Shocking New Book: The Yowie

The Yowie Healy Cropper

Click on the cover above to make the Yowie larger.

The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot

Wow! What a beautiful cover. If a book’s cover is a window to the content, you will not be disappointed. This is an earthshaking book. It’s big, it’s monumental, and it will surprise many people.

I am an American, and as such, I have to admit that North Americans, specifically the general population and the media more than the readers here, tend to think egoistically that our Sasquatch was here first. The sense is that the files and legends of the rest of the world, perhaps with the exception of Nepal and Tibet, are filled with merely copycat hairy upright critters that the folks in those other places have imitated in their popular culture due to our Bigfoot. Not true, of course, and The Yowie is a tsunami of evidence supporting the historical significance of encounters with these Australian hairy hominoids.

When I was asked to do and contributed a foreword for this book, I was startled by the extremely logical pattern that the sightings of the Yowies follow. I was taken aback by the findings in this book that the accounts are mostly from a thin but long band of eastern rainforest coastal habitat, and not from all over the country, not from the Outback, as many people may have imagined.

Also, although I was somewhat aware of the long history of the reports, I was held in awe by the pages upon pages of old and yet good reports of these cryptids.

There’s something there, and this book leaves little doubt now for it puts it between the covers in a well-organized fashion, for all of us to appreciate.

The Yowie truly is the most comprehensive, authoritative work on Australia’s most baffling cryptozoological and hominological mystery about these strange, hairy, bipedal hominoids. The book matches in size – 7 inches by 11 inches – Tony Healy’s and Paul Cropper’s previous book, Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia. Because of the larger page sizing, the book’s designer has fit a good deal on the 336 pages of this volume, including 120 illustrations, an index, and a thoroughly annotated catalog of cases from 1789 to 2006. (See the table of contents below.)

Hey, there’s even a site – The Yowie File – where you now can find updated news. And if you are Australian, order your book from there late in January 2007.

If you are in the USA or the UK, The Yowie is now out, and you will want to get a copy or buy one for a cryptofriend for the holidays. (BTW, don’t believe that statement "Usually ships within 8 to 12 days," as I’ve confirmed it is more like 2 to 4 days.)

Here’s some more content info:

During the early colonial era, Australia’s Aborigines often warned British settlers to beware of huge, ape-like creatures that lurked in the rugged mountains and deep forests of the island continent. Their people, they said, had been encounter- ing the hairy horrors since time immemorial. They knew them by many names, including doolagarl, thoolagarl, jurrawarra and tjangara.

Soon the colonists, too, began to experience hair-raising encounters with the hulking, foul-smelling creatures, which they referred to as “Australian apes”, “yahoos” or “youries”. Today, they are generally referred to as yowies. The list of modern-day eyewitnesses includes zoologists, rangers, surveyors and members of the elite Special Air Service Regiment.

This book chronicles the yowie saga from the pre-colonial era to the present day. It contains over 300 carefully documented eyewitness reports and a vast amount of other data, much of which suggests that the damnably elusive creatures really do exist. The authors also critically examine the many theories that have been put forward to explain – or explain away – Australia’s most baffling zoological mystery.

Table of Contents Foreword by Loren Coleman Explanatory Notes Introduction: Gorillas in Our Midst 1. Aborigines and the Yowie 2. The Colonial Era 1788 – 1901 3. The Early Modern Era 1901 – 1975 4. The Modern Era 1975 – Present 5. Littlefoot – The Junjudee 6. Summarising the Evidence 7. Who or What is the Yowie? Endnotes Acknowledgements Appendix A: A Catalogue of Cases Appendix B: Yowie-related Place Names Bibliography Index

About the Authors

PAUL CROPPER became fascinated by the yowie mystery in 1976, when he uncovered several long- forgotten eyewitness reports in colonial-era news- papers. Although then only 14 years old, he began visiting the Blue Mountains, to the west of his home in Sydney, searching for proof of the creatures’ existence.

Canberra-based TONY HEALY, who had already become intrigued by the bigfoot/sasquatch phenomenon while working in Canada in 1969, also became involved in yowie research in the mid-1970s.

Since 1981 they have collaborated on many projects, notably in co-authoring Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia, which contained a lengthy chapter about the elusive yowie. Over the past 30 years they have searched for lake monsters, hairy giants, out-of-place big cats and other semi-legendary animals in Fiji, North America, the Bahamas, Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, Nepal, Malaysia and in every state and territory of Australia.