Location: West of Emu Plains NSW
Event: Sighting
Year: 1991
Male Witness
I was living down in Sydney, and I was working with a Yugoslav fella putting fences up. He was a bit of a rabbit hunter, he kept on pestering me to go with him. One weekend we went out caught a bunch of rabbits, then the next weekend he said come out with me again.
He picked me up, we went out past Emu plains, to the West of Emu Plains. There’s a lot of rural country areas out there, got there, to this particular property. We pulled up as we did before, my mate got out, walked over to the owner’s house. The guy came out onto his veranda and my mate told the owner that he wanted to go rabbiting, the bloke said, “Yeah okay, good luck, there’s the boundaries”. We jumped in the car; we drove about halfway down into his property.
His land was completely cleared, there was only a few trees on his property, the grass on his property was probably 2 inches high at best. Next door’s property, and the property to the back of him was exactly the same, hardly any trees around, only some trees were kept for show.
Started walking down, came to the edge of his property, at the end it sort of went up into a ridge. At the top of the ridge there was these 2 huge thorn bushes about 30-35 metres in front of us. They were probably about 3, 3 and a half metres apart from each other and about 5 ft 6 or 5 ft 7 high. About as wide as 3 burley guys.
Weird thing about it was there was a 6-strand barbed wire fence which we thought was a bit weird, normally they are only about 3 to 4 strands. We’re walking along, I’m looking at this thorn bush to the left, all of a sudden it starts moving, it rattled, it shook. I’m staring at it, and my mate said “What are you doing? We’re supposed to be looking for rabbits”. So then I’m pointing my head at the ground, but my eyes are looking at this bush, I’m fixed on this thorn bush.
Then all of a sudden this creature jumps from the left bush to the right. This thing dived, it leaped in one leap, that’s three and a half metres. The way it did it, I was thinking it was either a wild pig, or something else, I wasn’t really thinking of a Yowie at the time. It leaped like a dog would, or like we would do a swan dive, except its arms were tucked in a bit, and legs were tucked in a bit too. I said to my mate “I just saw; I think was a big hairy pig that just jumped from one bush to the other”. He said, “Well we won’t go up there then”.
I saw it from side on when it leapt, it had a kind of squarish, big body, a big heavy torso. A massive body, a big mass of hair covered its body, even its head. It was a reddish, blackish, brownish colour. It had short, really thick, stocky legs. Its arms were probably about the length of a human’s arms. It had the classic cone shape head, but the head was sort of buried into the shoulders a bit, but it had a snout! A short, square snout like a boxer dog. I don’t think it was that big, yes a big torso maybe, but maybe close to 6 ft tall, could have been sorter maybe 5 ft 6 5 ft 8 tall. I say 6 ft because the torso was so big.
No sooner had we said we were going to turn around and go back to the car, this rabbit shot out in front of us. It ran straight up the ridge towards the thorn bush on the right. We had a Doberman with us at the time, he saw the rabbit and headed straight for it! So we’ve panicked, and we’ve chased after the dog because the dog just took off after the rabbit, and we’re screaming out to the dog to stop. The whole time I’m thinking this wild pig or whatever it was is going to be behind this bush. Its going to attack us as soon as we startle it. As we’re running up I could see there’s a tiny little hole at the bottom of the bush. The rabbit ran into that, the dog was hot on his trail, the dog then done a big dive straight into the hole into the bush. He got stuck, and his back legs were sticking straight up out of the bush. My mate is trying to pull his dog out, I ran around the back of the bush and there was nothing there. Absolutely nothing. I had a quick look around, sweep of the area, couldn’t see anything running away.
My mate then said, “Come and help me pull this dog out I can’t get him out”. And I went back around there and as my mate was trying to pull this dog out, the dog got pulled back in! The dog was making the weirdest noises, it was like in total panic. We eventually got the dog out, the dog had a few thorns on it, and it was absolutely terrified, it was pooing itself.
Where we pulled the dog out we left a hole in the bush, I poked my head in to have a look. All of a sudden this face appeared. The thorns were there but I could see this face through the thorns. It came up a bit closer to me, it was about 2 feet away from my face, our heads were both moving side to side, I kind of get the impression that it was copying me.
It looked like a female, half apish, half human, half something else. It had a really sweet, placid look on its face. I’m looking at her, we’re both staring at each other, at this stage, she’s still got this nice, placid look on her face. The reason I say her is because it had a girly face, it didn’t look like a male. I’d say it was young, it didn’t have an old look, it had young features, it looked like a kid. It had hair around the face, not on the actual face itself. The face was front on, I didn’t notice any ears, maybe they were covered in hair. The face was pale grey, if you compared it to anything it would be similar to a chimp, around the mouth especially the lip how the top lip looks puffy, sort of smoothish, but the rest of face sort of looks scaly. But this skin didn’t look rough, it looked young. The nose was sort of broad, but not, similar to an ape, kind of like a normal nose but spread out. Eyes looked kind of human-ish but not really, kind of animal-ish. Didn’t notice the whites of the eyes, I think the eyes were dark brown. It had this smirk on its face, like ‘oh you caught me’, like a really cute look. She was just as curious as I was, I think she was trying to get a better look at me by coming closer. I didn’t notice any smell, although it was a windy day. The creature made no noise whatsoever, I think I even said to it, “What are you doing in here?”
I’ve turned my head back and yelled to my mate “Come and have a look at this”! And when I turned back in, its face had changed completely, the whole face changed. It went from this nice, placid, half apish, half human, sweet, round face to turn into something really evil, an angry, demonic look. It went almost doggish, its face sort of went elongated, lines on its face got longer, like the frown lines. Its forehead looked like it had gotten a bit higher or something, I don’t know it just looked completely different when it got angry. Its nostrils flared, its ears changed, to make it look more vicious. I didn’t notice the ears when I was looking at the placid face, but when it changed, I saw the ears, they were all covered in hair like a dog. It looked more like a dog when angry, this sort of really elongated creepy looking, evil expression. At first it looked more like an ape, then when it changed it looked like a dog. It looked as though it changed the structure of its face to look more fierce. Whether it can dislocate its jaw or change the lines in its face, if it has the ability to change its facial structure. I believe it does have the ability to change its face when threatened. Not as prominent as it would be on a dog, but definitely looked like it could change its facial features. How do we know it’s not putting on this cute face to lure you in? I don’t know, but it was a scary look, and I don’t scare easy. It was like I betrayed it because I called someone over, the whole personality changed, that’s what spooked me the most, it went from good to evil.
It was kind of like it was mimicking me because I must have been frowning at it. But the thing is, it was cowering, it was going backwards, like a dog would if backed into a corner, like if you were to hit it, but it still had this look like it wanted to rip your face off. Like when you corner a dog and it growls and shows its teeth, it was kind of like that. It didn’t open its mouth to show its teeth, but it curled its lip and showed a bit of pearly whites, I’d say they were white. I saw teeth but didn’t see razor sharp teeth or canines.
The only thing I can’t work out how it got in the thorn bush, there was only this tiny little dug out, behind the bush, this tiny hole. It wouldn’t even have been big enough for me to climb in, yet this thing got in there. I tried to get my mate to come and have a look, but he was really upset about his dog getting thorns all over it, it ruined his whole day and he just wanted to get out of there.
We jumped in the car; we went back to the house to see the owner. I said to the owner, “We didn’t catch any rabbits”, he said “I didn’t think you would”, but I said “You got a funny looking creature living on your property. Up by the 2 big thorn bushes, I just saw some big, hairy creature jump from one thorn bush to the other.” I was about to say I saw its face in the bush, and he said, “Okay there’s the front gate… that’s the way you came in, just go out that way” with a serious look on his face he goes to us both, “Don’t ever come back here again!” I thought that was a bit weird. I saw his face, when I mentioned what I saw, he knew what he had.
That was the closest I’ve ever seen one. My heart races when I talk about it. I’m guessing this was probably one of the smaller species. About 10 years ago, I spoke to a couple of Aboriginal elders here in northern NSW about Yowie’s, there’s a bit of conflicting information between the guys, they all have their opinions about them but all similar. One of them said there is one which has a longer snout looking more like a dog or a bear. Basically, a Yowie with a snout. He also said the smaller ones live under ground. Which kind of makes sense, because this creature that I saw managed to get inside this thorn bush without getting tangled up. It would be a good spot to have a burrow in because nothing’s going to go in after you. The ground was normal soil, not hard clay or rocks, a lot of rabbit holes around that area so maybe a sandy soil. When I used to do fencing on properties, there was several occasions when we came across wombat burrows, they’re quite large, you can crawl into one. Some of them are 20 odd metres deep. It wouldn’t surprise me if a Yowie would kill the wombat and take over that burrow, wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
I used to live up in the hills, we used to get lots of weird noises up there, and every morning I used to hear this ‘whoop whoop’ noise and I never knew what it was, but one morning I looked out my window and saw this big, brown bird with a long brown tail, they make that noise. Everyone thinks it’s a Yowie but it’s not, it’s a mutton bird (Pheasant Coucal). Apparently they don’t fly, they hide in and out of lantana. They can only fly up to a tree but not actually fly. I hear this noise sometimes when I go walking in the deep forest.
In the late 60’s when I was about 10 or 11 years old I used to go interstate with my parents, we drove to South Australia just about every year. We would go out west through Broken Hill to go to South Australia. Back then there were no houses for miles, it was all open country, no boundary fences, nothing. There were 2 or 3 occasions, at different times over the years when we were going through there, driving down these country roads and saw these big, hairy dudes walking out in the bush, by themselves, just one off. My father pulled the car over and questioned Mum “What was that?” but Mum just shrugged it off and said it’s probably an Aboriginal. Dad said well they don’t grow that big and hairy. Even though it was a long way away you still see that it was quite big.
I live in northern NSW now, there’s a historical cemetery here, about 10 years ago, I was with my 2 grandkids, about 7 or 8. Up in the hills, we were looking at all these tombstones, then I heard these big heavy footsteps, this heavy clunk, clunk, clunk, I could hear it but couldn’t see it. That was another weird thing that happened.
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