Original Article
http://www.critic.co.nz/about/features/99
Articles about Rex Gilroy
The Great Aussie Battler
Some might call Rex Gilroy the cryptozoological answer to Steve Irwin.
He has an all-consuming passion for the task at hand, reminds you a bit of your jittery uncle, and is equally as likely to get killed in the field. Irwin swam with deadly creatures; Gilroy goes hunting in the Ureweras.
The Australian explorer has been uncovering Australia’s mysterious archaeological past since the 1959, during which time he has documented over 3000 reports relating to the yowie (a particular ‘hairy humanoid’ mapped back to – and dismissed as – Aboriginal folklore), along with Australian pyramid networks, Tasmanian Tigers and Moas.
In early January of this year, Gilroy said he was within photo-op distance of the little scrub moa, one of the many extinct garden vegetable varieties of moa who once roamed freely on the mighty contours of Aotearoa.
He and his wife, Heather, claim to have found hard evidence (tracks) in the Urewera ranges in November last year. Evidence, he says, that points to the existence of the Anomalopteryx didiformis, better known as the little scrub moa. Aside from tracks, the latest find includes a recently-used nest in a dead kauri tree.
In a recent interview with the Hawkes Bay Times, Gilroy refused to reveal the exact location, but has confirmed that “the location is in pretty remote country. [We] need to have more time to investigate, and if I can get something on film, that would be tremendous.”
Due to the vast similarities of moa and their luckier Australian neighbours the emu, this seems to be the most convenient sceptic bandwagon to jump on, but despite the torrent of negative reaction from scientists and the news media, there’s no stopping Gilroy.
“You’ve got to be a bit eccentric in this business,” he says. “If people think you’re a little bit crazy, they leave you alone so you can do your work.” So the mad old bastard ploy is actually just a ruse. Might be time to start paying attention to that crazy old taxi driver.
Moa may have been hunted to extinction within a century of human arrival to New Zealand. By the time you read this, the Gilroys would have been back in the country, not making such a media fuss this time, quietly going about rewriting their vague history.
One prominent archaeologist, speaking to Critic anonymously for fear of aggravating the staid hierarchy of the scientific community and upsetting his firm hold from within the academy, is on Gilroy’s side.
“It’s quite boring and predictable, actually, the reaction within the academic community to people like Rex Gilroy: that he’s only a pseudoscientist, the prints are from an emu, the photo’s far too blurry, all that stuff.
The media play along, and cast him as the crazy old uncle. But he took me up to the spot in the Ureweras. And I was blown away, to be honest. This could be it.” Why does the scientific community appear to be so resistant to these new discoveries?
“A range of reasons, from purely selfish ones, certain researchers may have put out books on extinct birds or something like that, but as far as I can see, it’s mostly snobbery.
They call people like Gilroy a joke, but that’s what they said about Orbell, and let’s not forget that Galileo and Newton were also considered pseudoscientists for the most part.”