“We are keen to hear of any recent sightings of any of these beings from readers,” the 68- year-old says.

“The Australopithecus-type Yowie has recently been sighted at Canyonleigh where a nubile-breasted female of approximately 1.5 metres height was apparently seen drinking water on the edge of a creek, while two male creatures of just over this height were spotted by a Crookwell property owner in scrub between there and Roslyn, apparently foraging for plant food.”

Rex has also just completed filming a segment of an ‘Animal Planet’ documentary on the relationship between the North American ‘Bigfoot’ and Australia’s ‘Yowies’.

Over the past 50 years or so, since Rex discovered these creatures through reading about them at school in the library, he has been gathering some quite detailed research on what the Aborigines call the Yowie, an extremely hairy man/ape creature that supposedly still roams the uninhabited Australian bush all along the east coast.

This species has many names across Australia from the various Aboriginal tribes’ descriptions of the sightings. Rex has travelled into some fairly remote parts of the bush that he says “television documentary cameramen never tread, due to the inaccessibility of these wilds: vast, silent mountain wildernesses that most people know nothing about.”

Homo erectus, or Australopithecine, as it is more commonly known, is a gorilla-like creature usually around 1.5- 1.8 metres tall, although there have been sightings of these creatures that have been well over 2-3 metres or more.

They were rumoured to have roamed across from the South East Asian mainland, when Australia was still attached to it up until about five million years ago. Rex reckons he has uncovered some footprints of these creatures.

He also has skulls and fossils of these creatures that he claimed to have uncovered whilst hiking in the bush with his wife Heather. He has also travelled to New Zealand, where he has been studying the existence of a similar ‘Homo erectus’ creature, known as the ‘Moehau’.

He has even conducted studies into possible panther sightings across the east coast of Australia by various people. There were sightings of the ‘Yowie’ by white men going as far back as 1795, when some settlers were out on a hunting trip, and claimed to have seen a ‘man- sized hairy beast’ dashing away from them through the scrub.

Many other stories throughout history have been recorded, and some of them have been taken seriously, others not.

“I am sick and tired of these idiots that seek to make fun of my findings, and choose to ridicule them by being just plain silly,” Rex counters.

“For instance, there was a man that was going around in the late 80s and early 90s who was claiming he had seen the Yowie also, but then would exploit his findings by hamming it up for the media, and dressing up in a gorilla suit to go on TV.

“He even claimed to have made a buck out of it by marketing the ‘Yowie’ chocolate bars.”

Rex and his wife are planning to come to the region from July 1 onwards, and will have a group of around 50 people with him, splitting into two groups of 25, who will cover the northern and southern areas of the region.

If you would like to get more information on these Yowie sightings, you can visit Rex’s three websites,

None

Follow @squireant

None