I know it very well. Because, I met the guy. It happened in nineteen-seventy-nine. This fellow was fifteen-years-old. And he was working on a cattle station…. Ardmore Station. West Mount Isa. Very, very isolated area and there were aboriginal and white stockmen. Huge, huge property. Hundreds of square miles. And they were having lunch. They were just sitting on the ground eating their lunch and there was a vehicle, one of their vehicles was behind them.

And there was a …. This is rather a sad bit. There was a dog there. Not much more than a pup. And it was tied to the wheel of the vehicle. And they were talking and looking the other way and all of a sudden the dog started shrieking. And they turned around and there was a five-foot-tall ape-man. Not heavily built, but, he was covered all over with hair and he was doing the old ape-man slouch. And it was scaring this dog, which was going absolutely nuts!

And this was actually very close behind them. Just like a matter of twenty feet behind them. And they could see it clearly. It was right there! And the dog just suddenly, just dropped! And this, this creature didn’t look, didn’t turn his head to look at the men. It just walked off. Walked, didn’t run, just walked off out of sight.

And the Aboriginal guys ­– when everyone got over their fright, the Aboriginal guys were yelling out “Jingari. Jingari!” And the guys were saying “What the hell?” And they went up, the dog was dead! This thing had frightened it to death and horrible. The Aboriginal guys tried to track the Jingari, and they could for a while…. But then the tracks, they just lost the tracks. Again, this is an often told story. Anyway, the Aboriginal guys said “Oh yeah, this is very unusual. We’ve seen them before. Our people have seen them, but white people, hardly ever see them.” And in broad daylight and in front of them like that.

Shortly thereafter the old guy who was in charge of the horses had left the property. So this guy at the age of fifteen was put in charge of all the horses. So when they drove these hundreds of cattle to one part of the property way, way down to the other part, he would have to take the horses. Either, I think ahead of the herd and fifty horses, big job, responsibility for a young guy. And he’d have to take them miles and miles and miles. And take them down, make camp, and get everything ready and then the other guys would turn up.

Anyway, he had to go through this place where they’d seen the Jingari. And anyway, he said they went through and the horses were all skittish and he felt the hair on the back of his neck going up, you know? Which again, is an often-mentioned feature of Yowie reports and that freaked him out. So thereafter he, in his life, had a couple of odd experiences. He saw a couple of UFO’s in another area.

Oh! They used to see Min-Min lights there too.  And floating spook lights, but, that area is noted. That’s practically Min-Min headquarters…

Sorry to interrupt Tony. Can you please explain for listeners who aren’t aware, what Min-Min lights are?

Well, they’re what they call in some areas Jack-o-Lanterns, or spook lights. You know, these lights that people see at night and they’re about from golf-ball size, up to basketball size. And, they’re around, fairly close by and when you try to approach them they go away. Or, they blink out and they appear somewhere else. There’s many stories about people getting lost from trying to follow them through the scrub. The Aborigines had various legends about being a fire-stick carried by the ancestors and that sort of thing.

Oh that’s interesting.

Yeah, but there’s a fine line between Min-Min’s and UFO’s, you know.

Yeah, very fine line. Yeah. And actually Australia is not the only place I’ve heard of, if where people follow the lights they get lost. Or it leads them into swamps or something like that.

Exactly! Yes, yes. In the UK. They have those stories don’t they? The Will-of-the-wisp

The Will-of-the-wisp yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s a funny thing. This fellow mentioned one other very odd occurrence. He said “Now look. I can’t remember if it was exactly the same day. Or a day or two later. But no further apart than that.” He was with the stockmen and the boss of the homestead turned up with their mail. And, he said there was a letter from his Mother. Enclosing a magazine article. He thinks…. He doesn’t know from what magazine it was from. Something that was apparently in the nineteen-seventies. And she said; “You might be interested in this? There’s a funny story from Ardmore Station.”

And the story was, there had been a group of surveyors, or linemen, or something. They weren’t cattlemen, but they were workers and they were sleeping in tents on Ardmore Station. And, two men were sharing a tent and this Greek guy was grabbed by something in the middle of the night! Something, like a hairy hand, grabbed him by the ankle and started to drag him out of the tent.

Actually, that sounds quite familiar. I think I may have heard that. Yeah. Or read it somewhere.

Yeah well, I haven’t been able to find the newspaper, the magazine article. You know, I’ve tried Googling it and everything, but. He said well, he didn’t keep a copy of the article. But he said…. Well, this seemed so outrageous, because, I mean they’d just seen a hairy-man. And then, you know, within days. Either on the same day, or the next day, or the day after, this letter arrives from his mother.

Yes. Interesting timing.

Yeah, yeah. I forget the guys name here. He’s still on the land. So yeah, many, many other stories. I interviewed a lady Mandy, I think her name was. Who saw a five-foot tall Yowie beside the road, just north of Roma, in Queensland.

Mandy 2018

So your name is Mandy?

Mandy: Yes.

And this occurred, I understand just recently. Just what a week ago, or something?

Yeah. Like you say, it was actually last Wednesday, so just over a week ago. It was probably about three in the morning, or something like that.

Right. And you were driving along very slowly because of all the ‘roos eh?

Yeah. Well they weren’t big ‘roos. They were like little gray roos. Some of them were really tiny. So yeah, I’m just sort of mindful of the wildlife, ‘cause, there isn’t quite a lot of respect when you’re on outback roads for wildlife. So yeah, I’m travelling in the dark. You just like to be able to stop to let them pass or, you know? I was probably going about forty k’s an hour on the road.

Right, right. Ok, so what was the…. I mean, were you travelling through forest, or open country there?

Oh no, I’d just turned…. I’d just turned into go in this like, forestry area. And as I looked back on a map, there’s a particular little forest area around there. Probably about thirty to thirty-five k’s out of [inaudible]. There’s a little state forest there and then there’s a larger one further on. And, as I look back through the road, you know, like I said, it might be fifteen-twenty k’s. It appears to be about thirty k’s so I could have been actually there. And there was a lot of trees, and a lot of larger trees were like dropped to the left side, like the road was built up and yeah, it was just slightly elevated to the right, the trees as I’m driving up.

Ah. Ok. And I understand from your email that you saw this fellow on the road? And he appeared to be crouched was it?

Well, it was crouched. I had my high beam on. So I could see quite a distance along there. And I thought gee, this is a different colour for a ‘roo. It’s quite dark and large, I thought. ‘Cause, where I come from we get quite large ‘roos down around Anglesea. So, I slowed right down. And, as I’m getting closer, it’s like, it stood up!  And it was just like staring at me and as I’m getting closer, it’s getting more sort of auburney, shiny, you know?  Ah more with auburney colour. It was just standing there staring at me like a ‘roo would, you know? I was thinking oh my gosh! What is that? You know? A hundred meters away my senses shut down, so I didn’t feel the fear until a couple of days later. So, you know, yeah.

Oh right! And when it was looking at you, was there any eye shine – you know, like with some animals?

Oh extremely shiny, as the light, as I got closer with the light. Yeah absolutely. It’s quite shiny. And it was very hairy. And I actually couldn’t see a face. It’s like its hair was about…. Oh maybe, um…. Maybe like ten centimeters long? It was like it’s all over the head.

Ah ha, oh yes

Do you know what I mean? It’s just like…. Yeah, it was just like all over it. Yeah, like it was um, a junior. It gave me the appearance of something that was younger.

Oh yes. Oh well.

Do you know what I mean? Like a younger dog, or a younger [inaudible]. Yeah sort of like a polar bearish, type of hair in appearance.

What I meant before was, when you had the head lights on were its eyes reflecting?

I couldn’t see any eyes reflecting, I think it’s head was looking down. There were no eyes to be seen and the hair was not…. It seemed to be like I couldn’t see any facial features. Do you understand what I mean? So it was sort of looking at me, just straight on, seeing the sketch. And so, whether it’s head was like looking down, or whether you know? I couldn’t see any shiny eyes at all. No, there was no eye reflection at all. No.

I guess what I did, as I got closer, I actually high-beamed down, ‘cause, I didn’t want anything to jump in front of me, ‘cause, that’s what I do. And I slowed right down to about, oh 15k’s an hour, to  have a good look. And I thought oh damn! ‘Cause as I drove out of Rona, I had no battery on my phone. I only had about 15 left, and there was no…. and there was no like – what would you call it? No bars on my phone. So I thought, oh well switch it off and save it until I get to the next town and see if I can get some reception. You know?

And as I got closer I thought, oh, I’ve got to stop and take a photo of this. And then I thought oh my gosh, you know? If that’s junior, I mean…. Maybe if it’s got others? I didn’t feel safe. I started to think, no it’s the wrong thing to do. You know? And I started to think oh my god, and I kept driving up a little bit further past it and I thought, do I turn around and go back and take a photo or? You know, it’s just extraordinary, so beautiful. You know? It’s just an amazing creature and I thought, ‘cause, you know I’ve seen the black panther in York (?) ways…

Oh really? Oh that’s really interesting

Yes, I saw it with a friend of my son’s.  ….  so I thought I just had thought, so what is it? What is it? There must be some information about what I can see what it is and yeah I saw it eh. It’s something you know. But, it’s not something that I’ve seen before. And it was just standing there looking. It didn’t move from side to side. It didn’t run, it just stayed there. It appeared to be looking towards me, but like I said, I didn’t see any facial features so I suppose it it would have had its head looking down or something. But there was a dead ‘roo, a little small dead roo on the side of the road and I’m just wondering if it was down there feeding on it?  ‘Cause, I know with my dogs, if they startled by something they’ll stop. Before it goes, oh don’t come near my food. And I was thinking this is in the wild. It could be wild. Not it’s not safe to do that, it just not safe to stop.

But, I probably saw if for about, oh I would say, a good forty or fifty seconds, ‘cause, I slowed right down as I’ve gone past it and had a good look at it, thinking oh my gosh, that’s amazing! Just absolutely incredible! You know? And you know, confirms that it does exist. And what I saw was real and I’m blessed to be able to see it and….

Yes. You are very lucky. 

I then decided to keep on…. Actually, it was about five hundred meters past and there was a small kangaroo. Probably about two-thirds the height of my car, which is a Volvo xc sixty. It was just sitting there. It seemed to be hit by a car, and the side of it’s face was hanging out.

My God!

And I felt prompted to stop and help it. And I said there’s no way in hell I can get out of my car here, ‘cause, I’m not far from where that happened. And I thanked my heavenly stars, when about another, oh probably another three or four minutes up the road, when I got up to about forty k’s, I saw a truck coming. And I thought it’s probably going to um, put it out of it’s misery. But, I stopped very close and very slow to it and thought, how can I help this animal? There’s no wild-life numbers, and I don’t know where to take it and if I go out there, I don’t know if I’m going to be safe, if that had appeared to be young. I just thought…. I initially thought it was about four-foot-tall, but it could have been four and a half, yeah – five foot tall, yeah.

Just back-tracking Mandy. So the dead roo was on the shoulder of the road, or on the edge of the road was it? And where…

It was this side, ‘cause, it was facing me, ‘cause, I’m travelling on the left hand side of this road. It was just slightly, slightly to the right of its body, that little dead roo.

So the Yowie or creature, would have been standing just on the edge of the bitumen would it?

He was just on the edge of the road. Yeah. It was just to the right, where the edge of the road is, so it was on the left of the road. On the opposite side. Not on my side. So when I drove past, I could look straight out my window and had a good view. Like, no more than two meters away. Very close.

Extremely interesting.

David 2018

Sounds like you had a bit of an experience in the Richmond Range eh?

David: Did you know that area reasonably well?

No I don’t actually. I know that we’ve had a lot of Yowie reports from Woodenbong, North of Richmond Range there. Yeah, Yeah.

Woodenbong, is not that far away. Now look Tony, I’ll tell you what happened. What happened was ah…. Not this immediate weekend, the weekend before. So what happened was I’ve got a property near Bonner and so we drove down to…. We drove down Casino and went up Bruckner highway and you go out of Casino about forty k’s going West. And you get up to the top of the Richmond range and you go into the National Park there, for about twenty k’s. And you get to a really nice cottage, which is up in a cleared area on the range. Kikuyu grass. Bloody off the grid cottage.  So we stayed there for a couple of nights. Saturday night and Sunday night.

And, it’s very isolated. It’s twenty k’s in from the bitumen road. There were two guys on motorbikes the entire time. Trail bikes that went past. They were the only people we saw in forty-eight hours. And it’s very…. It’s just in the middle of bloody nowhere. Fabulous views and all that stuff.Anyway, on the bloody – on the bloody Sunday night there was quite a strange bloody noise. I’m sure you’ve heard…. I’m sure you’ve heard possums and koalas, with that very loud grunting sort of noise? And, I’m sure you’ve heard cattle? I’m a farmer and especially bloody cows, when you’ve separated calves from them, they’ll bellow all night.

Oh yeah.

Now it was nothing like that. It was nothing like that. It was just sort of a bloody moan. A moany sort of a noise. And it sort of spooked Sue and I a bit, because, you know, we thought that’s a bit strange. I wonder if someone’s there, you know? And (coughing) it went a couple of times. A couple of these quite loud, low moans.

Anyway, I got out with my bloody – I’ve got quite a powerful torch, you know. It lights up to about five hundred meters. And I went out onto the veranda of this place and just went right around, ‘cause, it’s in the middle of a bloody paddock. The nearest trees would be, oh shit, a hundred and…. At least a hundred and fifty meters away on one side and maybe hundreds of meters away on the other.

So and there was nothing, no stock there. There were no possums. There were no bloody…. There were no trees there, so no possums. No bloody koalas. None of the bloody normal things. And I thought, that’s bloody odd. Anyway, in the morning we left. And we left the place about eight o’clock.

So, it’s a forestry road. A well graded forestry road, but I was taking it bloody easily along there. Just came out of a patch of really deep, bloody primary rain forest, into that open bloody eucalypt stuff and then pow! Here was this…. You know, a fleeting figure. Running across the road!  And I thought, shit! What’s that?

I immediately said “Sue… hey, hey, hey! You see that?” And she said “What? What?” “Bloody someone running across the road!”

And anyway, we pulled up and it was all over in shit…. Aw a couple of…. From my perspective driving, I was watching pretty carefully. But then, I definitely saw this bloody figure move, running across the road and then, into some light – light eucalyptus forest. But, I distinctively thought, how strange is that? ‘Cause, I saw what I thought was an arm going up to brush a branch or something away.

Anyway, we pulled up and had a look around and of course didn’t see anything and couldn’t hear anything. I switched the car off and couldn’t hear anything. And that was about…. Oh, we reckon about twenty past eight, half past eight in the morning. Because, we left that bloody joint at eight. And it took us about forty minutes to get the twenty k’s. It’s a pretty average bloody track you know. Yeah, so that’s sort of what I’ve got to report.

Oh, and the bloody smell! The smell, the smell. Oh that’s right. The smell that bloody, on the night before, the Sunday night. When I was outside I could definitely smell something. It was definitely a smell, like a bad BO smell. Like someone hadn’t had a bloody shower for a few days. We ah…. Like there’s showers at this place. There’s no evidence of…. There’s no rats there. There’s no bloody possums to get at the garbage bins or anything. But, I did go in and said “Hey Sue. There’s a really bad [inaudible]” There’s a feed line across the road from us on another property back in Bonner and I thought, it smells a bit like that. 

Ah. That’s bad. Yeah.

So, yeah that’s all I’ve got to bloody report. You know?

Oh. That’s pretty interesting David.

Yeah. Well I, I’m a reasonably sensible guy. I’ve, I do a fair bit of shooting on my place here. We have feral dogs and cats and all that sort of stuff. I’ve got a lot of roos on my place. A lot of wallabies. It didn’t fit that bill; you know? Like if you see a bloody…. If you see a kangaroo, they’ve got a bloody big tail that bounces. Wallabies have got a very long tail that keeps straight. But, I didn’t see a tail. I definitely did not see a tail. So that’s…. And it wasn’t a bloody koala. It was too big for a koala. And, and yeah. Height wise, I reckon, as I said in that thing to Dean, I reckon it was about the height of like a child? Or like about…. Maybe about five foot tall.

I probably should have gone, ‘cause, I got a reference against it with a couple of the little trees there. Probably should have gone and measured that. But I didn’t. So, but that’s yeah…. Colour-wise, it was again a Brindley colour. Not bloody the colour of a kangaroo. Not, not, not, not the light – you get those Rufous wallabies up there. Those red-necked wallabies.  It wasn’t that. So yeah, yeah.

Right. Did you say, did you make a guess at the distance in front of the car? The range it was?

Oh, yeah. Look, I’m sitting in my office here. I reckon it would have been, probably about fifty meters, forty meters.

Oh that’s pretty close. Yeah that’s pretty close.

And, where I saw it, we were going down a side. This road road follows pretty much along the top of the range and as it goes around a few spurs there’s some quite, very, steep-sided things and we’d just come off one of those. I was seriously watching the road. And then, when I actually picked this up probably, probably the figure was going off the track. Going off the track. You know, I was watching the bloody side. I just bring my gaze up and holey shit! So, probably the middle of this track…. Fifteen meters, twenty meters you could see into the bush there.  

So it was fairly upright was it?

Yeah, yeah. Again, not like a roo or a bloody wallaby at full speed. They’ve got their heads down; you know? And that’s, it was sort of the [inaudible] that, that sort of caught me too. Like it was quite wide, it was quite wide like an [inaudible] across the shoulders or the body. ‘Cause, kangaroos and wallabies and things, they’re pretty bloody small really and I thought shit! This is a bit; this is a bit wide. And I’m looking at it like it was going from my right, to my left. And, I’m looking at it from an angle, from an angle of about forty-five degrees and as I closed up to where it crossed the road the angle would have changed slightly. But I was probably looking at it, in all honesty, at an angle of forty – yeah, thirty to forty-five degrees.

Oh yeah, and so did you? …. I know it was fairly fleeting, but did you, you noticed a few details. Did you sort of register the shape of it’s head, or anything about it’s head or shoulders?

No! If I didn’t, I didn’t because I thought I saw what was an arm going up to bloody brush this branch away. I, and this road’s relatively bloody dangerous, you know? So I was, and I drive an XR6 Ute, so I was going pretty slowly. I was probably doing about twent, twenty-five k’s you know? That’s about the max you can do on this bloody road. And I saw it, but I yelled out to Sue “Look, look, look, look there mate!” And slammed…. I didn’t slam the breaks on, but I did pull up on the gravel, ready to bloody turn the engine off, but you couldn’t hear any crashing noises. You couldn’t hear any noise of something going through the bush, which you sometimes do with kangaroos,

Oh sure, you do.

cattle and stuff like that

So your first remark to your wife was that you thought it was a bloke that went across the road. So it was sort of human, roughly human shaped, I gather. Is that right?

it’s a bloody Yowie!” She said; “Oh bullshit!” I said; “Oh no, seriously! It wasn’t hopping blah, blah, blah” I said. “It wasn’t a koala, like that thing at black pinch,” blah, blah, blah. So that was the conversation, yeah.

Yeah. It ticks several boxes for the Yowie. The smell. The revolting smell and the weird moaning. We’ve heard that before. And then, there’s the man-like shape and running like buggery across the road. Oh did you notice, particularly the legs at all?

No. But, I definitely had an impression that it was, that there were legs. Like, not legs like a kangaroo, but more an upright. And, the other thing was the colour. It was like a brindle, a brindle sort of brown. And that was the thing that sort of shook me a bit.

There was a fellow, near Queensland, near the…. Have you heard about the  Canungra {Inaudible] Training area near Queensland? Just in from the Gold Coast in the jungle area there. We have several stories from around there. From the soldiers and also the civilians driving along the road, reaching the – ah they call it the Canungra Land Warfare Center.  Anyway, there was a fellow there – this was quite recent. And, he was travelling in broad daylight, driving a truck that dropped off a load of stuff. And, he came around a corner in his truck and he thought “oh there’s a massive logs or something rolling onto the road.” That was his very first impression. A lot of debris or something. And then, he realized it was this big hairy creature! And it stood up.

And he was practically on it. He hit the brakes and came right up close. So close that the thing was standing with his chest virtually against the bonnet of the truck. Yeah. He told the story quite cheerfully. It was in the media here, after Dan Harrison interviewed him. And this thing thumped the front of the truck and he said it was almost comical. Three expressions crossed his face. First off it was shock and then anger. I forget what the third expression was. It just thumped the front of the truck. It dented the bonnet slightly and it turned and walked off. But he said it was really, really huge and like twelve feet tall. And big with it.

He did a couple of nice sketches of the face and so on. And he initially didn’t want his name used or anything. At first he didn’t even tell his wife. Not for a day or so and then he did. And, then he mentioned it to a couple of the other truck drivers, and to his surprise, they didn’t laugh. They said yeah, yeah. Some of the guys said they’d seen that there and so eventually he went public. We’d interviewed another guy Mr Cook, who saw one in almost the same spot a couple of years earlier and in that case it had run across the road. Just in front of his truck. Pretty close. It was virtually the same spot.

So when you are interviewing these people Tony, I guess you are very aware of their body language and demeanor. And, so how…. Most of these people you’ve interviewed, how do they appear to you when they’re talking about their experience? ‘Cause, usually when you’re talking about an experience like that you tend to feel the feelings again.

Yes, yeah a lot of them relive the terror. They often say, “Oh the goose bumps are coming up on my arms again and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up, just recalling it!” As far as I’m concerned ninety-five percent, or more, of the witnesses are clearly telling the truth. There might be a small proportion that are fantasy prone and or, who might have been perhaps mistaken. But that’s why we like multiple witness accounts. I think in our book Yowie we had 300 reports. And, I think a hundred of them were more than a single witness. And around fifty percent of the sightings are in daylight. You know, that reduces the chances that people are mistaken. And of course, the similarities in the reports over the course of a hundred and fifty years too, are striking, you know?

Yeah. So in Australia…. Australia’s geographically, such a huge, huge country. Where would you feel that most of the sightings tend to be based? Like, are they towards the coast or are they towards the center of Australia?

Well, most of our reports come from the Eastern Seaboard, you know, within a hundred kilometers of the coast. Or, two hundred kilometers of the coast. There’s the coast area. The coastal forest and mountains. The Great Dividing Range and what they call the spurs of the Great Dividing Range. So from right up Cape York, right down into Victoria and around…. But, there are reports and there is a lot of Aboriginal Yowie lore from way inland as well. It’s just that, as you know in Australia only a small fraction of the population lives on the inland. In the outback. The vast majority lives east of The Great Dividing Range. So, where there are more people, I suppose? There’s more people who might see them

True, true. That’s a valid point. I know I was at Uluru about oh, a yeah and a half ago. And, the distances. I can’t get my head around the vastness of the place. It was just beautiful. But, while I was there I was thinking man this would be such an easy place for something like the Yowie to hide away from people in.

Sure. Yeah. Yes, and there are stories. We have a few reports from the northern territory, from the inland and some Aboriginal lore, but see, if I’m right. You know, I’ve got this outrageous idea that I’ve mentioned to a lot of people, that they seem in some way paranormal. It doesn’t matter, they could appear anywhere, I suppose. They seem to be, honestly, identical. They seem to be exactly the same creature they have in Canada and the States. There’s very little difference between the Australian reports and the North American ones. The Himalayan Yeti reports are …. There’s a lot fewer reports, so it’s hard to tell. Same down in Malaysia. Very similar, but and New Zealand too. It’s hard to say. It’s mainly Maori lore, isn’t it?

Well there’ve been a number of sightings over the, you know, like this past century, there’s been a lot of sightings. And mostly the ones I’ve seen certainly correlate with what you say, you know? Ape-like figure. Tall. Sometimes there’s an obnoxious smell with them.

That story that you recorded by that lady…. Was she Maori? I assumed she was Maori. Yeah. As you know, the elements in that were very similar. The feeling of being watched. That, that is very common. People feel that someone is watching them. Then they turn around and lo and behold, there’s a hair ape-man. And, that other detail she mentioned, the thing pacing the boat. By keeping up with the boat. That’s so common. Like Yowie’s coming along beside a track and people walking down the track. The Yowie’s just a little bit back and just, just pacing them

Pacing them….

Or keeping up with cars, you know? Running alongside cars. So I was very struck by her sighting it was great! That was the lower Whanganui right?

Yes, correct, yeah that was fascinating. Fascinating. Of course there’s a lot of Maori lore around that area about the Moehau man – I can’t remember if that is the term the local iwi, or tribe use in that region. Different regions have different names for it. But yeah. That was a really, really interesting encounter. I thought.

That was a good one.

Whanganui Experience

I remember when I was about six…. Must have been about six or five, we went for a school trip. We went…. I used to go to a little school near the Whanganui River. And we went for a school trip on the riverboat, to go and see the bridge to nowhere, cause it’s a pretty long walk inland, and it’s only half an hour walk from the river.

And at the time my uncle, he was running a business with the river boats, so he took our school up there. School was only about ten kids, and so it wasn’t like…. You know? Thousands of kids trying to take them up a river.

Well anyways, we went up there and I dunno…. I just had this really weird, eerie feeling, like someone was watching me. And I kept on saying to Mum, ‘cause, Mum came, and I kept on saying to Mum: “Mum there’s someone in the trees watching! I can feel them! I can’t see them, but I can feel them watching.”

And Mum’s like don’t be silly – ‘cause, you don’t want to scare your kids – you know? She totally believed me though. I could see that she believed me. I’m pretty sure that she could feel it too. And, I kept on saying to my Uncle, I said: “there’s somebody in the trees watching”, and he goes “yeah, nah, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. It’s just in the trees.
Well anyways, we went up to the bridge to nowhere and it was fine when we got off the boat and went up and had a look at the bridge to nowhere. It’s really beautiful up there, I totally recommend going to have a look.

Well anyways, we were on our way up [stream], we were back on the river boat. I could feel this thing watching, I could see it sort of like running in the trees, following the boat. Following the boat down, ‘cause, we were going really slowly ‘cause, it was in the middle of the summer time and it…. And so the river was quite low and the bottom of the boat was scraping along the rapids. So we were going really slowly, so as not to punch a hole in the bottom of the boat.

Well anyways, I could see this hairy, gorilla looking thing running along…. And, it was black. And I dunno, I just felt really uncomfortable about it, like I just didn’t want to stop. We just…. We couldn’t stop, and I kept on telling Uncle, and I was holding onto him and squeezing him for dear life! I said to him, you can’t stop this boat, and we got a bit stuck on a rapid, and I said: “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” I was freaking out.

And this thing was standing there, just looking at us, and we got the boat going…. And it was just absolutely, truly terrifying and my Uncle saw it. My Mother saw it. I don’t know about anybody else, I don’t think they saw it, but it…. Yeah it was only because I could see it, and I noticed it…. And it was…. I dunno, it just felt so freaky, it was….

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like its energy. I didn’t like how, they way it was running after us…. Yeah it just felt like that it was defending something and it just really didn’t want us to be there. Yeah.

It was really tall…. Like the tallest person whom I know, he was 6 foot taller. It was taller than them, from what I could see, from what I remember…. And, I dunno…. I just remember him – It had like, black fur…. And, I don’t really remember much more. I don’t really remember its face. I was just a little kid. I just remember being…. Just the feelings I had about it, being I was actually really terrified and I didn’t want it to come anywhere close to me.

As I said, my knowledge of the Moehau is not that great.  But, my friend Paul Croft, a great researcher. And before I went to New Zealand he Googled everything he could and dug up a lot of those reports of early colonists. And a lot of Maori say that there’s Moehau along Whanganui that will grab people out of canoes and…. So I tried to go to as many of the areas as I could, when I was there. I spoke to quite, well, a few Maori.  But, I never spoke to a Maori who knew anything about the hairy ape-man. I knew that there must, there must be some.

I was actually doing an episode…. It was the big cats that got me started on it.

Right! There you go.

And then it got me into like the Moehau, the Patupaiarehe, which are the New Zealand fairy folk. The Taniwha, which are our

Oh yeah, lake spirits.

… monsters that live in the rivers. Guardians some call them, kaitiaki…

Yes, very interesting. Yes.

Yeah. So, you’ve written three books and you’re working on a fourth book. Is that correct?

Ah. Yes, yes.

Can you please tell us about your books? I know one of your books is currently out of print. Which is a real shame. I was looking at it online and it had such good reviews and people were saying in the comments, that why can’t you bring it out I digital format, or get it reprinted?

Yeah we should. It’s awkward, you know, dealing with a big publisher. If it was the fellow who did our second book, Anomalous books in the states, Patrick Huey,  he’s a friend of ours and he, you know, would reprint anything we ask. But yeah, the first book that was in nineteen-ninety-four. That was Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia. And as you gathered we have half a dozen chapters. Mysterious Big Cats, the Yowie. The water monsters, the Bunyip.

The Bunyip’s comparable with our Taniwha here in New Zealand.

Yeah. A lot in common, yeah. And the Tasmanian Tiger, you know, does it exist in Tasmania. And, does it exist on the mainland? And the… What was the other one?  Oh, the Queensland marsupial Tiger cat.

Is that a thylacine?

The thylacine is the Tasmanian Tiger. This striped cat-like thing from Queensland was described as being, well just like that. Like a small tiger. Anyway, that was the first book, and second was Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot. That was two-thousand and six. I think really, that is our best book, that is. We put in so much time and effort to it. And, we documented three-hundred reports.

Wow, that’s a large number.

Yeah, yeah. All the possible explanations, and the Aboriginal lore, so we’re proudest of that. The third book was Australian Poltergeist, which we wrote because, we had an experience with a poltergeist, on a station in the Northern Territory in nineteen-ninety-eight. The Humpty-do episode. We, we, as they say these days were embedded in the, in the house with with the people for five days. Yeah, they were very good. They said You stay here if you like or, you know we sat there one night and had a cabin around the corner. But we went there every day and we saw a lot of phenomena that couldn’t be explained naturally. There were objects appearing in mid-air and coming seemingly coming through the ceiling and going on the wall, lying around. So we became interested in poltergeist activity big time after that. And we collected 50 other cases. Eighteen-forty-five to modern times and so we compiled them in our third book Australian Poltergeist.

Then got the idea of doing a second book on the Yowie, incorporating the hundreds of additional cases that got on to. Largely through Dean Harrison’s research. Sort of floundering around with that book for the last oh gee, five or six years. And we keep getting distracted. I’m also keen to finish my memoirs. There’s really different things I’ve looked at over the years. So, because of, as I was saying, I’m seventy now, so friends are dropping off the twig everywhere. So yeah, I’d like to just get it all down, you know? I have them in the manuscript, largely written. But it needs a lot of work and attention, so I’d like to get into that.

I can understand that and like, you’ve been doing this for over 40 years. So, and obviously, it’s been a consuming passion for you. Like it is for me. I mean, I absolutely love this. I got into this when I was about – oh I dunno thirteen or fourteen? I first heard bout spontaneous human combustion, which is my episode that just played a short while ago.

Oh sorry, can you say that again?

Spontaneous Human combustion.

Oh yeah! That’s fascinating isn’t it?

Yeah, yeah. So your goal is to finish this book with you’re working on with Paul Cropper? When do you think you might possibly have that finished by?

Well gee…. I’m going through a bit of a sort of period of semi-despair about it. I don’t think we’ll get it done this year. I’ll be seeing Paul in a couple of weeks, but I reckon, probably mid next year. Mid next year.

It’ll be ready for the publishers? So Tony, I want to thank you very much for your time today. It’s been a very, very interesting chat.  I’m sure my listeners have enjoyed it as much as I have. So thank you very much for your time today.

 Oh, thank you. It’s been very enjoyable. A pleasure talking to you Marianne. Yeah, talk to you again soon.

In this episode, we’ve heard of a number of people’s experiences in encountering the Australian Yowie. And of course, those barely scratched the surface of the experiences he has heard. I encourage all of you to go and check his books out. They are beautifully written and if you have an interest in this subject then so worthwhile adding to your collection. I realise that this episode is a much longer than normal one, but Tony is such a fascinating gentleman to talk with and he was kind enough to share those interviews with witnesses with us, that I felt it was worthwhile doing the longer time frame. Whether or not you believe in the existence of the Yowie, the Bigfoot, the Moehau Man, or whatever other name this being
goes by throughout the world, these witnesses and experiences can certainly make us all question our current understanding of whatever may co-exist with us on this beautiful world of ours. And in my opinion, that’s not a bad thing.

This episode’s bumper music is called Goddess Dance by SackJo22. Licensed under creative commons. For more information check out this episodes page at www.walkingtheshadowlands.com. If you have any suggestions for topics you might like me to cover in upcoming episodes, then please don’t hesitate to contact me. Or, if any of you have any questions, suggestions, or any comments that you’d like to make, or experiences that you might like to share with myself or my audience. Then just email me at shadowlands@yahoo.com.

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• “Goddess Dance” by SackJo22, 2011 – Licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)