Creature record / 1955
Monday morning. 7:30 am. Inverloch Road, Wonthaggi. Fred Rollinson and his employee, Mrs Sturgess, were startled by a blood-curdling yell. Something was up a tree. It was big as a dog, with large claws, a large head and a furry body striped like a zebra. It had a long tail. When it saw them, it sprang 15 feet to the ground and disappeared. That was late 1955. Within weeks the Wonthaggi Monster was everywhere. Farmers. A drill-hand. A police constable. Sheep dragged off and devoured overnight. By 1965 the local editor, Tom Gannon, had logged 52 sightings. And he had come to believe the animal was something officially extinct. A mainland thylacine.
Wonthaggi lies in Bass Coast Shire, South Gippsland, Victoria, a region that already had its mystery animals. A "lioness" in 1915. The Gunyah Lion and the Warragul Panther. On Thursday 1 December 1955, Tom Gannon, editor of the local Powlett Express, added another. He would keep a scrapbook on it until 1989.