Tim the Yowie Man's Mount Franklin yowie sighting

The Brindabella Ranges rise on the western edge of Canberra. They form the northern end of the Australian Alps and run on into the wider Snowy Mountains region. Mount Franklin stands at 1,646 metres on the border between the ACT and New South Wales, inside Namadgi National Park and Bimberi Nature Reserve.

In 1994 a Canberra man named Timothy Bull was about 21. He was an economics student at ANU. His project was to put a dollar value on a national park near the Brindabellas. To do it, he interviewed bushwalkers about how much they valued the area. The work took him onto remote tracks.

Late afternoon. Dusk coming on. On a lonely track, something moved in the bush. He thought it was a large kangaroo. Then he realised it was not.

In his own words, years later, it was "massive bulky short dark haired like a gorilla marching through the bush." It was about 100 yards away. He was frightened. He kept his eyes on it and stepped backward until he reached a fire trail. Then he ran to his car.

He would later call it "a big hairy bipedal hominid like creature romping through the Australian bush." Another profile described "an unidentified big black hairy creature." In 2017 he put it plainly: "a creature, which at the time I had no idea what it was and it completely freaked me out."

At first he said nothing. He feared ridicule. When he finally described what he had seen, a friend told him it sounded like a yowie, the Australian version of Bigfoot.

The sighting, he says, "literally changed my life." He spent about five years interviewing other witnesses. He changed his name by deed poll. Timothy Bull became Tim the Yowie Man. He went on to write columns for The Canberra Times and the Sydney Morning Herald and became the National Museum of Australia's "Resident Cryptonaturalist." His 2001 book, The Adventures of Tim the Yowie Man, Cryptonaturalist, gives the Brindabella encounter a chapter of its own.

The case rests on one witness. There are no footprints, no hair, no photographs and no film. No official body ever looked into it. The exact spot has never been published, and the setting shifts between retellings: Mount Franklin, the Brindabella Mountains, a camping trip near Canberra, the Snowy Mountains. The ranges overlap, so the versions may describe the same day. His own first impression remains the obvious alternative. Eastern grey kangaroos are common in the Brindabellas, and a big male standing upright at dusk could look bulky and dark.

Critics aimed at the man more than the sighting. In 2001 the Christian Science Monitor called him "a self-styled, publicity-hungry 'cryptozoologist'" and set him against the yowie researcher Dean Harrison. Bob Nixon, chief investigator for Australian Skeptics, offered a broader verdict: "I'm happy to say there probably isn't a yowie." By 2017 Tim himself said he had never found solid evidence.

The Brindabellas kept producing stories. In 2000 the bushwalker Steve Piper filmed a bipedal creature in the same ranges, the clip known as the Piper Film. A ranger later reported four large footprints in fresh snow on a Brindabella road. Whatever moved through the bush that afternoon in 1994, it left no trace. It left a name instead, and it turned an economics student into Australia's best-known cryptonaturalist.