Dean Harrison of Beenleigh, south of Brisbane, works in a hardware
import/export business by day, and as a yowie hunter by night.
Mr Harrison just wants to get the beast on film to prove the sceptics wrong.
He said there were thousands of yowies up and down the eastern seaboard of
Australia, and they had terrorised people over the last few years, usually in
less densely populated areas.
"It's not a joke," Mr Harrison told AAP.
"I've been face to face with five separate yowies and was actually chased
through the bush by an angry one at Ormeau (on the Gold Coast hinterland)."
Motorists have also reported seeing a large, upright, ape-like creature
charging across a nearby stretch of the Gold Coast motorway during peak hour,
he said.
Residents of one street at Springwood in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney,
had been terrorised by a non-human ape-like creature prowling around their
back yards and had gathered one night to drive the creature through the bush
and away from their homes, Mr Harrison said.
In October last year, an expedition to Coonabarabran in central-west New
South Wales was "yelled and screamed at" by a large unknown creature whose
footprints were later found, a discovery which bore out the accounts of a
Yowie told by local residents, he said.
But Mr Harrison said some yowies were quite gentle with a fascination for
children, and had been known to steal baby clothes from washing lines.
One Yowie was spotted listening to the sound of a crying baby and was
observed gently stroking the walls of the house and making crooning sounds,
as if to soothe the crying baby, Mr Harrison said.
Mr Harrison, who says he has been tracking yowies for years, will this
weekend head the expedition of 12 people in four wheel drive vehicles and a
campervan to an undisclosed location in mountainous terrain west of Gympie in
south-east Queensland.
There, at three separate sites, the expedition members will stake out the
elusive Yowie, using sensor equipment to detect movement, heat-seeking
devices, infra-red spotlights and video recorders, night vision scopes and
sound recorders.
"The mission is to find any evidence of the yowie or other strange creatures
that live in this remote location, and to capture sounds and hopefully
footage of ape-man," Mr Harrison said.
The latest expedition of the organisation that calls itself Australian
Hominid Research/Yowie Hunters, follows a report from three motorcyclists who
were riding trail bikes in a remote area west of Gympie last year.
The rider who was last on the trail reported being chased on his bike through
the bush by a three-metre tall hairy creature.
Mr Harrison said that two years ago, another group in the same area reported
seeing a mother, father and baby Yowie beside a creek bed near their camp
site.
"They noticed just on dusk a family of three (yowies) had come up from the
nearby creek bed and ...there was a large male, a female and juvenile," Mr
Harrison said.
New Hunt for Australia's Yowie
To some it's just a huge, hairy joke, but 12 deadly serious men plan
to search for that large, ape-like and always elusive creature, the yowie.
[Original headline: Yowie Hunters Head For The Hills Near Gympie
]
[Source originally published: Nine News / Australia - March 9 2000]
