Location: Aratula, Queensland
Event: Yowie Encounter (?)
Date: 1st August, 2018
Time: 1.30am
Last Wednesday night I got up to go to the toilet and decided to have a smoke outside. I don’t smoke inside the house, so I always go outside.
The next door neighbours block is an undulating downs type of country, it’s very rugged and bushy. Up the back of our place is a long gully which goes up to the top of a mountain to the other side, so it’s pretty rugged type of Country. We ride up there a lot because it’s a great view.
I’m standing outside having a cigarette and I could hear, which I can’t even mimic, a Whoop which was very guttural, and then a barking kind of scream. I’ve heard cattle singing out at night and a cows signing out for a calf, and a bull calling out but it was nothing like that. The scream was like a barking growling kind of scream. Even now, the next Thursday morning the hairs are still sticking up on the back of my neck. It was that close to the house.
We have horses in a temporary paddock with an electric fence. All the horses are normally quiet, and at that time of the night they are all bedded down, but they were going off. They weren’t going anywhere near the back of the block, they were actually running to the Olive Grove which is where we have it fenced off.
Whatever it was, and I will go as far as to say it WAS a Yowie, because it was running through the bush, and was going through the bush like a freight train. A lot of crashing through the underbrush, and it was a full moon so I saw half a dozen Roos just come FLYING out of the low lying timber and the lantana, and they were going like there was something behind them, like they were being herded. The crashing in the undergrowth still went on for 15-20 minutes. It seemed like it was REALLY cranky. These Whooping, barking screams – it kept doing it. It sounded like it was frustrated.
There was also a sound like someone beating a stick against the ground. Like a Whack, Whack, Whack, Wack. All I could think of was something like a caveman beating a bone against a rock or the ground type of thing, like using it as a tool.
This barking scream, like I said, went on for about 20 minutes. I didn’t sleep much for the rest of the night.
From 2am to dawn, I couldn’t hear anymore hollering or that whooping barking scream or call, but I could hear something going through the bush for the rest of the night like something looking for something and it did this noise like clapping two rocks together. That’s the best way I can describe it. Like a ringing clap of two rocks being struck together sound.
I didn’t smell anything.
There are a lot of rocks on the side of this hill and it was throwing rocks. Days after I went and had a look and there were rocks that looked like they had been thrown and/or displaced. My neighbour keeps his property pretty clean and picks up things like this because if they get caught under a mower or a slasher, a spark can cause a fire. We’re all proactive keeping these areas pretty clean. But I noticed all these rocks.
When I went into the bush, the undergrowth was a mess. Like something had gone in there with a pressure machine. There were decent sized sapling just snapped off at the ground.
I put in two fresh hay bales the next day, and the horses didn’t go anywhere near them. All night long they stayed down near the boundary next to the Tarome road and I was concerned they would go through the fence or get out.
Up around Carnarvon Gorge, my Grandfather says he used to come across them all the time. This is back in the late 1930’s. He did a lot of contract mustering and droving around Carnarvon before WW2 and enlisted. He said, ‘They exist boys, we’d see them all the time’. He saw both the Junjudee and the big ones.
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