Henry James McCooey's "Australian Ape" between Batemans Bay and Ulladulla

Henry James McCooey knew the bush of the New South Wales south coast. He was an amateur naturalist, a bushman in the words of the writer Tony Healy, and he signed himself H. J. M'Cooey. On 9 December 1882, the Australian Town and Country Journal in Sydney printed his letter on page 747. Its title was "The Naturalist: Australian Apes".

"A few days ago I saw one of these strange creatures", he wrote, "on the coast between Bateman's Bay and Ulladulla". Above it, "a number of birds were pursuing and darting at it". The animal was "partly upright, looking up at the birds, blinking its eyes". It was "distorting its visage and making a low chattering".

McCooey was "above the animal and distant less than a chain", about 22 metres. "I had ample opportunity of noting its general appearance."

Standing fully upright, he judged, it would be nearly 5 feet high. It was "tailless and covered with very long black hair", turning "a dirty red or snuff-colour about the throat and breast". Its eyes, "small and restless", were partly hidden by matted hair. The arms "seemed to be strikingly out of proportion". He put its weight at about 8 stone.

To McCooey it was "a most uncouth and repulsive looking creature, evidently possessed of prodigious strength". Then he threw a stone. It "immediately rushed off". In Healy's retelling, it vanished into a ravine, pursued by its squawking persecutors.

McCooey had more to say. According to reprints of the letter, he could name half a dozen men at Batemans Bay who had seen the same. A search party had been planned there, then dropped for fear of a shooting accident. He also wrote of the skeleton of an ape, 4ft in length, that could be seen in a cave about 14 miles from Batemans Bay. And he offered to capture a specimen for the Australian Museum for £40. Nobody took up the offer. No official investigation followed.

There were no photographs, no tracks, no hair. The case rests on one written account. No hoax allegation against McCooey has surfaced, and no specific mundane explanation has been offered. What is disputed is his place in history.

In 2014, ABC South East NSW called the sighting an Australian first. Graham C. Joyner, who studied the scientific reaction to "Australian ape" reports from 1882 to 1912, saw it differently. McCooey "did not claim to be the first to have seen such an animal", Joyner noted, and he was not the first in print either. Osborne had described an animal seen near Dapto in 1871. An 1876 article spoke of a "hairy man of the wood", and a 1987 Sydney Morning Herald column suggested 1795.

The letter remains a key early case in the yowie story. It appears in Robert Holden's Bunyips: Australia's Folklore of Fear, in Healy's 2019 article "The Legend That Will Not Die" for The Fortean, and on The Why Files podcast.

Around Batemans Bay the reports kept coming. Sightings near Dignams Creek in the 1980s. Footprints found by oyster farmers on an island at Batemans Bay. Dozens of claimed yowie sightings on the Far South Coast. As one website puts it, the museum has been waiting for McCooey's specimen since 1882.