If you've read my previous posts then you will know that I grew up and went through school with Robert Winkler's eldest son (who I refer to by his school nickname 'Winkie').
As mentioned, Winkie told us of his father's encounter with a mate on a fishing trip but I never once heard the word yowie when this story was told. The inference was always there but it was never stated.
With that in mind, when we finished Year 12, myself, Winkie and two other mates decided to have our 'schoolies' by driving up river and camping for a couple of days. None of us had any real bush camping experience but between us we had enough knowledge to light fires, cook meals, and navigate (even with an analogue watch).
I can't exactly pinpoint where we went other than to say that we went up river well past Willawarrin, Toorooka and Bellbrook (which I'm sure you will all remember was the area where George Gray was attacked). One of the trip objectives was to spend a day finding the point where the Styx river met with the Macleay.
Anyway, we drove on up the bitumen for a long way past Bellbrook and then turned onto a forestry road for a ways finally parking at the top of a high ridgeline. We then loaded our packs and hiked down a forest road to the river. The road would have been wide enough for a 4WD and it was a loonngggg.... walk down.
When we got to the bottom and found the river we set up camp for the night. The idea was to hike to the junction of the rivers the next day and then stay the next night, then pack up and go the following day.
Well the first night was a cracker. Four eighteen year olds and two two-man tents. Winkie and I shared my tent and our mates the other. Being full of testosterone we started we spent our campfire hours building up a yarn about how we were camped of the 'good' side of the river and how the other side of the river was the 'evil' side. You could feel/smell the fear we were building up in ourselves by the minute. Never once was Winkie's Dad's story spoken of. I think it we had we would have scared ourselves so stupid that we would have drawn straws to see who had the job of killing the others with a tomahawk before planting in their own skull rather than be caught by the evil.
Anyway, at some point we decided to crawl into the tents (reluctantly) and try to sleep. The tents were side-by-side and we kept elaborating on the evil side in our sleeping bags. One distinct part of the story was where Winkie was plucked through a torn hole in the tent and shredded before our disbelieving eyes and ears. At that point Winkie almost lost it and decided he was going to squeeze into the other tent. That scared me so much (being left alone) that I almost pleaded with him to stay in my tent so that I had a 50/50 chance of not being shredded myself.
At this point we all (thankfully) settled down and stopped talking and just started listening for evil. At some point after that we all managed to drift off.
The next day we awoke without incident and proceeded to do our hike down the river. We didn't quite make it all the way but we had a damn good go.
That night we tried to breath life into the evil side tale but I think we were all a bit scared of working ourselves up into the state that we had gotten to the previous night. That night was uneventful and we mostly got a good nights sleep.
The next day we had to do the reverse hike back up to the top of the ridge. It was fairly unremarkable except that I was the slowest and least fit of the group and at some point fell behind and out of sight of the others. I certainly didn't enjoy that part of the trip. I was far too tired to catch up and could only manage a steady one foot after the other up the steep slope. Whilst by myself, I started re-living 'the evil side' in my mind and imagining that something had crossed from the evil side and was coming up after me. It wasn't quite the "I'm being followed by something" feeling that is described in yowie encounters but it was a distinctly uncomfortable part of the trip. Particularly when I came to a fork in the track going up. My mates had conveniently dropped a handkerchief for me there but they weren't smart enough to use it to indicate which fork they took. Anyway, I chose the right fork and caught up with them about 10 minutes later whilst they were taking a rest.
And that was it, we reached the top, got in the car and drove back to Kempsey.
The point of this story:
- You can go fairly deep into the Upper Macleay and NOT have a yowie encounter;
- Despite this, you can still scare yourself stupid.
As for why I told you all this; I have always found it intriguing that never once was the word 'yowie' mentioned on this trip, despite all of us having heard the yowie stories related to the area.
Also, given Winkie's Dad's experience where the word 'yowie' was never mentioned in the telling.
Sometimes its the 'omissions' in the story that stick in your mind rather than the story itself.
As a skeptic I don't know whether I want to have a yowie encounter or not. At the moment, as a 45 year old father of two, I'm beginning to feel my mortality. As much as I love camping I can't quite bring myself to go bush camping at the moment.
Cheers