Location: Blackbutt Qld
Event: Sighting.
Date: 2002
Witness: Female
It was probably around March, Blackbutt’s really cool at night, it was chilli but not cold where you’re having to rug up. I’m a night bird, I don’t like the daytime, that’s why I’m happy driving at night and doing things at night. It was school holidays, my adult niece and I were cleaning up my son’s bedroom, my eldest son was looking after one of the younger kids who was asleep. At that stage I had had another baby, I had her with me and my niece.
We packed up the Tarago, Blackbutt didn’t have any trash collection, so you had to take your own trash to the dump. When you’re a single Mum you organise one trip not a dozen trips. The dump is about 7 or so kilometres from the house. Heading off to the dump, at that stage before this night, you could go there whenever you wanted, there were no gates or barricade or anything. I had gone to the dump numerous times at night, you don’t have to pay or anything.
We get there, all of a sudden there’s this gate, stopping us from getting into the dump. There’s a small bitumen road leading into there, then it goes into dirt to the dump. We pulled over to the right-hand side near the gate because that’s where the gate would open from. We’re parked there and trying to see if we can open the gate or get around the gate. I was cranky because they didn’t let us know about the gate being locked.
My daughter’s asleep in the car, at that stage I smoked and so did my niece. We both got out, we were in front of my passenger door with my door open, we’re having a smoke, the car’s running, the high beams are on, looking at the gate and there’s no way around and I’m thinking should we try and walk in.
And we could smell this… horrendous smell…we’re commenting on how bad the dump smells and it doesn’t usually smell that bad. Everyone’s been to a dump, and it smells but it’s more like a musty, mouldy smell. Food breaks down pretty quickly, plus there’s animals around like goannas getting the food so it’s not like, horrible, but this smell was burn your nostril type smell. It was like a rotting smell, but more like a strong urine, like very strong ammonia smell.
So we’re commenting how it felt creepy there tonight but we got the heebie-jeebies, and it wasn’t like we hadn’t been there before. So we’re commenting on how creepy the place is, still smoking and laughing about how stupid we are at the dump at this time of night and not being able to get in.
Then we heard this sort of noise in the bush to the right of us, and the bush was extremely thick. We sort of looked at each other and go “Did you hear that?” and we’re like, yeah, okay. So we’re sort of looking into the bush now which is the right hand side.
Eventually she goes “Can you see that?” She’s going “Look… eyes!” and I looked and there were these red eyes, and it was like they blinked I guess. And I’m like, “Oh they do look like eyes” and we’re sort of just standing there staring at it. It’s starting to come closer to us and the more it came closer the more they looked like real eyes. Eventually it was probably about 3 metres away from us in the thick bush, we just couldn’t stand there any longer we just screamed, jumped in the car and got out of there.
These eyes were glowing, there was no reflection coming from anything, our lights were going straight ahead, it was nowhere near going to where these eyes were. I didn’t know what they were, they were really high up, I would say 7.5 to 8ft high. At that stage, I never put it down to it’s a Yowie, I’d never heard of them having red eyes or anything like that. No noise whatsoever.
This thing was observing us, although it was frightening and scary and a horrible ‘get the hell out of here’ feel, I didn’t feel that it was hunting us or anything like that, it was more going, what the hell are you doing here?
The Benarkin State Forest goes for kilometres and kilometres, I don’t know how big it is, and the terrain is incredible, its just mountainous and pine tree forest and then really thick bush, there’s deer and wild pig, and all of that around there, it’s just extremely thick and the dump all lead onto that.
Then I started to hear stories on Yowie hunters of glowing red eyes and that gave me the heebie-jeebies, because that thing was just metres from us. This things eyes were like, fire engine red, very red, no question about it. It looked like it was blinking. We could see its two eyes straight on the whole time, obviously it was there the whole time. We heard movement in the bush, but it wasn’t loud, it was slight movement. Whether it positioned itself as it heard the car turn up and here we are yapping up like nobody’s business, casual as anything. Then we started getting the heebie-jeebies but you do don’t you when you’re out in the bush. We got that feeling before we even heard anything or saw the eyes.
After seeing that, that was probably one of the most frightening things I’ve felt. I’m not normally scared of the dark. I wouldn’t say like I felt like someone was watching us, because I would have looked around then for that, it was just like you felt a presence. That’s probably a better way to put it.
Being raised around family, my parents didn’t teach me this, my Uncles and Aunties and Nanas taught me, you don’t go anywhere in the bush at night and so on, especially women having their period should never go in the bush because that would attract them.
The whole thought of it being around the dump, that makes sense too, you can get whatever you want from the dump.
Another thing I find interesting too is that when I’ve spoken to other family and people about it, they have told me (Yowies) are around cemeteries.
I started telling a friend about my sighting, she quickly interrupted me and said “I saw the Benarkin yowie! I was driving with a friend and just near the cemetery, we nearly hit it.” I didn’t ask her what year it was, but it’d be years after me. But my sightings, and her sighting, they’re all within 5 kilometres of one and other.
I asked on a fb chat if anyone had seen anything in the areas and the response on black panthers and Yowies was incredible. The terrain around that area is perfect for something that would want to not be seen and not be disturbed because nobody goes through it much, if at all.
My brother was working on the Blackbutt range after there was an avalanche, they had to re-do the road up, they cut off the road for ages, you had to go all the way around to Gympie to get to Kingaroy, even to Blackbutt. I asked him had he heard anything because they were working at night, they had to have people on the road all the time. He said there was one fella who was operating one of those mobile traffic lights to control the traffic when there was only one lane. There was one person on a truck going down the Blackbutt range then going up the range, and he controlled that traffic light and the cars would follow him. He got to the bottom one time, and he said, this always amuses me, he said a huge man in a furry coat banged on the roof of his car, and he got out of there. I’m like who the heck walks around in the middle of the night that’s huge and wearing a furry coat? That’s highly unlikely, it amuses me, but if that’s how you want to take it in and live with it then that’s fine.
I really want this documented so that we have more of an understanding.
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