Article Souce Canberra Your Guide

IT ALL began with footprints in the sand. Two left feet. Not the kind associated with dance classes and the like, but two feet, looking like any other footprints, except they were both left feet.

This occurred on Pambula beach on an otherwise perfectly normal weekday November morning. The few other beach-goers were going about their normal business in a normal sort of way.

Discreet inspection revealed all had the correct assignation of one left and one right foot. And their big toes were not disproportionately large, like these peculiar footprints in the sand. It’s the kind of strangeness that is difficult to get your head around.


You wonder whether you’re seeing things, whether an imp crept into the peaceful holiday house and spiked your cornflakes (of course not!), as you search for more practical explanations. Could two people with identical feet have been walking in such a way as to make it look like the tracks of one person? Or, more plausible, could it be a prankster in fake feet? Maybe, but why pick Pambula beach on a random Tuesday morning? Why not Bondi at a weekend?

No logical answer was forthcoming, so the puzzle was abandoned and would have been forgotten, had a visit to the Eden Killer Whale Museum not jogged the memory.

But there, after marvelling again at the story - and skeleton - of Old Tom, the orca who was virtually single-handedly responsible for whaling in Twofold Bay (and after he died, whaling ceased), a stroll downstairs to the indigenous section revealed ancient history, customs - and the feet. There they were, on a wall panel. At least they were the same shape as the strange footprints in the sand, but were more logically left and right. These were the footprints of the doolagarl, or doolagard, the yowie that allegedly roams the South Coast, and these feet were painted by former volunteer curator Alex McKenzie about 10 years ago, explained Eden Killer Whale Museum curator Jodie White.

This writer had no intention of wondering whether yowies actually do exist, or what could possibly have two left feet, but then you can never tell what’s around the corner. When it comes to yowies and similar enormous creatures, it is interesting that this phenomenon, in various forms, has been reported for centuries in China, America, Canada and, of course, Australia.

At the time of writing, the Government of the Malaysian state of Johor has announced it will organise a proper scientific expedition to track down a legendary ape man reputed to roam its jungles. A spate of sightings of their Big Foot, a creature up to 3m tall that leaves footprints 45cm long, has inspired this renewed interest.

Australia’s yowies have been reported on since before the settlers came to the land down under, with Aboriginal rock paintings in north Queensland depicting a tall, hairy creature. Yowie sightings have been reported since soon after the First Fleet, and continue.

But, it must be remembered, no conclusive evidence that yowies exist has been produced. Plaster casts of footprints abound but, similar as they may be, it’s not proof. A picture of a yowie, yowie fur, or yowie scat, would be far more conclusive, but this has not happened.

Of course those who’ve seen one remain convinced that they exist.

While tales may differ over time, the recurring theme is a gorilla-like animal over 2m tall, with an unbearable, nauseating stench about it. This terrifying creature is covered in fur and is reported to have long arms and no neck.

For Canberra’s own Tim the Yowie man, seeing such a creature in the Brindabellas in 1994 proved a Damascus experience, an encounter that first saw him hunting yowies and eventually pursuing the unusual the world over, trying to explain the unexplained.

Tim, the National Museum of Australia’s resident cryptonaturalist, treads a path of caution when dealing with the weird and wonderful, only resorting to paranormal explanations when "normal" doesn’t crack it.

He really doesn’t know if yowies exist. When he first saw his yowie 12 years ago it was very real to him. Since then, he’s hunted for the flesh-and-blood creature the country over and found no sign. Now he tends to think it is some sort of paranormal phenomenon.

And even this gets people heated up. "The paranormal goes against logic, but so does a 2m-tall creature coming out of the bush that nobody can identify," he said.

Some five years after his own sighting he went to a Big Foot conference in Ohio, at which the topic of whether Big Foot and his ilk were flesh and blood or paranormal got "very heated. So heated, in fact, that a fight between for and against took place in the parking lot."

In his paper The Yahoo, The Yowie and Reports of Australian Hairy Bipeds, Dr Colin P.Groves of the Department of Anthropology at the ANU notes that Australia was indeed once home to giant things, such as the rhino-sized Diprotodon and Zygomaturus, creatures distantly related to wombats.

He also notes the reports of "wild men" from settlers and pioneers, which he says "are a hotchpotch of shooters’ campfire tales, unidentifiable apparitions seen at dusk, and various hairy horrids that frightened the horses and demoralised the dogs".

In this paper, Groves concludes that the evidence for the existence of an Australian wild man - or yowie - is "extremely poor".

But if you want to believe in the possibility that yowies really do exist, you’re well placed. The region around Canberra, the Brindabellas and the Snowy Mountains are thick with yowie stories.

One faithful recorder of them is Rex Gilroy, whose website carefully chronicles yowie encounters from pioneering days to more modern times. Take his report of what happened to Susan Townsend, her female friend and their boyfriends when camping on the shores of Lake Jindabyne in January 1990. Townsend was getting the fire started while the others collected wood when she noticed a strong smell. Then she heard twigs snapping and turned around to see a hairy, 2.3m-tall giant male creature striding out of the trees just 10m away. He moved towards her but, hearing the others coming, bolted into the forest.

Other yowies in Gilroy’s collection of tales are less reticent - tearing apart prospector’s huts, hurling rocks and boulders at people, emitting blood-curdling screams, and generally being "hairy horrids", to borrow Groves’s term. Some tell of yowies being particularly bloody, attacking and killing horses, for example, and there are "eyewitness" tales from pioneers of a yowie taking men, never to be seen again.

Of course, Tim the Yowie man gets told most yowie stories going, and he seldom heard of any violence associated with yowies. "Yowies seem to be non-violent in my experience. Only occasionally do I get a report of it lunging or attacking human beings ... I’ve been called to investigate yowie signs, such as scratches on trees 2m above the ground, but have not been convinced that only a yowie could have caused that."

There is, though, "a flow of reports all of a similar nature - the stink, the long arms, no neck, the hair".

One of the stories that sticks in his mind was told to him by a ranger in the Gold Coast hinterland, who said the stench was so bad he’d thrown up.

But with all these appearances, not a single yowie has left a sign that can conclusively prove that he, or others like him, exist. Footprints are easy to fake, far easier than a clump of fur or, better still, the convenient carcass of a 2m-tall yowie.

Why the stories persist over centuries, and why yowie descriptions have so many similarities even though witnesses are so far apart from one another remains a mystery.

But if the yowie really does exist, can anyone explain the two left feet?