In search of yowies

 
Belinda Garfoot is 54 years old and lives in the Newcastle suburb of Elermore Vale in NSW with husband Peter. In 1996, while on a driving holiday, she and Peter watched a yowie cross the Kings Highway between Braidwood and the coast.

Peter had pulled to the side of the road to rest the car's brakes when he saw the creature in the rear-vision mirror, and both turned to watch it for five to 10 seconds. 

It was, they say, at least 2.1 metres, or seven feet, tall, with disproportionally long arms, no neck, shaggy and with an upright walk. So what was it?

Garfoot's encounter is included in The Yowie - In Search of Australia's Bigfoot by Tony Healy and Paul Cropper - a serious look at a great many reports of yowies stretching back many years.

Read Newcastle Herald columnist's Jeff Corbett's recent blog post about yowies and keeping an open mind here.

The Lamington Triangle - Yowies galore

The magnificent Lamington National Park in Queensland is well-known as a Yowie hot-spot - boasting hundreds of sightings of the shaggy manbeasts (or manimals, bush apes, yahoos - whatever you prefer to call them) - and it also has a forbidding reputation as a wilderness area, claiming many lives in its many decades as a national park.

One of the most famous Lamington National Park yowie witnesses is the former Queensland Senator Bill O'Chee, who as a schoolboy saw a giant gorilla-like beast that he said looked like the Star Wars character 'Chewbacca'.

The park lies on the Lamington Plateau of the McPherson Range on the Queensland/New South Wales border. From Southport on the Gold Coast the park is 85 km to the southwest and Brisbane is 110 km north. Lamington National Park is also renowned for its natural beauty, rainforests, birdlife, ancient trees, waterfalls, walking tracks and mountain views.

In this short clip, courtesy of Michael Hardcastle, several seasoned bushmen, including Bernard O'Reilly (author of the Australian classic Cullenbenbong, which mentions the 'Gubba') talk about the park, its grisly reputation and the mysterious hairy men that lurk in its rarely explored forests - the Yowies.