[Australasian Ufologist Magazine is pleased to announce the publication of Rex Gilroy’s long-awaited, definitive book on the Yowie mystery, “Giants From the Dreamtime - the Yowie in Myth and Reality” [see advert in this issue for price and details]. Packed with a thousand sightings reports of “close encounters of the hairy kind”, and over 300 photos, all packed into 408 pages, this book the first of its kind ever published in Australia, presents the results of 45 years research by Australia’s one and only “Yowie Man”. The following article is composed of extracts from this book]
There is a mystery lurking in the wild, untamed mountains and forests of New Zealand.
It is a mystery dismissed as a myth by anthropologists, but one which has persisted since the arrival of the first Maori colonists from Polynesia centuries ago.
The mystery concerns the existence of races of primitive, hairy, giant-size and smaller hominids, said to have survived in these wilds since ice-age times.
Perhaps the ‘mystery’ has not so much to do with their existence, but how these hominids were able to reach New Zealand in the first place.
The logical explanation is that they arrived here via a land-bridge that formerly connected New Zealand to Melanesia-Australia.
Could such a ‘bridge’ have existed?
During the Mesozoic era, about 150 million years ago, New Zealand was linked with Australia, India, Africa and South America in one supercontinent called Gondwanaland.
New Zealand separated from Australia about 70 million years ago when the Indian-Australia plate began to swing away from the other continental masses. About the same time New Zealand also separated from Antarctica.
At this time [as demonstrated elsewhere in my book] New Zealand was part of a massive sprawling continental crust which included, via what is now the Norfolk Island Ridge stretching from North Island to New Caledonia, the islands of Melanesia/New Guinea and south-east Asia.
By 20,000 years ago what are now the North and South Islands and also the third, smaller Stewart Island, south of Invercargill across Foveaux Strait was one continuous landmass. Then around 12,000 years ago as the last great ice-age came to a close worldwide, the melting icecaps caused sea levels to rise, inundating low-lying land surfaces. This, together with local geological upheavals, shaped the present New Zealand and submerged the great Melanesian ‘bridge’ to a depth of up to 2,000m below sea level.
“Preposterous, no trace of such a ‘bridge’ exists”, said a geologist to me some years ago, yet centuries of powerful ocean currents can easily carve away any traces of former surface landmasses, as has been the case with the former Bass strait land-bridge between Tasmania and Victoria
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The Maori people only settled North Island around 1100AD. They are known to have been preceded by the Moriori, a more primitive Polynesian people who were already established in the North Island well before the first Maori arrived.
Prior to these were the ‘Moa Hunters’, another Polynesian people who hunted the giant flightless Moa birds into virtual extinction across both main islands.
And there were the mysterious Patupaiarehe, a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, red-haired race who constructed megalithic fortifications and other structures over 2,000 years before Maori arrival....
Aotearoa, the “Land of the Long White Cloud”, as the first Maori colonists named New Zealand, is a land of many mysteries, hidden deep within its primeval mist-shrouded forests and valleys, and mountain ranges with peaks rising up to or over 3,000m high into th clouds; where volcanoes smoulder ominously and mud spurts from boiling springs., The Maoris call the mountains Gods, and they are.
Maori traditions speak of other, more primitive stone-age people who preceded them to New Zealand. Among these were the Moehau, a hairy race who manufactured crude stone and wood implements. They were feared by the North Island Maoris, who stayed clear of the mountains of Ruapehu and Tongariro, because these mountains were inhabited by “terrible creatures”, half-man, half-animal [as they described the Moehau], who would kill and eat any Maoris who dared to venture into their domain. These Moehau ‘manimals’ resemble Australia’s Yowie, or “hairy man” of Aboriginal tradition, both of whom bear features linking them with Homo erectus, our immediate ancestor to modern humans, as my book demonstrates.
Both Maori and Moriori legends also speak of people of great stature, these include beings like the Matau, the Tuuhourangi and Toangina, whose heights varied from 2.6 to 3 metres. All were tool-making beings.
The Toanginas were the scourge of the lower reaches of the Waikato River, attacking Maoris fishing there.
The Lake Wakatipu area of Central Otago was the home of the Matau giants; monsters of 3m height. There were also the Maero or “wild men” of the forest country of both North and South Islands, and whose features, like those of the Matau, are reminiscent of Australia’s Yowie.
Towering over all, however, were the 4m or so tall “Forest Taniwahs”, who roamed the mountains and forests with huge stone axes, killing and eating anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path.
Two types of primitive hominids thus appear to have been present in old New Zealand; a normal-size race, known both as the Moehau and Maero; and one, or more giant races, of which the Matau, Tuuhourangi and Taongina may represent a single race. The Forest Taniwahs on the other hand, appear to have been something else, as the Maoris were adamant that these hominids were taller, and more powerful than the other giants.
Not only have the massive stone ‘megatools’ of giant beings been unearthed throughout New Zealand, but also giant and normal size fossilised human footprints have come to light.
For example, at Karangahake Gorge, Waihi, in the Coromandel region of North Island, during March 2000, my wife Heather and I discovered three fossil hominid footprints, two being of modern-height human-like beings, the other that of a giant hominid at least 3m in height. The giant foot impression measures 46cm long by 29.5cm across the toes, 21cm at mid-foot and 24cm across the heel. The two smaller impressions are in one case, 20.5cm long by 9cm across the toes, 7.5cm at mid-foot and 7cm across the heel; while the other foot impression is 20cm long by 8cm across the toes and mid-foot and 7cm across the heel. All had been impressed up to several centimetres deep in a deposit of cooled volcanic ash and mud.
According to geologists, the volcanic eruptions [which created the gorge] hereabouts ceased somewhere between 2 and 4 million years ago!
Huge megatools have turned up in the Coromandel Range, in regions which have been the scene of modern-day Moehau sightings. These megatools match those recovered by me in Australia, and consist of hand-axes, adzes, choppers, knives, clubs and other tools weighing about 5, 12.5, 16.5 to 18kg.
Megatools occur throughout New Zealand, along with other sites containing crude, small stone implements which parallel Homo erectus tool-types being recovered by me in Australia.
Yet who were the Matau hominids? Were they the descendants of Meganthropus [Giant Java Man] migrations from Java, or similar relatives from Australia, or even a locally-evolved ‘Megazealander’ race? And if a locally evolved form, from whom could they have evolved? From an isolated Homo erectus population perhaps? The mystery remains unresolved.
And then there were the Rapuwai creatures; gigantic, slow and clumsy, but so strong and muscular as to be able to crush any Maori in their powerful hands. The Rapuwai inhabited the Marlborough district of South Island’s northern tip [if not elsewhere in Aotearoa].
The literature on New Zealand’s giant hominids is far too voluminous to be covered in this article. The reader can find the full story in “Giants From the Dreamtime”.
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There is a mass of evidence for surviving relict hominids in modern-day New Zealand that parallels Australia’s Yowie reports.
The suggestion that hairy manbeasts similar to Australia’s Yowie survive in the wilds of New Zealand’s North and South Islands, seems unbelievable to many people. After all, they will argue, New Zealand is such a small country.
Yet Bougainville is even smaller than the North Island as is Fiji, and these islands have contemporary relict hominid traditions of their own.
Despite generations of European settlement and land clearance of both main islands of New Zealand, there still remain vast regions of largely inaccessible forest and mountainous recesses, where any secretive hominid primitives could very easily escape detection by modern humans, as is the case in Australia and New Guinea.
Consider the following case histories.....
The Coromandel district has a long history of European encounters with Moehau creatures. During 1878 in the Pukewa spur area of the Waihi district, there were several reports by gold prospectors, regarding their sightings of large, long-haired manbeasts or their females and young, in lonely areas thereabouts. Often these hominids were claimed to have been seen carrying stone knives, hand-axes or wooden clubs, even spears. Members of the Ngatikohe tribe warned settlers against going into the bush country lest they meet up with these fearsome creatures.
In one incident in 1882, the body of a headless, partly devoured prospector was found by Maoris in the Martha Mine region. Later up in the hills the body of a woman, apparently dragged from her hut while the rest of the family was absent, was found, her neck broken.
In 1903 larger-than-man-sized footprints were found by miners in the Karangahake Gorge district of the Coromandel Range. The five-toed tracks embedded in mud on a creek bank, suggested the maker was a good 2.4-2.7m tall and of tremendous weight and strength.
In 1972 Mr Trevor Silcox and another man were wild pig shooting in the Coromandel Range. As they stood on a ridge, looking across a forest gully to another ridge 150 metres away, they spotted a 2m tall, dark-haired naked hominid moving about in scrub. When they eventually reached the spot, the men found footprints in the soil measuring 35cm long with the toes dug into the ground and the heel not as deep. The prints were 17-18cm wide at the toes. Four prints were found, leafmould obscuring the rest.
Taller creatures have been claimed sighted in the Urewera Ranges near Waikaremoana south of Gisborne within recent months.
Turning to the South Island, the wild country of the Heaphy River, which forms part of the Northwest Nelson State Forest Park inland from Golden bay, is a region of many eerie happenings involving the Moehau. At one Heaphy River location, during January 1983, a deer hunter found a trail of one hour old 40cm long, man-like footprints in the mud and sand of the river bank, which he was able to follow for about 3km before they disappeared into rocks.
Further south in the Nelson lakes National Park are beautiful placid lakes overshadowed by rugged mountain ranges covered in dark, dank beech forests said to be the lair of giant manbeasts.
During the spring of 1971 a ranger discovered a trail of large [45cm long] man-like footprints, leading across snow-covered ground on a hillside into a forest. He followed the tracks through the forest for a few hundred metres until the forest terrain proved too tough for him.
Mountain climbers who frequently explore the mighty Kaikoura mountains, which rise some 2,700m into the clouds overlooking the northern coast of South Island, have frequently claimed to have found large human-like footprints in snow and soil, and also on occasions spotted one or more male and female hominids of from 2 - 2.8m in height.
Heather and I have been into many forest-covered mountainous regions. We can easily accept that these inaccessible [to modern humans] wilds could easily hide any number of relict survivors from the dawn of Man.
The Haast Pass has a long tradition of ‘manbeast’ and ‘womanbeast’ encounters. Deer hunters and campers have often claimed to have sighted hairy creatures, even small groups, wandering along the banks of the Haast river that winds along the base of snow-capped mountains.
Of all the vast, and largely impenetrable, mountainous, forest-covered regions of New Zealand, the Fiordland National Park, situated in south-western South Island, is undoubtedly the most inhospitable. It literally rains eight days out of ten locals will tell you, and people continue to disappear without trace in these wild places, victims some believe, of the Moehau.
During our September, 1997 field investigation in the Milford sound region, I stumbled upon a number of small, freshly-made, cutting and scaping tools. These resemble the crude implements of Homo erectus unearthed in south-east Asia dating back 500,000 to 1 million years ago, and also many other Homo erectus tools recovered by Heather and I in Australia. During our March 2000 New Zealand field investigation, we again uncovered a number of freshly-manufactured Homo erectus-type stone tools in the Milford district that resemble many others found by us at a remote location deep in the mountain country behind Nundle, in the New England district of northern NSW. These include examples that match others recovered by me in the Haast Pass region of South Island.. The discovery of freshly-manufactured stone implements in remote mountainous, forest-covered regions of New Zealand can only mean one thing; that small populations of Homo erectus live on in these wilds, hidden from modern human interference.
During October 1970 campers in the Milford wilderness were forced to abandon their camp, they claimed, after a 2m tall hairy “man-monster” appeared nearby, emitting loud screams and hurled rocks at their camp.
And in the north Fiordland region about this time, at Haast Pass, and also at Mt Helen, other campers and bushwalkers reported finding large man-ape footprints in remote places.
In the Cameron Mountains, inland from the south-west tip of South Island, during November 1991, campers found several 45cm long, ‘man-ape’ footprints in dense forest. The tracks were barely an hour old, so the men abandoned their camp and moved elsewhere.
“Giants From the Dreamtime” presents a mass of evidence, backed up with photographs, demonstrating that a pattern exists throughout the Australia/New Guinea/New Zealand region of the Pacific; that of races of giant tool-making hominids and more primitive giant ‘sub-man’, ape-like creatures having existed contemporaneously with more modern-sized beings.
The evidence for ‘relict hominid’ survival in modern times is a widely-publicised worldwide phenomenon. Even so, for far too long a gap has existed in this overseas literature, for it has concerned only those better known creatures of Asia and the Americas, namely the Yeti, Sasquatch etc, ignoring the wealth of information to be had from the Australia/Pacific region.
The evidence presented in my book, on relict hominid activity in Australia and its near neighbouring island land-masses must be included in the debate, for it is of vital importance to researchers in the gaining of a broader understanding of the mystery,. This book now fills that gap.
I welcome the assistance of readers in my investigations. If anyone has information helpful to my researchers into the Yowie mystery I would be pleased to hear from them at the Australasian Relict Hominid Research Centre, PO Box 202, Katoomba. NSW 2780. Ph 02 4782 3441 or email on randhgilroy@mpx.com.au.
Readers can also visit our website:
www.internetezy.com.au/~mjl29/Mysterious_Australia_Homepage.html
Source: The Australasian Ufologist Magazine Vol. 5 No.2 Pgs 26-30 (Photos/Illustrations)