Gold Coast Yowie: Sighting locations and details of mythical creatures revealed

The Gold Coast is Australia’s premiere location for yowie sightings, with maps and drawings revealing what the creature looks like and where it’s been seen over the years.

The Gold Coast is a city which is full of mysteries, some old, many more recent.

Among the region’s oldest and most curious is that of the yowie, a creature long believed to reside in the central and southern suburbs, as well as the Hinterland.

The first reported sighting at Springbrook was made in 1886 by local Indigenous tribes and there were several more through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Fast-forward to the late 1970s and there was a dramatic uptick in sightings.

Many of these occurred 45 years ago in 1978, the biggest year on record for yowie encounters.

A sketch of a Yowie that was allegedly seen in the Gold Coast Hinterland.

An August 1978 story published in the Gold Coast Bulletin featured an interview with Nerang resident Shaun Cooper who revealed to reporter Des Houghton what he had witnessed near his Yakkayane St house.

The then-teenager described the yowie as being an “eight foot tall monster that looked like a baby King Kong”.

He said he was ‘terror stricken by the dark hairy thing’ which he claims was stripping bark off a tree.

“It was about 2.30 on a Sunday arvo,” he said at the time.

‘I had gone for a ride on my bike when I saw it up the hill a bit. It looked real to me and it was clawing the tree,” he told the Bulletin 45 years ago.

“Bark was falling down around its body and then suddenly it turned and looked at me, putting its arms by its side.

“It looked at me from about 50 yards away for no more than three seconds. I turned and went for my life.

“My dad wasn’t home and my mum didn’t want to go back and look for it.”

Shaun Cooper’s sighting came less than a year after a group of students from The Southport School (TSS) including future Nationals Senator Bill O’Chee saw what they believed was a yowie near Springbrook.

An image captured in the Gold Coast Hinterland.

He told the Bulletin on November 17, 1977: “About 20 of us saw it”.

“It was about 3m tall, covered in hair, had a flat face and walked to the side in a crablike style,” he said.

“It smashed small saplings and trees like matchsticks as it careered through the bush, we spotted it several times and once watched it through binoculars. It definitely was there.

“We first saw it just before we returned back to Southport on the afternoon of October 23.”

Yowie Research administrator Dean Harrison has been compiling hundreds of accounts of Yowie sightings for more than two decade.

Approached about it in 2005, he still recalled the incident.

“I still remember it, I can still see the damn thing,” he said.

“The majority of my school chums still remember it, it was such an amazing experience.

“It was a big thing, about 8ft tall through the binoculars, it moved in a crablike fashion.

“We saw where it had been lying on the grass and the impression it left was about 8ft long.

A witness sketch of the 1978 'yowie sighting' that allegedly took place at Palm Beach. CREDIT: Australian Yowie Research.

“That night it just ripped up whole shrubs between the creek and where our camp was, right out of the ground, – roots and all. A bloke can’t do that, it was quite incredible.”

Yowie hunts on the Gold Coast have continued occasionally in recent decades.

Cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy in search of the Yowie in dense bushland on the Gold Coast.

Veteran hunter Rex Gilroy, the Australian Yowie Research Centre director, told the Bulletin in 2012 he believed the creature was alive and in the Hinterland.

“I have a few plaster casts of large footprints from the Hinterland, which interestingly enough match similar prints found near Coffs Harbour,’’ he said at the time

“It is exciting stuff; most recently I was told of a 5ft-tall (1.5m) female-like creature with pendulous breasts scavenging for what was probably fern roots near Springbrook, which is a promising lead.

“I am 68-years-old, and after hunting them for 55 years I refuse to sit down and retire.’’