Yowie

Also Known As: from Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay yuwi, a spirit that walks at night; known through the nineteenth century as the Yahoo, the hairy man, the Australian ape and the Australian gorilla
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Cryptids, Aboriginal Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A hair-covered biped of the eastern Australian bush that appears at the edge of clearings at dusk, watches, and is gone before anyone can reach it.
Role in Mythos: It is Australia’s contribution to the worldwide wild-man tradition, assembled over two centuries out of a Gamilaraay night spirit, colonial newspaper reports of an unclassified ape, and a burst of publicity in the mid-1970s.
Relation to Humans: Almost every encounter is a staring match that the human loses by blinking, and the creature is far more often described as watching than as attacking. A handful of accounts have it screaming, throwing stones or killing livestock, but no report has ever produced a body, a bone or an unambiguous photograph.

Sandy Creek runs shallow and cold about four kilometres north of Kilcoy, in the Queensland hill country where the dairy paddocks give out and the scrub takes over. On 28 December 1979, two sixteen-year-olds came out of that scrub and told anyone who would listen that something two to three metres tall and covered in chocolate-coloured hair had been standing among the trees, looking at them. Within a year the town had carved a version of it from a single beech log and set it on a plinth in the middle of the park. The park is now Yowie Park. The local rugby team plays as the Yowies. Whatever the boys saw that afternoon, Kilcoy made a living out of it.

The creature in those reports is broad through the shoulders and stands upright, somewhere between a little over two metres and a claimed three and a half. The hair is dark: black, chocolate, sometimes rusted red across the throat and the chest. The nose is wide and flat, there is no neck worth the name, and the arms hang long enough to be remarked on. The smell, in the accounts that bother with smell, is wet dog left too long in a closed shed. Footprints attributed to it are consistently larger than a man’s and inconsistent in almost every other way, including the number of toes, which is the sort of detail that tends not to survive into the retelling.

The name is older than the animal. In 1875 the Reverend William Ridley published *Kámilarói, and Other Australian Languages*, a survey of the languages of northern New South Wales, and recorded among the Gamilaraay the word Yō-wī, glossed as a spirit that roams over the earth at night. The Australian National Dictionary traces the English word to the closely related Yuwaalaraay yuwi, a dream spirit. Neither entry mentions hair, or apes, or anything three metres tall. Ridley’s Yō-wī walks in the dark, and that is very nearly all he says about it.

What the nineteenth century actually argued about was the Yahoo. An anonymous piece titled “Superstitions of the Australian Aborigines: The Yahoo” ran in the *Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine* in February 1842. By November 1876 the *Australian Town and Country Journal* was passing on a report from Milburn Creek of “some unearthly animal or inhuman creature … namely the Yahoo-Devil Devil, or hairy man of the wood.” Where the settlers got the word is contested. Jonathan Swift had put a race of filthy human brutes called Yahoos into *Gulliver’s Travels* in 1726, and the historian Graham Joyner, who spent decades working through the colonial record, concluded that the borrowing ran from the settlers to Aboriginal speakers rather than the other way about.

On 9 December 1882 the same journal printed a letter under the heading “The Naturalist: Australian Apes”. Its author, an amateur naturalist named Henry James McCooey, had been on the south coast between Batemans Bay and Ulladulla when he came across an animal squatting in the undergrowth. It was tailless. Long black hair covered the body, with a reddish tint at the throat and chest, and its small restless eyes were half hidden under matted fur. Standing, he judged, it would have reached nearly five feet. He threw a stone at it and it went crashing off through the scrub, and he then wrote to the Australian Museum offering to fetch them one for forty pounds. Nobody took him up on the offer.

Genuine field records of hairy-man beings do exist in the south-east, and they are worth separating from the noise around them. R. H. Mathews reported a being called the Yaruma from the south-eastern corner of New South Wales in 1907. W. J. Enright published a Jarra-Wahu, or Yerri-Wahoo, from the north coast in the journal *Mankind* in 1937, along with a Yahu around Mudgee and Maitland. Those are notices from named collectors working in named districts. The long inventories of regional yowie names that circulate today, a dozen or two at a time, come out of later cryptozoological compilations rather than out of anyone’s fieldwork, and they deserve to be read that way.

The Yowie as most Australians now picture it is a creature of the mid-1970s. Before then the word barely surfaced in print. In May 1975 *The Bulletin* was reporting on “the monster … currently causing trouble in the central west of N.S.W.”, and by December 1976 *The Australian Women’s Weekly* was telling readers to forget the fairies at the bottom of the garden. The man most responsible for the change was Rex Gilroy, who ran a private museum, founded an Australian Yowie Research Centre, and by 1978 was said to be holding files on three thousand sightings. He worked at it for fifty years, with his wife Heather, and died in April 2023. Writing in the journal *Australian Folklore* in 2002, the folklorist John Ryan traced how comprehensively the word had taken over the space once occupied by the Yahoo. Joyner put it more bluntly still: the modern Yowie, in his reading, is a misunderstanding of the old colonial ape reports, and the animal has never existed.

Publicity had its own momentum. In October 1977 a thirteen-year-old named Bill O’Chee was camping near Springbrook in south-east Queensland with a school group when they reported a three-metre hair-covered figure in the rainforest; he later compared it to Chewbacca and later still became a senator. Springbrook has since accumulated more Yowie reports than anywhere else in the country. In 1995 a chocolate company launched a line of Yowie confectionery with a fictional backstory written for it by the English-born author Geoffry Morgan Pike, and in 2004 a Canberra man trading as Tim the Yowie Man beat Cadbury in court over the use of the name.

What the Yowie does, in the overwhelming majority of accounts, is stand there. It comes to the edge of a clearing at dusk, close enough that the hair can be seen shifting in the wind, and it looks at whoever is looking at it. Then the lantana closes and there is nothing left but the sound of something heavy going downhill through the undergrowth. Its abilities are all of a piece with that: enormous apparent strength, a scream carried across gullies at night, stones thrown out of cover, an ability to move through country that stops a person on foot, and above all the ability to be somewhere else by the time anyone reaches the spot. Almost nobody reports it doing anything more.

Its limits belong to a creature that lives entirely in report. In the mid-1970s the Queanbeyan Festival Board and radio station 2CA offered two hundred thousand dollars for the capture and presentation of a Yowie, and the money has never been claimed. The tracks contradict each other. The best-known footage, shot by the Canberra bushwalker Steve Piper in the Brindabella Ranges in 2000, shows a distant upright shape and settles nothing. No skeleton has been recovered, no hair sample has survived analysis, and the Australian Museum has been waiting for McCooey’s specimen since 1882.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Yowie?

The Yowie is a large hair-covered upright creature reported in the bush of eastern Australia, the Australian counterpart of Bigfoot and the Yeti. Reports describe it as roughly two to three metres tall, dark-haired, long-armed and effectively neckless, with a broad flat nose. It is usually described as watching people from cover rather than attacking them.

Where does the name Yowie come from?

The word comes from Aboriginal languages of northern New South Wales. In 1875 the Reverend William Ridley recorded the Gamilaraay word Yō-wī, meaning a spirit that roams the earth at night, and the Australian National Dictionary traces the English term to the related Yuwaalaraay yuwi, a dream spirit. Neither of those original senses describes a hairy giant, which is a later association.

What was the Yahoo?

The Yahoo was the nineteenth-century Australian name for the same phenomenon, also called the hairy man, the Australian ape and the Australian gorilla. It appears in an 1842 article in the *Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine* and in colonial newspapers such as the *Australian Town and Country Journal*. The historian Graham Joyner argued that settlers took the word from Jonathan Swift’s *Gulliver’s Travels* and passed it to Aboriginal speakers, rather than the reverse.

Is the Yowie a real Aboriginal tradition?

Partly. Traditions of hairy beings were recorded from south-eastern Australia by collectors including R. H. Mathews in 1907 and W. J. Enright in 1937, and the word itself is Gamilaraay. However, the modern hairy-hominid Yowie was popularised from the mid-1970s onward, largely through the work of the cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy, and the long lists of regional “yowie names” now in circulation come from cryptozoological books rather than from field ethnography.

Has anyone ever proved the Yowie exists?

No. In the mid-1970s the Queanbeyan Festival Board and radio station 2CA offered a two hundred thousand dollar reward for the capture and presentation of a Yowie, and it has never been claimed. Alleged footprints are inconsistent even in the number of toes, the best-known footage from the Brindabella Ranges in 2000 is distant and inconclusive, and no physical specimen has ever been produced.