“A towering, fur-covered giant that melts back into the gum trees the instant you look twice.”
Australia's giant of the gum forests goes by many names. In 1875 the Reverend William Ridley recorded 'Yo-wi' among the Gamilaraay as a spirit that roams the earth at night; other nations knew the doolagahl, the quinkin, the jurrawarra — the hairy man of the wood. Colonial newspapers preferred 'yahoo'. Whatever the name, the description holds: a bipedal, ape-like figure, hair-covered, standing anywhere from 2.1 to a reported 3.6 metres tall.
The Yowie is Australia's answer to Bigfoot, and its paper trail is older than most. From nineteenth-century bush journals to a former senator's flustered testimony, the creature has been reported up and down the eastern ranges for a century and a half — always glimpsed, never caught, leaving footprints whose shape and toe-count vary maddeningly from cast to cast.
The Legend
Aboriginal traditions of hairy men of the bush long predate the colony. Old Bungaree, a Gunedah elder, recounted legends of an ancient race of 'Yahoos' who inhabited Australia before Aboriginal peoples, fast-running and formidable, clashing with humans in the deep past. Comparable beings appear under different names across many nations of the east coast.
The settlers inherited the fear wholesale. In November 1876 the Australian Town and Country Journal asked its readers who had not heard, from the earliest settlement of the colony, of 'the Yahoo-Devil Devil, or hairy man of the wood'. By then the creature was already a fixture of bush talk — something between a spirit, an undiscovered ape, and a memory.
Documented Sightings
In 1882 amateur naturalist H.J. McCooey reported a tailless creature covered in long black hair, reddish about the throat and chest, on the New South Wales south coast between Batemans Bay and Ulladulla. A century later the reports kept coming: in 1977 Bill O'Chee — later a Queensland senator — saw something at Springbrook he compared to Chewbacca and put at over three metres tall, and in 1979 two students near Kilcoy met a two-to-three-metre brown hairy figure.
In 1994 the investigator known as Tim the Yowie Man claimed a sighting in the Brindabella Ranges, and in 2000 bushwalker Steve Piper filmed an unidentified bipedal figure in the same mountains — the 'Piper Film'. Springbrook, in the Gold Coast hinterland, has produced more Yowie reports than anywhere else in Australia. The late cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy claimed a collection of more than 3,000 encounter reports.
The Lore
The sceptical case is itself historical. Historian Graham Joyner, who compiled the nineteenth-century accounts in The Hairy Man of South Eastern Australia (1977), argues the modern 'Yowie' was assembled in the mid-1970s from misread 'yahoo' reports — a word possibly borrowed from Gulliver's Travels — and notes the term was relatively unknown before then. The footprints' inconsistent toes do the argument no harm.
Believers counter with the sheer depth of the record: independent Aboriginal traditions of the hairy man across the east, unbroken colonial reports, and modern hotspots in the Blue Mountains and the Queensland border ranges. The Yowie meanwhile thrives in the culture — lending its name to chocolates, cartoons and roadside statues — Australia's shaggy shadow, always one ridge further into the bush.
Field Notes
- ✦ Reported as bipedal, 2.1-3.6 m tall, but occasionally said to drop to all fours when fleeing.
- ✦ Sightings concentrate in the Blue Mountains and the Gold Coast hinterland — Springbrook has more reports than anywhere in Australia.
- ✦ Many Aboriginal nations describe comparable 'hairy man' beings under different names, from doolagahl to quinkin.
- ✦ Rev. William Ridley recorded 'Yo-wi' among the Gamilaraay in 1875 as 'a spirit that roams the earth at night'.
- ✦ In 1977, future senator Bill O'Chee reported a three-metre creature at Springbrook; Rex Gilroy claimed over 3,000 collected reports.
Case File
- Classification
- Unknown bipedal hominid
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Eastern Australian ranges and bushland
- First Sighted
- Aboriginal tradition; European reports from the 19th century
- Habitat
- Dense forest, mountain ranges and remote bushland
- Reported Size
- About 2-2.4 m tall
- Also Known As
- Yahoo · Doolagahl · Australian Bigfoot