The Kilcoy Yowie Shooting at Sandy Creek

Kilcoy sits about an hour north of Brisbane, in what is now Somerset Region. The yowie, Australia's Bigfoot, has deep roots here. CNN links it to a Jinibara Dreamtime story about an outcast hunter cursed to become a large hairy creature. Local John McAulay put it plainly: "There have been tens of thousands of sightings going back to early settlement."

December 28, 1979. Sandy Creek, about 4 km from Kilcoy. Warren Christensen and Tony Solano were both 16. Accounts differ on the setting. CNN says they were camping on private property. Australian Yowie Research says they were pig hunting with a .22 rifle and had stopped for lunch.

First came the sound. The thumping of massive feet, from hundreds of metres away. Then branches snapping. Solano never saw the creature. Only heard it. Decades later, Solano still remembers the snapping branches and the terror.

Christensen saw it. A hairy, towering figure came into view at 20 metres. It stood 2 to 3 metres tall, with dirty dark brown hair. Christensen fired and the boys claimed a hit. They tried for a second shot, but it ran off too fast, with huge strides, leaving a sulphuric smell behind.

They tried to track it. Then, Australian Yowie Research says, it doubled back behind them. The boys retreated down the creek to keep an open line of fire in case it attacked. That was the last they saw of it. CNN describes a wide-eyed vigil beside loaded guns.

A few days later the boys went back with their biology teacher. They found several large footprints. Traces of brown hair on the foliage. Broken branches. Headless hares whose bodies looked crushed.

A plaster cast was made. One account gives it as 50cm long and 15 cm wide. Another describes three-toed tracks 19 inches long. The boys posed with the cast for the local paper. It was later lost during house moves. No analysis of the hair is on record, and no photograph of the creature exists.

The boys rejected the obvious answers. Kilcoy has grey kangaroos, not the large reds. The footprints were wrong for a cow. No official investigation is on record, and no specific hoax accusation has surfaced. Sceptics note that no conclusive evidence supports the Kilcoy sightings, and the story has shifted in the retelling: camping or a lunch stop, 1979 or 1980, one witness or two. Solano, CNN reports, is still convinced. Christensen would rather leave the incident in the past.

Within a year, a statue carved from a single beech log stood in what became Yowie Park, the old railway yard. Trophy hunters repeatedly cut off its genitals. The Australasian Post carried the story in 1981. In April 2018 a fibreglass replacement by NatureWorks, made from the original mould, was reinstalled after three months away. Mayor Graeme Lehmann said: "When you talk to people involved in the sightings, they're convinced it exists."

March 2022. The statue was stolen. It turned up partly underwater in the park lake. NatureWorks director David Joffe repaired it as a gender-neutral version. Mayor Jason Wendt remarked: "It's probably country policing at its best." Today the town has a yowie burger, yowie ale and a rugby team called The Yowies. It all began at Sandy Creek, with two teenagers and one shot.