Speaker 1: Myself and my mate Brian, who I was living with
at the time, had each taken two weeks paid holiday
from work to go to a spot Brian swore we
would love. I remember at the time that I'd never
even heard of it before. I should have, as it
was relatively well known. It's a place called Mount Warning.
Mount Warning is twelve hundred meters high, give or take,
and it's just a big, splendid jungle covered hill with
a rock summit that sticks up from the coastal hinterland
in far northern New South Wales. The thing, apart from
its beauty in historical relevance with the indigenous people of
that area is that it is the first place to
receive the rays of sun in Australia. Being the highest
easternmost point in the country attracts a lot of sun lovers, hippies,
alternative types in the light, plus a lot of people
like me who love nature and want to see the
place for its own and maybe the sun thing too.
So the three of us took a train from Sydney
to I can't pronounce this word, murwill Bump, merwill Bump,
murwill Umba, merwill Umba, where we hired a car and
a big tent big enough for the three of us
in our gear, we drove to a place right at
the foot of the mountain, a kind of caravan park
with camping sites too. Back then it was called Willumbon
Wildlife Reserve, which in retrospect turned out to be funny.
My mate Brian is a herpetologist and a damn good one.
He still is, and ostensibly the reason for all of
us going all the way that far north right on
the Queensland border was so that he could do some
snake hunting and collecting, which he was permitted to do so.
Seeing as FJ was no fan of potentially fatal pieces
of rope, Brian trained me up as his assistant. Basically,
I helped him catch him bag. I would also render
first day should we cop a bite from a nasty species.
Each day we would head out into the vastness of
the surrounding area, looking for snakes along the roadsides and
near the creeks, each time probing a bit further up
the mountain road and its verges. At night, we would
walk to a large wayside spot two kilometers from the
campsite with our guitars and gear, and we would cook
our dinner on an open fire beside the nice clear
creek that ran along behind the clearing. We would sometimes
catch yabbies in the creek and cook them in the
billy right there. We'd stay up there well into the
night and then walk back down the dark, unlit road
to the campsite so we could sleep. Rush routine worked
really well. It wasn't school holidays or anything, but in
the caravan park there were still quite a few holiday
makers and gray nomads and such, and so by heading
up the road each night when it started getting dark,
we would be away from the other people and be
at ease to make some noise, have a few ales
whoop it up a bit, and carry on like you
do when you are in your twenties. One night, one
very dark night, Brian explained that on moonless nights, a
lot more snakes than things are apt to move around,
as it is safer for them from nocturnal predators. They're
being less light than normal, which made sense to me. Plus,
it had been a very hot day, it being late
November and coming into summer, and he knew that some
snakes would be soaking up the last of the heat
from the sealed roads up in the bush and it
was a very good chance we could back some pythons,
and as it turned out, he was exactly right. Our
other mate, Jay wasn't keen on going up and past
our firepit area on this particular evening. He had a
book to read and just wanted to kick back in
the tent and plank quietly on his acoustic and have
some time for him, which was cool with us, so
Brian and I took the snake bags. We took a
good stick, a dolphin torch, and off we went. We
stopped at the fireplace and bowled the billy for a
cup of tea as the sun set. Once it was dark,
we headed up the road that leads to the peak
of the mountain. It's a long walk to the top,
eight kilometers from where we were. He hadn't made any
plans to go all the way to the top, just
walk along and bag some snakes, enjoy the night's warmth
and the music. I guess it would have been nine
or ten that night. Neither of us had watches, and
mobile phones hadn't been invented yet. We had one eight
foot carpet snake, which is a beautiful python, a few
brown tree snakes in the bags, and we're just quietly chatting,
no torch on for quite some time, so as to
let our eyes get accustomed to the darkness. It was
a different kind of bush up there from what I
was used to up north. It is tropical and more
like jungle than bush. The thick green tangle whirld came
right up to the roadsides on both sides of the road,
except it wasn't green. It was just an all encompassing
living blackness of vines and palms and figs and ferns
and trees that sting and stab and things that want
to bite you everywhere you step. It's not a silent
darkness either. The forest is full of life and movement,
with things that croak and squeak and chatter and squabble
and scurry and fly and hump past your face and
flap into you and scrabble in the branches above you.
In the black. We were walking slowly along this dark
tree covered tunnel of a road to our left, and
I heard a branch crack. Now many Australian trees are
self pruning, especially in summer, Ucalyptus especially. They dropped their
branches all the time. This is one reason so many
Australian birds and marsupials have adapted to live in hollows
made where the tree branches have come off. The animals
and trees have evolved together, so hearing a branch crack
is nothing unusual. Usually we didn't even mention it. We
heard it and barely acknowledged it as we kept chatting
in the dark, barely able to see each other though
we were right side by side. A few moments later
came another crack. This was different altogether. This was quite close,
maybe a stone's throw away, and it came from down
the gully that we knew was beside us. It wasn't deep,
maybe thirty meters. It just a fold in the land
that the runoffs used to join with the creek. Now
this was a break, the sound of something literally breaking,
maybe the trunk of a fairly large soul. It just
went bang, more like a gunshot than a branch breaking.
You could tell that this tree didn't break like a
dead fall. It just got broken green, and it was loud,
and it was closed. And we stopped, but before either
of us called to say, oh crap. From the same
spot as the snap came a sound like a cough.
I've often described it as a bit like someone clearing
their throat, like a big man going um, or a
cross between that and a cough. I can make a
sound pretty close to it. We turned to each other
and Brian spoke first, but all he got was, did
you hear that? Suddenly the air was torn apart, like
as if by thunder. The loudest and most horrific, ear splitting,
blood curdling scream yell roar hit us like a bomb blast.
The sound literally vibrated our bodies and in our ribs
and skulls, and it seemed to take heat and strength
out of us, if only for a moment. It lasted
for what seemed like an impossible time. Maybe it was
about as long as one can hold its breath, maybe shorter.
I can't, with impunity say how long that scream went for,
but it was long and drawn out in the most
ferocious and frightening sound I've ever heard. As it tailed off,
there was another huff or a cough at its end,
and the two of us stood, weakened the knees and bones,
waiting for the hammer to fall. It sounded like the
warning of certain death to come at any second. We
had suddenly plummeted into a few horrible moments to the
very bottom of the food chain. It was a bit
like when you're swimming out in the surf behind the
brake and you see a fin and you don't know
if it's a dolphin or not, and you suddenly realized
that you might be on something's menu, and there's nothing
you can do about it, so you accept the fact
that there are only three out comes. One you will
make it safely to shore. Two you're going to get injured,
possibly badly, and three you're going to die today. Well,
whatever made that sound was close, and it was the
king of the effing jungle. Years after this incident, I
would have the pleasure of having a male lion roar
from twenty meters behind me in the dark. A lion's roar,
as almost bowel moving as it was, was nowhere near
as loud and powerful and barrel chested as this thing. Seriously,
the yali that made that roar must have been freakin huge.
In those first few moments after the scream, nothing happened.
There was complete silence, not a cricket chirp, not a
possum stir, not a frog croak. Everything was silent as
a grave. It was as if that roar had sucked
the vitality out of every living thing in that area.
That area either, but the whole bloody mountain seemed to
hold its breath. I was snapped out of my shock
by Brian, whose face was almost nose to nose with
mine as he said, Okay, Harry Butler, what the f
was that? Now? Please allow me to just give a
very quick heads up on that last comment for your
American listeners. Harry Butler is a well loved Offsea naturalist
who had a popular TV show on the ABC called
Harry Butler in the Wild. We had all grown up
with this show. In fact, Harry was one of the
people to inspire the late Steve Irwin to take the
path that he took in life. So there's Brian, eyes
like dinner plates, waiting for me to give him a
sensible answer, and I could not. He knew that I
was very good in the bush. He knew I had
heard everything that was to hear in the bush. He
knew I was running through my noise catalog in my mind,
trying really hard to equate that sound was something in
my Brett's book of bush Noises. Now, after a moment,
I gave him my honest answer, I'll be ft if
I know, Mike. And then it hit me. I was
back in w J at night with the same bloke,
and I was looking at the yowie I'd seen all
those years ago, and I knew what it was in
an instant that was out there and had made that sound.
And I said, wait, I think I might know what
this is. Mate. Brian, looking more serious than I'd ever
seen him look before, said oh yeah. I said, yeah,
do you want to know what I reckon it was?
He looked right into my face. I could practically hear
his gears turning. He took a moment and he said no.
Suddenly I wasn't scared. Maybe it was the pleading look
in Brian's eyes that made me think he was relying
on me for a solid and helpful idea. The third response,
I call it there is flight, fight, and a total
complacence of Bambi volence. So I finally said, well, Mike,
if it's big enough to sound like that and it
wants us, we are eft. And Brian replied we're closer
to the peak than the camp. Let's have some balls
and just keep going. And then, and only then did
we remember we had a torch. It had been gripped
in my hand the whole time. And although our minds
were still full of tilt, that roar had frozen us
to the spot, and it took a moment to fall.
So I shined the light straightforward to the spot where
the sound had come from, and despite the rays barely
penetrating that vast green wall, a second after flicking it on,
there came a thud, like someone dropping a bag of
cement from the back of a truck. We felt it
through the road. We knew it was a foot thump,
a stamp, like what an annoyed horse would do, only
so much more powerful. Okay, you don't like the light either,
I thought, so I shined it down the corner of
the road behind us. Nothing same in front, just more
road in jungle, and I turned off the light. I
had kind of judged that as I walked about the
seven kilometers an hour, that we had been walking pretty
slowly for an hour or so, and we had covered
about five kilometers. We were a long way from home,
and that bugger. Yahwe probably knew it. So we continued
up the road, slowly at first, and then with an
f U king Kong attitude, completely unarmed. Of course, the
noises of the bush came back, but conversation had begun
to die away, and after about another twenty minutes or so,
Brian just stopped and said to me, very quietly and seriously, Bretto,
I can feel it watching us, Mate, Can you feel that?
Of course I can, mate, But he hasn't made us
move on yet. That's a good thing, nay, said my mate. Dude,
this feels wrong. And when the road hits the base
of the path it stops at this park. Now, said
my mate, dude, this feels wrong. And when the road
hits the base of the path it stops at this
little car park thing. And then there's this little rocky,
windy footpath to the summit, like through the forest. Mate.
This was new info, and straightway changed my mind. Suddenly.
That single lane road felt like a much safer line
to take than to blunder in total darkness right into
this thing's backyard with a torch or no torch. The
blacktop felt like a wiser of two options. Okay, mate,
let's go home. We did one hundred and eighty degree
and walked back down that blackest pitch road past where
the roar happened, down and down and down, watched all
the way. I have no doubt. We got back to
our tent at about midnight. FJ was still awake. He
had been filming some footage on the old microcassette video
camera we had taken with us to catalog the holiday.
In the clip, he was laying back with a cigarette
and telling the camera that he could hear some very
strange noises coming from up the mountain and that he
was glad he was staying right here. He hoped we
were okay. I still have the footage. It's a shame
he didn't get any of what he was hearing on tape.
But the gist of it is that he was five
kilometers away and he heard the roar, so you can
imagine what standing a stone's throw away did to us.
We sat in the tent and we talked about it,
had a couple of stiff drinks, and turned in. Now
here's the bit that drove it all home for me
and my mate. Next morning, it was sunny, perfect and
people out and about, and all the reality around you
makes your logic denial thing kick in and you wonder
did that stuff really happen? You get it the day
after very every real experience with something otherworldly. You guys
know what I mean. But we went to the little
shop in the caravan park that morning for some stuff
and it was like a little general store beside the
park's end ground swimming pool, postcards, post office, milk bar, etc.
I joked about something to Brian about the last night's
goings on, and the really nice bloke that ran the
shop just up and said, you blokes up near the
big fella on the mountain last night, eh or something
like that. It was years ago. Anyway, this bloke goes
on to tell us that it is playing local knowledge
and it has been for a long time. There is
a yalie up on Mount Warning and there always will be,
and most people know that. He went on to say
that the indigenous people of the region would go miles
out of their way to avoid that mountain back in
their day. He told us about how the lady had
the little place on the left after the kindergarten in
Wallumbe had her little terrier just swooped up from its
running tether by that big bugger in one hand as
it went straight through her laundry line. The dog didn't
even yell, It just crushed it in one hand as
the yowie went straight on through her yard into the bush,
dragging fresh laundry after it. I had been past her
house a dozen times or more. So even though we
didn't need to be, we felt pretty validated by the
bloke in the shot because even though he may have
been stretching the truth even a tad. I don't know,
but I know what we heard on Mount Warning that night,
and it was big. It was a bloody yowie. It
could have been nothing else. We don't have bears, We
don't have cougar's wolves or the sorts of land predators
that can growl or roar like that. We don't have
huge deer like moose er el in our forests. That
Mike Bellow pretty well. It was no koalis fighting or
possums going at it for fruit, or bats screeching. There
are yowie's, you might call them sasquatch. It is mysterious,
but it's really no mystery. It's very plain and simple.