The Yowie: The Hairy Watcher at the Edge of the Australian Bush
Every inhabited continent keeps, at the edge of its settlements, the same figure: the big, hairy, upright shape that is almost a man and is not — glimpsed at dusk at the treeline, smelled before it is seen, gone before it is believed. Australia's is the Yowie, and his file has a structure worth respecting before a single sighting is weighed: he is attested in two archives that arose independently and then, unnervingly, agreed. The first archive is Aboriginal, and it is old past dating. The peoples of the southeastern mountains kept — and keep — traditions of the hairy man : the doolagarl of the Yuin country on the south coast, the dulugal of the escarpment forests, and a dozen names more along the Great Dividing Range — a big, shaggy, man-shaped being of the high ridges and thick gullies, strong beyond men, shy of fire, master of a powerful smell, and territorial : certain mountains, certain brushes, certain camps were his, and were respected as his — not haunted ground exactly...