Location: Pilliga, New South Wales
Date: 1979
Date of report: April 21, 1979
Source: Melbourne Chronicle, via the AAP
Witness: Constable Wayne Warren
The dreaded Yowie is back – this time frightening drivers along a lonely stretch of highway in NSW.
Latest reports of the Yowie, Australia’s answer to the Abominable Snowman, have come from desolate Pilliga scrub country on the Newel Highway between Coonabarabran and Narrabri.
Fear has spread so far that truck drivers have put up a warning sign north of Coonabarabran: “beware, Yowies for the next 121km’s.” Constable Wayne Warren, of the Coonabarabran Police, said yesterday truck drivers and holiday makers heading for Queensland were too frightened to sleep by the roadside anywhere on the 125km stretch to Narrabri.
“Its really quite amazing.” He said. “One Victorian driver returning from Queensland drove more than 50km the other night with two blown trailer tyres because he was too scared to stop on the side of the road. He said that he had heard the reports and wasn’t going to take any chances.”
Constable Warren said that stock carters had reported “mysterious happenings” while driving through the Pilliga State Forest at Baradine, about 40km Nth-West of Coonabarabran. He said that several drivers had reported large footprints in the ground by the roadside.
“One bloke said he was asleep in his cabin when he heard this thump, thump, thump. He said he was too frightened to investigate and drove his truck to Narrabri,” he said. When he got there, he found two running boards had been pulled off his truck. Another said he felt his tarpaulin being shifted while parked one night.
He said it was dead calm and when he got up the courage to investigate, he found it had been pulled down one side more than 10 feet. One thing is for sure. None of these truckies dared to block the Newel Highway in the Pilliga country during the recent truckies blockades. I guess the Premier (Mr Neville Wran), could have done with a couple of Yowies on his side.”
Yowies have been described as the counterpart of the Yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and the Sasquatch or Bigfoot, of north-western America. There have been numerous sightings of the creature, which reportedly looks like a giant hairy ape-type beast, along the east coast of Australia. Most sightings have been recorded in eastern NSW, particularly the north-east.
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