Katrina Tucker's Yowie Encounter at Acacia Hills

Acacia Hills lies about 70 km south of Darwin, in the Northern Territory's Litchfield Municipality, where mango farming is an important local industry. Katrina Tucker and her husband had run a mango farm of about 20 acres there for about 20 years. The nearest shop was roughly an hour's drive away. For about five years, every July and August dry season, the couple heard odd calls from a ridge 5 to 10 km away. Then a neighbour's cows jumped a fence, and horses at a nearby stud were spooked.

Mid-August 1997. About 3 a.m. A much closer call woke her. Her dogs were distressed. She rode a four-wheel bike uphill towards the shade house through a dark, cloudy night.

The headlights picked it out about 8 feet away, standing side-on. She put it at around 6.5 to 7 feet tall, "covered in dull, dark reddish-brown hair", more brown than red, about 2 cm long and matted. "The creatures shoulders were sloped, not square like a human. It had no neck", and its arms were long. She never saw its face.

Then it ran. "It ran by bending its knees, and was stooped over." Its arms did not pump the way a human's would. It swayed from side to side, taking large strides that looked like slow motion. To her, it seemed frightened.

The smell stayed with her. "The smell resembled a cave full of bats, or the inside of a chook house, or urine." It made her retch. The call was high-pitched, "like a howler-monkey", rising from low to high. Once it seemed to be answered from somewhere else.

Next morning she found prints along the fence line. She covered one of the best, because that area was spray-irrigated. "The prints had 3 big toes, with another 'thumb' located down on the instep." Photographs of the large footprint were collected at the time. A high-tensile fence had been crushed, something she believed no person could have done.

She contacted the NT Museum, Palmerston Police and a local naturalist. A police officer came out and tried to match the stride between the prints. He could not. He was too short. Police said they would check two empty farmhouses for a possible hoaxer.

In December 1997, Paul Cropper and Tony Healy of Strange Nation took a call from a woman describing "a screaming, stinking 7-foot tall orangutan-like creature" on her mango farm near Acacia Gap. In April 1998 she rang again to say it had come back. They flew north. "The beast itself, as usual, remained elusive." The details match Katrina Tucker's account closely.

Museum staff suspected the footprints were a hoax, though they did not dispute that she had seen something. They were later told the prints had four toes. The editor of Australian Yowie Research agreed the tracks were doubtful but stood by the witness: "The prints certainly looked artificial, but the witness' story was extremely credible. A truly puzzling case." For yowie reports in general, Darren Naish notes suggestions of wild-living people or mistaken pigs, owls and possums. Historian Graham Joyner holds that the yowie never existed.

Healy and Cropper reproduced her drawing in The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot (2006). In 2025 Darren Naish set it beside Melba Cullen's 1930 Kempsey drawing. Several other reports came from around Acacia Hills in the late 1990s, and in 2009 Andrew McGinn suggested a yowie had killed a pet dog near Darwin. Her name still varies across sources, from Katrina Tucker to Kate Tucker and Kate Jones. Her taped interview survives.