The Springbrook Yowie and the Southport School Boys

Springbrook sits in the Gold Coast hinterland of Queensland, 40.5 km south-west of Southport. It has been cited as having more yowie reports than anywhere else in Australia. In October 1977 a party of boys from The Southport School came to stay at the newly opened Koonjewarre campground. They slept in cabins on open grazing land at the edge of the forest. The name is said to be a Kombumerri term meaning "meeting place on high ground".

Saturday, 22 October 1977. Midday, according to researcher Tony Healy. From a cabin window, the boys saw something large lying on the ground uphill, in an open and treeless area. "Eventually it stood up and moved slowly around." It was a bright, sunny day, and the creature stayed in the open long enough for every boy to look at it through binoculars.

One of them was Bill O'Chee, 13 by Healy's account. In November he told the Gold Coast Bulletin what they had seen: "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 crab-like style. It smashed small saplings and trees like matchsticks as it careered through the bush."

Healy counts about 30 students and two teachers. Australian Yowie Research tells it differently. It places the first sighting on the afternoon of 23 October and says the creature approached the camp several times, once coming within about 10 m of the cabins. That night, it says, whole shrubs were torn up, roots and all, between the creek and the camp.

The next morning the boys found large, indistinct footprints. Metre-high bushes had been "ripped right out of the rock-hard ground and hurled all over the place". Australian Yowie Research adds a flattened area about 8 ft long where the creature had lain. No casts were reported. No hair, no photograph, no film.

According to Australian Yowie Research, staff told the boys to keep quiet because they wanted to keep using the campsite. An article in the school paper was censored. Some boys got into trouble for talking. O'Chee went to the Gold Coast Bulletin himself. Healy writes that he risked expulsion to do it. The story ran in November 1977. The Southport School, the same source says, never went back to Springbrook.

No one has alleged a hoax in this case, and no ordinary explanation has been offered for it. The wider scepticism is about the yowie itself. Historian Graham Joyner argues that the yowie as a modern concept was unknown before 1975 and that "the animal has never existed".

A 2010 Sunday Mail article compared the creature to Chewbacca from Star Wars. A later interview quoted by Australian Yowie Research put its height at about 8 ft. Shaun Davies of the Yugambeh Museum has linked Gold Coast yowie reports to two traditional figures, the Janjarri of the lowland scrub and the Bunyun of rocky country such as Springbrook.

O'Chee went on to serve as Senator for Queensland for the National Party from 1990 to 1999. Sworn in at 24, he was the youngest person ever to sit in the Senate, and the first person of Chinese ancestry elected to federal Parliament.

"None of us will ever forget it," O'Chee later told Healy and Cropper. The subject, he said, "comes up every time we have a class reunion", and "they're definitely out there, because we saw one." In 2019 he still stood by it. Healy and Paul Cropper gave the case pages in The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot (2006), and Cropper later held it up as a model report: "Multiple people, broad daylight."