The yowie

An ape-like creature that people report seeing in the Australian bush. The name is one of several for a being with roots in Aboriginal oral history.

Paul House, speaking at the National Museum of Australia in 2009, said that the hairy man other Australians call the yowie is, to his people, the Doolaga, living in the mountains on country. He said the Queanbeyan Age recorded his great-great-grandfather watching elders bury a hairy man. One story in Tales from Ngambri History, he said, was built on that record together with oral stories handed down in his family.

ABC South East NSW wrote in 2014 that Aboriginal communities are thought to have known the yowie, and to have had a name for it, before Cook and Phillip arrived. It said the first formal record of settler contact is believed to be in The Australian Town and Country Journal of 9 December 1882. Wikipedia says yowie is one name among several for a being of Australian folklore thought to inhabit the Outback, and that it began in Aboriginal oral history.

In 2002 ABC TV's Catalyst sent reporter Paul Willis into the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, where he met Neil, who teaches at a high school. Neil said he had met a large ape-like creature walking on two legs several hundred times, and many of his neighbours said they had seen it too. Catalyst noted that scientific evidence for such an animal was lacking.

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid describes how a man named Gilroy turned to Aboriginal mythology, identified a creature called the Tjangara, and announced to wide press coverage that Bigfoot lived in Australia too, besides Nepal and the United States. Gilroy and Heather, his wife, took the name Australasian Cryptozoological Research Centre for themselves and searched Aboriginal mythology for beings that matched their Australian Bigfoot.