Location: Braidwood, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: 1870
Source: The Naturalist - Braidwood Dispatch, 1870's
On the 3rd of October last, young Johnnie Williams was riding from his home at Snowball to the Jinden P.O, Braidwood. When about halfway the boy was startled by the extraordinary sight of a wild man or Gorilla.
The boys states that a wild man suddenly appeared from behind a tree, about thirty yards from the road, stood looking at him for a few seconds, and then turned and ran for the wooded hills a mile or so from the road.
The animal ran for two hundred yards across open country before disappearing over a hill, so that the boy had ample time to observe the beast. The boys states that he appeared to be over six feet in height and heavily built. He describes it "as a big man covered with long hair."
It did not run very fast and tore up the dust with its nails, and whilst jumping a log it struck its foot against a limb, when it bellowed like a bullock. When running, it kept looking back at the boy, till it disappeared. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and the boy describes everything he saw minutely.
The boy is a truthful and (unreadable word?) young fellow, well acquainted with all known animals in New South Wales and persists that he could not have been mistaken.
For many years there have been tales of trappers coming across enormous tracks of some unknown animal in the mountain wilds around snowball. Of coarse, these tales were received with doubt, and put down as clever romancing on the part of the possum hunter, but the story of Johnnie Williams is believed by all who know the boy as a true tale. The proof of such existence of such an animal in New South Wales should be of some interest to the naturalist. - Braidwood Dispatch.
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