‘Australia’s Bigfoot’ watched over the small town of Kilcoy for decades. Then one day, it disappeared

The small town of Kilcoy is not the site of the first, or even the most recent, “Yowie” sighting. And hunters of Australia’s version of Bigfoot are no more likely to see it there than anywhere else in the country’s vast, rugged bushland.

Yet, for decades, a vacant-eyed replica of a towering, hairy beast has stared into the distance from a plinth in the center of town.

It’s a monument to an astonishing encounter almost 45 years ago, one that Tony Solano says he’ll never forget.

“To this day, I am still convinced. Take it to my grave,” said Solano, who hasn’t spoken in any detail about what happened for 20 years.

Kilcoy is home to just 2,000 people, and there were even fewer on December 28, 1979, when Solano and a friend, then both 16, spotted something scary — and almost inexplicable — in the woods.

They didn’t know what it was at the time, but the incident became folklore, and a drawcard for tourists to the small rural community, set in rolling hills about one hour north of Brisbane in the state of Queensland.

Solano said he and a friend were “armed to the hilt” during a camping trip on private property near Sandy Creek, a narrow waterway that winds almost 45 kilometers (28 miles) through the region.

“We had probably three or four guns, a .22, .22 Magnum, 20-gauge shotgun solids … We were out hopefully chasing some pigs, but it never eventuated,” said Solano, of a time well before Australia introduced some of the world’s toughest gun laws.

Solano’s memories are hazier than they once were, but he says he will never forget the sounds of branches snapping, and the terror that surged through his body as his friend fired shots at a beast that loomed 2 to 3 meters (6.5 to 9.8 feet) tall in nearby bushes.

The bullets missed, and the boys spent a wide-eyed night beside loaded guns before leaving their campsite to raise the alarm.

After steadying their nerves, they returned a few days later with their biology teacher to make a plaster cast of its massive footprint and posed for a photo with it for the local paper, looking suitably afraid.

The town went wild.

Before long, Yowie branding was slapped on everything from spoons to T-shirts and, within a year, Kilcoy got its first Yowie statue, a sculpture carved from a single beech log hoisted onto a plinth in the center of town as a warning — or a lure — for curious onlookers.

The wooden Yowie stood for decades in Yowie Park, becoming a target of trophy hunters who regularly lopped off its genitals as a souvenir.

The original started rotting and was replaced by another wooden version, which suffered the same fate, so they gave up and made a replica of fiberglass that was gender neutral.

But in March 2022 — despite being securely attached to the plinth — the whole thing disappeared.

Blurry images

The specifics differ, but Yowies are generally described as much taller than a man, covered in hair and cloaked in an acrid stench with notes of wet dog and rotting flesh.

Similar creatures are known as Bigfoot in the United States, Sasquatch in Canada, Hibagon in Japan, Yeren in China, and the Yeti or Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas.

Some believe Yowies are capable of crossing dimensions, which is why their remains have never been found. Australia’s foremost Yowie hunter, Dean Harrison, is not so sure about that. “They look after their dead,” he said.

Harrison runs Australian Yowie Research, a database that logs Yowie sightings across the country, and he’s struggling to work through a backlog.

It’s not because there are more Yowies, he said, just more people who are less fearful of being ridiculed for sharing their story.

Harrison’s first encounter with a Yowie was 30 years ago, when he was living in a home surrounded by trees on Tamborine Mountain in southeast Queensland.

“I was walking towards the front door in the dark, and there was this awful noise coming from the swamp just beyond the fence,” he told CNN. “It was guttural, really guttural. I know koalas can make some pretty horrific noises, but this is nothing, nothing like a koala.”

Harrison said he heard it walking on two feet, ripping foliage from the ground with every step. “And then it would throw whatever it’s pulling out, and you can hear it hit the other trees.”

Did he see it as well?

“No, this is all audio. But it was absolutely horrifying,” Harrison said.

The next time was 1997, when one chased him through a field in the hinterland town of Ormeau. This time he saw it.

“The way I describe it, is like a bear and a lion all in one. It was huge,” he said.

An even closer encounter followed in 2009, when Harrison says he “got hit in the chest by one,” in wilderness around the tiny town of Kilkivan, north of Kilcoy. “You don’t get any closer than that,” he said.

The next day, Harrison said he went for a solo hike and saw two Yowies. He didn’t have his phone on him, so wasn’t able to take a photo.

However, years later Harrison and his team took thermal imaging equipment into the mountain ranges of D’Aguilar National Park, north of Brisbane, and caught on camera what they claimed were two Yowies.

Blurry images show beasts standing at least 2.7 meters (9 feet) tall, he said.

It’s hard to make out the Yowies’ features, but for a team of Yowie hunters who’ve dedicated years — even decades — to finding proof that they exist, the significance was extraordinary.

The stolen Yowie

In Kilcoy, the Yowie statue’s theft made the local newspaper, and a longtime mayor of the surrounding Somerset region, Graeme Lehmann — who retired early this year — was quick to point the finger.

“You’d nearly say it’d have to be out-of-towners,” Lehmann told CNN at the time. “I don’t think the locals would have tried to destroy some of their heritage. The Yowie’s been something that’s been an icon to Kilcoy for a long, long time.”

John McAulay, a former stockbroker and retired cattle farmer, has lived in Kilcoy for most of his 83 years. Despite never having seen a Yowie, he has become the local Yowie expert, at one stage giving talks to busloads of tourists, though he receives fewer requests for that these days.

He’s not convinced the creatures exist. But then again, maybe they do.

“It’s just the number of these bloody stories you hear,” he told CNN. “They can’t all be nuts or on drugs.”

At the time of the 1979 sighting, McAulay’s father Bill was chairman of the local council and part of the team that commissioned the Yowie statue.

“He was very disbelieving of the whole thing,” McAulay said. “But he could see the opportunity – or the council could – for promoting the town, and they jumped right on it.”

Bill McAulay planned Yowie boat rides, an illuminated Yowie Hall of Fame and Yowie safaris around the countryside, according to news reports from the early 1980s.

None of that panned out but Yowies — or signs of them — aren’t hard to find in Kilcoy.

Visitors can buy a Yowie loaf (double the standard size) at the local bakery opposite Yowie Park, where you can grab a Yowie coffee, near the training ground for the local Yowie football club.

Until a couple of months ago, the local Exchange Hotel sold a Yowie burger. At the bar, regular Tony Morgan wasn’t buying the legend. “I think it’s a load of crap,” he said. “There’s no such thing.”

Yowie, the outcast hunter

The Yowie sighting may have made headlines in 1979, but the legend of the Kilcoy Yowie goes back much further than that — to Dreamtime stories of creation told by the land’s traditional custodians.

More than a decade before the 1979 sighting, the late Aboriginal elder Uncle Willie Mackenzie, known to the Jinibara people as Gairabau, told the story of the Yowie to Lindsey Winterbotham, a doctor with an interest in anthropology, who set about making audio recordings of Indigenous culture.

Gairabau’s Yowie story goes a little like this: Yowie was a famed hunter who caught so much prey for the Jinibara people that they gifted him a black possum-skin cloak. But he became an outcast after stealing a beautiful Jinibara woman, who had been promised to another man.

When Yowie refused demands to return her, the elders sang a song that condemned him to live forevermore as a large hairy creature wandering the Jinibara lands around what’s now known as Kilcoy.

At night, when all is quiet, his cries can still be heard.

Uncle Willie told the story to his grandniece Auntie Jacqui Kina, according to a sign that was erected a decade ago outside Kilcoy Hospital.

It fell down, but a new sign featuring the story will soon be erected outside the hospital – another stop for tourists on the Yowie trail.

McAulay may know everything there is to know about Yowies, but he has no idea who stole the statue.

The Yowie turned up soon after it vanished, partially submerged in a lake, among lily pads and reeds, several meters behind the plinth in Yowie Park.

A guide at the local information center speculated that the culprits may have been local teenagers, out partying late at night, potentially armed with a welder to cut through the bolts securing it in place.

New Somerset Mayor Jason Wendt, who took the job in March, says police likely dealt with the thieves the old-fashioned way.

“It’s probably country policing at its best,” he said. “They were probably caught and told off by the local police and then probably learned their lesson.”

At the time of the theft, local police told CNN that the incident wasn’t caught on camera and there wasn’t enough evidence to investigate it.

Wendt, a veterinarian by trade who’s lived in the area for 30 years, says every town in the Somerset region has its selling point, and for Kilcoy, it’s the Yowie.

The region is spectacularly beautiful, particularly after rain when its hills become lush with fodder for grazing cattle.

The relaxed vibe is sometimes interrupted at night by deep rumbling roars and occasional screeches. So, if not a Yowie, what is it?

“Deer,” Wendt stated conclusively. But it could also be koalas, he added. “Have you ever heard koalas when they’re mating? They’re scary things.”

Back on the plinth

It would be months before the Yowie statue was back on the plinth.

The figure was repaired by a reluctant David Joffe, the director of sculpture company Natureworks, who has dedicated his life to creating realistic sculptures of oversized wildlife.

Joffe told CNN the council first approached him in 2018 to replace the rotten wooden Yowie and again to fix the Yowie when it was dumped in the lake.

He said he’d been excited about creating a more realistic Yowie for Kilcoy but was instead asked to make an exact copy of the original carving.

“I normally don’t advertise the fact that we did it, because we didn’t, we just made a replica,” he said. “That there is a serious let-down, not a Yowie,” he said, referring to the statue.

“If you look at the sculpture, all of the proportions are wrong.”

The repaired Yowie still stares from the plinth in the center of town, out toward the service station on the main road where cattle trucks rattle back and forth from the local meat works.

It’s been attached more securely to the plinth, to prevent any further late-night antics.

Not far away, in the information center, the head of the original Yowie statue is kept in a glass case for visitors to admire. Plans are afoot to create an interactive display so visitors can immerse themselves in the legend.

Solano says he is “amazed” the town is still talking about the incident, 45 years on.

He says he didn’t see the creature, he just heard it, and that his friend, Warren Christensen, spied the beast and took the shot.

Christensen told CNN he wants to leave the incident in the past. The former school friends are no longer in touch, Solano said.

Solano is convinced the sighting was real, based on what the boys found when they returned: several large footprints, traces of brown hair on foliage, and headless hares whose bodies appeared to have been crushed.

“You can make what you want out of it, but I’m a firm believer,” he said. “You can’t explain the footprints we’d seen, some of the hares around.”

He also dismissed theories that it could have been another large animal.

“Other people sort of judged it off by saying it was a large kangaroo. But you don’t get big reds, not around Kilcoy anyway, you have grays, but not big reds,” he said, referring to the largest breed of kangaroo that can stand 2 meters tall.

“And other people said, ‘oh, you know, it was a big cow,’” he said. “No, not really. Cows don’t leave those sorts of footprints.”

Solano no longer has the plaster cast they took of the Yowie’s footprint — it went missing during several house moves over the decades.

He occasionally drives through Kilcoy but rarely stops — if he did he’d see his 16-year-old face in a yellowing newspaper article hanging on the wall of the local “hall of history.”

Solano says he gained nothing from the sighting and has played no role in promoting it.

He hasn’t needed to. The story has taken on a life of its own, and many Kilcoy residents are more than happy to share it.

“Initially it was a bit of a story and now the town’s embraced it,” said Wendt, the Somerset mayor.

“Is this creature really real?” he asked. “It’s talked about everywhere.”

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