Charles Harper's Hairy Man of the Currickbilly Range (1912)

On Sunday, 10 November 1912, The Sun in Sydney printed a first-person statement by Charles Harper, a surveyor from Leichhardt. He had travelled into the Currickbilly Range, which he described as running parallel to the south coast "from the head of the Clyde River to North Gippsland". Its eastern slope was "excessively broken ridges, deep gorges, and dense jungles". Today the name is spelled Currockbilly, and the range lies within Budawang National Park. Harper had companions with him and two "large Kangaroo dogs with a strain of the British bulldog in each."

The night of the second day. The party was at the camp fire. One of the men was induced to throw dry kindling on the flames, "illuminating the scrub for distance around."

"A huge man-like animal stood erect not twenty yards from the fire, growling, grimacing, and thumping its breast with its huge hand-like paws." Harper put its height at 5ft.8in. to 5ft.10in. The body frame was enormous. Long, brownish-red hair covered its body, legs and arms, and shook with every quivering movement.

On the shoulders and back it looked jet black in the firelight. The head and face were "very small, but very human". The eyes were large, dark and piercing, deeply set. A most horrible mouth held two large and long canine teeth. Harper even described its bones, the short fibula and the very long femur.

It stood in one position for some time. Long enough, he wrote, to photograph it on his brain. Then it made off. The first few yards erect. Then faster, on all fours, through the low scrub.

The dogs were utterly demoralised. One companion had fainted and remained unconscious for some hours. Nothing could induce the others to continue the trip. The party returned as quickly as possible, out of reach of "Australian gorillas, rare as they are." Harper added that intelligent men in the southern district unhesitatingly asserted they had seen this hairy man-shaped animal at short distances.

No tracks, hair or casts came from Harper's camp. No camera was used. No official body investigated.

The same 1912 coverage carried a separate case from Bombala, where George Summerell saw a creature drinking at a creek rise to about seven feet on its hind legs. Sydney Wheeler Jephcott later cast huge four-toed tracks in plaster, and the casts went to a Sydney professor. Will Donald's drawing, the "Bombala anthropoid", is often captioned with Harper's words. Graham Joyner says Donald based it on the Bombala footprints.

No one has proposed a specific identification for Harper's animal. Joyner argues more broadly that the modern Yowie grew from a conflation with older "yahoo" and "hairy man" reports, and was relatively unknown before the mid-1970s. Patrick Gross rates the case unidentified but not UFO-related. He notes that the primary source was unavailable to him and that no investigation took place.

Joyner reprinted the account in The Hairy Man of South Eastern Australia in 1977. Janet and Colin Bord followed, then Tony Healy and Paul Cropper. Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark retold it in Cryptozoology A to Z, rounding the height to "almost six feet". Today Wikipedia quotes Harper beside Donald's drawing. A surveyor's night by the fire is still being retold.