Nexus - 0605 - New Times Magazine-pages

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UNDERSTANDING THE YOwIE PHENOMENON Indigenous legends and eyewitness reports suggest that two types of bipedal primates, the larger Yowie and the smaller Junjadee, inhabit densely forested country in Australia. have a regular talkback radio program on 2NR regional ABC in northeastern New South Wales, where I talk about the seasonal behaviour of local wildlife and identify fauna species for listeners from their descriptions of physical features or calls. On 11 February 1997, I received a call from John Morrison of Coffs Harbour, which made the local news service. On 15 January 1997, whilst on a family picnic between Station Creek and Dundurrabin in the Guy Fawkes National Park, Morrison's daughter found a trail of footprints. Each print was 60 centimetres long. He described them as something similar to a human foot- print, with obvious left and right prints, 1 to 1.5 metres apart. The big toe was distinct from a group of other toes that impressed together so they couldn't really be counted. The heel made the deepest depression: about two centimetres. The prints were in a dry creek-bed in sandy alluvial soil covered with some scattered shrubs. John and his family followed the prints for about a kilometre up a long, narrow gully until it reached a rocky outcrop. There were no fallen leaves or other debris within the prints, so they were fresh. It appeared to the family that a large, heavy, bipedal animal had recently walked up the gully. John had heard stories about an unknown animal called a Yowie, and wanted to know if the creature was generally regarded as real, because, until then, he was under the impression that they were just fanciful stories. I told John and the listeners that I had never really believed in the reports in newspapers about giant furry bipedal primates lurking within our bushland, until I was fortunate enough to hear at close quarters three different sets of calls that proved to me that there really was something unknown out there. I gave forth with approximations of the calls that I had heard, and I would imagine that those calls were the first Yowie territorial calls ever uttered over the airways. In 1973-74, I was studying the fauna of the Papua New Guinean rainforest with biolo- gists at the Wau Ecology Institute, a field station of the Bishop Museum of Hawaii. Over a one-year period I recorded fauna species (primarily birds) and their behaviour with an ornithologist on the slopes of Mount Missim in undisturbed Castanopsis oak rainforest at Poverty Creek at an elevation of 1,500 metres. On 6, 14 and 19 December 1973 and on 16 and 25 October 1974, during daylight hours, we heard very loud and powerful mammal calls consisting of a series of deep, base notes, repeated without variation over a period of five seconds, that produced a bellowing roar clearly audible through the rainforest from perhaps a kilometre away. At one instance I was standing on a rock outcrop above the trees and clearly heard the calls emanating from a forest valley approximately two kilometres below me. We had particularly specialised in the identification of fauna from their calls, so were surprised to hear powerful calls that sounded to my ears as primate-like. Having spent some time listening to the vocalising of chimpanzees, gibbon and other primates at Taronga Zoological Gardens in Sydney, I was forced to the conclusion that I was listening to the calls of a very large and powerful primate. As Papua New Guinea has an Australian faunal assemblage with no primates, I found it hard to believe that such a creature as I was hearing could exist. On 25 November 1973 at Vickery Creek, Mount Missim, at 1,200 metres elevation, whilst walking along an old logging track towards a bird hide in which an ecologist was observing nesting superb fruit dove, I observed a dark, bipedal figure crossing the track 200 metres in front of me. I took it to be a native Melanesian, but was surprised to see no sign of clothing at this high altitude and no weapons, and that, unusually, the figure did by Gary Opit © 1999 PO Box 380 Mullumbimby NSW 2482, Australia Telephone/Fax: +61 (0)2 6684 3554 E-mail: profgopit@yowiehunters.com NEXUS - 67 by Gary Opit © 1999 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 1999