GOING APE OVER RIDDLE

FACT or the product of fertile imaginations – that is the question which has hovered over reported sightings of yowies in the Gold Coast Hinterland.

Certainly the latest accounts by a Currumbin Valley woman, as relayed via cryptozoologist Dean Harrison, make for riveting reading in our report today.

Mr Harrison himself claims to have survived two dangerous encounters with the creatures. His latest witness similarly tells of terrifying incidents over an extended period in which a creature – or several of them – approached her family’s house at night, banged on walls and windows, threw rocks, charged at her and her dog and, in separate incidents, at her son or his mates, and so intimidated her daughter one night that she phoned her mother from her car in the yard, pleading for her to turn on the light and unlock the door so she could sprint to safety.

Close encounter stories in the Gold Coast region go back up to 7000 years, according to Yugambeh man and cultural researcher Shaun Davies, who told the Bulletin in February of indigenous accounts stretching way back into the past, and of traditional owners passing down stories of two ape-like creatures – the Janjarri and the Bunyun.

The Bunyun, said to look like “rocks’’ and reported to inhabit the high-range areas around Springbrook and Mount Tamborine, were the more aggressive.

The Gold Coast has seen many yowie hunters over the years. Apart from casts of footprints and tales of encounters, they have come up with little else in the way of physical evidence.

We do not doubt that in many cases, people have seen or heard something so unusual that they were left rattled. Former senator Bill O’Chee has never backed down from his claim that he and several other boys saw a yowie while on a school camp at Springbrook in 1977.

But until a creature is produced for all to see or verified scientifically, it remains just an absorbing mystery and the stuff of campfire tales. As the promotions used to say for The X-Files, the truth is out there.