Location: Nerang, Queensland
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: August, 1978
Time: 5.30pm
Male witness. 13 years old at the time.
We used to build cubbyhouses in the Nerang State Forest and ride our push bikes through the forestry. It was late in the afternoon and I was up at the cubbyhouse and it was just getting on dark and I had decided to head back home which was only 300-400m away.
First I smelt this really strong smell and I didn’t know what it was. It had a type of sewage odour to it, but not as pungent. I turned around towards the cubbyhouse and there was this Yowie standing pretty close to the cubbyhouse I was just playing in and it was scratching the side of a tree. It had its arms up on the tree scratching. I have no idea why it was doing it. It was about 7-8ft tall, quite slender but muscly, long arms that were longer than a humans, really hairy, I couldn’t see its face but I could see it had a kind of pug-like nose. The hair was a dark brown colour.
As I was looking at him, he saw me and started walking towards me and I freaked out and ran down the hill to my house. When it walked towards me it was like it took an overstep type of step, like it was building up to run. I just took off.
When I got home, my mother saw how frightened I was and ended up phoning the newspaper. They came out the next day in the afternoon. They took photos of the footprints of it from where it came towards me. The scratch marks were about 8ft high in the tree and the bark was on the ground.
We always knew they were there because other kids had found footprints in the Nerang State Forest.
About two weeks later, I was still very scared of the dark at that stage and I was woken by some noises. I looked out the window and saw a tall dark figure go past our house and walk over close to the house next door. It was way too big to be human. I didn’t play in that forest for a long time after that.
That was my first experience.
A few years later (Winter 1981), my brother in-law had a property on the western side of the Cunningham Gap. We did a lot of hiking and mountain climbing. On this one day, we were about to cross a ravine and he pulled me down to the ground and said ‘Look, look, look’ - About 150m in front of us, we saw a female Yowie with a juvenile walking over a log crossing a ravine. It was the same log we were going to cross. We were walking up to that log. We ducked down in the bushes and had a good view of them crossing the log. After they crossed, we could hear them run off through the grass into the forest.
They were similar to what I had seen in Nerang and smelt the same. They were very tall, the smaller one was about 6ft. What appeared to be the female, had a bigger breast plate and was around 7-1/2ft. They had long arms.
We went up to the log and there wasn’t any footprints because it was quite dry. They had taken off into the forest.
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