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Jan. 12, 2021 - Skeptoid
18:41
Skeptoid #762: On the Trail of the Yowie

Australia's version of Bigfoot may -- or may not -- have its origin in Aboriginal mythology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Australia's Bigfoot Legend 00:01:49
Australia has its own legends of a Bigfoot-type creature called the yowie.
And just as Americans search for Native American stories, hoping to find a traditional version of Bigfoot, some Australians have dug through Aboriginal mythology to try and find evidence proving their beloved cryptid has been around for centuries.
Is this the way to unmask a mysterious cryptid?
We'll find out today on Skeptoid.
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On the trail of the Yowie.
It is said to be Australian's version of Bigfoot or the Yeti.
It is said to be well known to the Aboriginal people.
Ancient Aboriginal Myths 00:06:55
Stories in the English language literature from Australia go back hundreds of years as early settlers reported encounters with strange creatures.
Today, we're going to have a look at the yowie and see if we can find a real animal hidden among all these diverse tales.
It's a journey that's going to take us back into the past and even along a brief detour through modern UFO mythology.
And by the end of it, we'll either know the truth or we won't.
A result which is in itself a fair metaphor for this elusive beastie.
Here's just a single sampling.
In 1876, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported the following harrowing tale.
On the evening of this memorable day, two hours before sundown, the young men and some of the women went to set their lines, leaving one of the young friends to boil the billie and prepare supper.
While engaged, the young woman was suddenly startled by observing a man, as she naturally imagined at first sight, was one of their own party coming towards the fire.
But on walking closer, discovered the appearance to be unsightly and inhuman, bearing in every way the shape of a man with a big red face, hands and legs covered over with long shaggy hair, from fright became almost spellbound, screamed and screeched, but unable to run.
The men, on hearing such unearthly cries, left their fishing lines and ran with all speed towards their comrade.
On reaching the fire, the monster of alarm was only distant some 50 yards.
On their appearing, it stood for a minute or two and turned away and made for the rocks.
Two of the men armed themselves with a tomahawk and cudgel and followed this extraordinary phenomena of nature for a short distance, up the rocky and rugged mountain, when suddenly it turned around and stood viewing the men as they were approaching.
They also halted, being then about 60 yards from the object of terror, commanding a full view of his whole shape and make, and resembling that of a big, slovenly man.
The head was covered with dark, grisly hair, the face with shaggy, darkish hair, the back and belly and down the legs covered with hair of a lighter color.
This devil devil, or whatever it may be called, doubled round and hurriedly made back towards the fire and women again.
On seeing him coming, a fearful commotion amongst the females and a kind of supernatural terror among the men took place.
In the meantime, before reaching the camp, it sighted away towards the inaccessible Rocky Mount.
Today the yaoi exists in the realms of cryptozoology.
Its believers treat it as a real yet undiscovered animal, very similar to how Bigfoot advocates take their charge completely seriously as a legitimate creature.
Also, just like many of the Bigfoot believers, yaoi believers turn immediately to Gigantopithecus, the extinct Pleistocene ape from southeastern Asia, as the probable identification.
Reports of yaoi sightings are sent to the cryptozoology website editors just as often as our Bigfoot sightings, and blurry, shaky, unidentifiable videos of supposed encounters are posted to YouTube at about the same frequency.
Both cryptids are represented by exactly zero evidence.
Neither exists in any fossil record where it necessarily would if it did exist.
Neither is taken seriously by more than one or two legitimately credentialed primatologists in the relevant field.
Both are represented by a range of physical descriptions that are so divergent that they cannot possibly represent any one actual animal.
And both are claimed to live in a range of ecological systems diverse enough that no actual animal would be adapted well enough to survive in all of them.
But their most intriguing similarity is that both sets of believers go to great lengths to tie their beliefs to local ancient legend.
Because while it's easy and gratifying to poke fun at those crazy country yokels who believe in the stupid cryptid, nobody wants to give the traditional legends of indigenous people that same treatment.
We tend to regard native legends with reverence and respect, and when we can tether our cryptid beliefs to those revered traditions, we do so in the hope that the perception of legitimacy and substance will stick to them.
So while Bigfoot hunters in North America point to strange faces on totem poles and dig through Native American storybooks to find mystical sounding words like wendigo, which they can frame as a sort of bastardized heritage for Bigfoot, the same appropriation has been taking place halfway around the world in Australia.
To understand how this happened, let's begin by turning back the clock about 50 years.
In 1972, one of the early books about the American Bigfoot and the Nepalese Yeti was published and received reviews in the press in Sydney, Australia.
Among those reading these with great interest was the paranormalist and prominent Australian UFO author, Rex Gilroy.
Turning to Aboriginal mythology, Gilroy identified a creature called a Changara and declared that Bigfoot was found in Australia, as well as the United States and Nepal, to much press coverage.
Gilroy and his wife Heather dubbed themselves the, quote, Australasian Cryptozoological Research Center, and then set about hunting for parallels between their Australian Bigfoot and creatures from Aboriginal mythology.
The results of this effort were summarized in Gary Opit's self-published 2009 book on the yaoi.
And fair warning, I'm not going to pronounce any of this right, so feel free to withhold your feedback on that.
The yaoi was originally known by a number of names in different Aboriginal languages.
The Bunjalung word Cherawara or Jurawara is said to translate as large hairy man, and other tribes called it Juga Benna.
Yaoi is from the Yualare language of New South Wales, means dream spirit, and is also pronounced and spelt Yuri, Yaurus, and Yahoo.
Tribes from Nambuka and Coffs Harbour in central eastern New South Wales knew it as Barga.
In the central coast of New South Wales it is known as Mingawen and in southeastern New South Wales it is known as Putakan.
Tribes in central New South Wales called it Nui and around the Australian Capital Territory it was known as Wawi.
Names and Origins 00:07:10
Tribes in northeastern Victoria named it Dooligal, also pronounced and spelt Durlagal, Tlulagar and Gulaga and means the big ones.
Tribes from areas of northeast New South Wales called it Juga Bena and Jurawara and Turamuli in North Queensland.
It was known as Pangkarlangu by tribes in the Northern Territory, Nukuna and Muluwong in South Australia and Jimbra, Jingra, Changara and Marbu by tribes in West Australia.
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There are over 300 Australian Aboriginal languages from at least 28 language families.
How many mystical creatures would be found in the cultural legends of all those different languages?
I doubt anyone has ever tried to estimate that, but it has to be an enormous number.
The idea that all of those different names we just listed would all be referring to the same creature, found throughout the continent, strains both philological and anthropological credibility.
That paragraph is not evidence that a single physical creature was well known by many names throughout the many cultures that make up the Aboriginal world.
It is evidence that cryptozoologists have collected as many old legends as they can in an effort to bolster their belief, by claiming, without evidence or credibility, that those legends all match their particular creature.
If a comprehensive study in comparative mythology was done among all those languages, which given how many of those languages are nearly dead, is likely impossible, chances are slim that a creature would emerge that is consistently described continent-wide.
Those minority of the folkloric creatures for which a uniform physical description even exists differ profoundly from the Bigfoot-style creature described today.
So, in short, no, the fact that there are many Aboriginal legends does not support the existence of a yaoi.
In fact, that they clearly do not describe today's version of the yaoi can be viewed as evidence against its existence.
But that's hardly a point that needs to be made.
That a Bigfoot-style creature currently does not rampage across Australia should be our default starting assumption, and is hardly an interesting revelation.
What is interesting, and also useful to know, are the reasons that the belief exists.
And this brings us to Graham Joyner, who in the 1970s was an archivist in Canberra and amateur historian.
Joyner had been doing his own deep dive into the historical literature, particularly the old newspaper reports of encounters.
Following the popularity of the articles by Rex Gilroy, Joyner decided to compile what he'd learned into a book that, he felt, set the record a little more straight.
This book, 1977's The Hairy Man of Southeastern Australia, has since become one of the primary sources for the true history of the yowie legend.
The book includes 29 early print references to a beast called a Yahoo, dated from 1842 to 1935.
Joyner knew that Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel, Gulliver's Travels, introduced the word Yahoo as a term for a coarse or brutish person.
In the book, Gulliver traveled to four different fanciful islands, and in the fourth, he encountered the Yahoos, a race of filthy brutes who resembled but were not human beings.
The book turning out to be quite popular, it was therefore not surprising that when showmen began touring about England and Australia, showing off a captured orangutan or some other great ape beginning in the early 1800s, they called it a Yahoo.
Thus, among 19th century Australians, Yahoo became the de facto common English word for an ape-like wild man.
There was no pretense that it had any Aboriginal roots, at least not at first.
However, in the 1970s, the enthusiasts in an Australian Bigfoot, notably the ufologist Gilroy, combed through the Aboriginal literature and found words close enough that Gilroy could declare the Aboriginal yaoi was the same animal as Joyner's Yahoo.
Yaoi happened to be the word that resonated with Australia's popular media, and so all the sightings since the 1970s have been yaoi sightings, while all those early ones that Joyner found referred to the Yahoo.
It should be pointed out that this version of the yaoi's history does appear to be the prevailing one, but it's not universal.
The Bigfoot believer community tends to reject the idea that the introduction of the English word yahoo played any role, and that yaoi did indeed descend from aboriginal folklore, and this view has bled over into a fringe of the scholarly community.
I include this in acknowledgement of the fact that the complete history of the Yaoi legend is not known for a certainty, though among the most rigorous researchers, the backwards grafting of Gulliver's Yahoos onto the sideshow orangutans and thence to the similarly named creatures from Aboriginal mythology does seem to be what best fits the whole history.
Understanding Cultural Legends 00:02:42
And if we can take that as the probable story, we once again conclude a Skeptoid examination not with a borish debunking and certainly not with a credulous confirmation, but rather with something richer than either.
We have an understanding and an appreciation for the cultural currents that create legends.
Giving them context and a meaning is far more interesting and useful and relevant than a mere campfire story of a monster in the outback.
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