Newspaper article's from Rex and a letter from Rex talking about how his research has evolved; from thinking that the Yowie was a big ape to realising the yowie's footprints were more modern looking than primate.
A Letter from Rex Gilroy
The following articles are as the sensation-seeking media reported, or rather, deliberately misquoted and distorted interviews on the subject of the Yowie, and not as I reported in these and countless other interviews.
These articles are an example of the kind of tongue-in-cheek reporting of my research into the Yowie mystery, which I had to endure from the Australian Media throughout the 1970's and 1980's.
Statements I made were distorted, and often reporters invented statements supposedly made by me. Sketches of the Yowie were drawn by newspaper artists and attributed to me. Radio and television interviews fared no better.
The true facts are as I have written them in my two books on the subject;" Giants from the Dreamtime-The Yowie in mYth and Reality", and "The Yowie Mystery-Living Fossils from the Dreamtime".
The media generally has always treated the Australian relict hominid subject with ridicule with few exceptions.
These individuals know nothing about the subject and have never bothered to make a proper investigation of the evidence, preferring always to discredit it out-of-hand, by pushing the "hairy monster" image, which to them is far more sensational than the tool-making, fire-making Homo erectus, our immediate ancestor.
Intelligent readers can make up their own minds from the evidence presented in my books.
Looking Back
Looking back over my 50 years of research on the Yowie mystery, I see an evolutionary pattern in my work, beginning with the youthful enthusiasm of a teenager gathering old Aboriginal and early settlers stories of encounters in the bush with the “hairy man”, to the beginnings of my earliest field investigations and footprint finds; how I at first believed that the “hairy man” was some form of long-haired bipedal primate, which might be a surviving population of Gigantopithecus blackie which had made its way into Australia during the Pleistocene period.
Yet I eventually realised that the cast footprints of the Yowie that began appearing in the 1960s, and also those recovered during the early 1970s, were more hominid than primate.
At the same time I was beginning to uncover recently-manufactured crude stone implements from remote areas of the Blue Mountains. These, together with Aboriginal accounts of the “hairy men and women” being able to make fire and cook their food, soon led me to realise that I was dealing with remnant populations of living Homo erectus.
This belief was meanwhile being reinforced by discoveries first with my late father, Mr W F [Bill] Gilroy, and later by my wife Heather and I, of actual fossil skull-types of Homo erectus over a wide area of Australia, mostly in areas once inhabited by the “hairy people” according to Aboriginal traditions.
I learnt also that ‘Yowie’ was but one of many, indeed a great many names throughout Australia, by which these beings were known to our Aborigines.
In fact, I discovered that these names all identified any non-Aboriginal race with which they once shared the continent, be they average modern human height beings, pygmies or giants.
All these names meant “hairy man”, “hairy woman” or “hairy people”, and they were all called such not because they possessed long body hair, but because they wore cloaks of kangaroo and other marsupial [fur] hides, just like the Aborigines in early historical photographs which can still be seen today.
Thus as my information and evidence grew I was able to discard previous ideas on the physical appearance and identity of the Yowie. A similar evolution of my theories, both on the origins of the Yowie and of pre-Aboriginal hominid evolution as a whole, can be seen in the way that my ideas have changed over the years as my collection of fossil hominid skull-types grew.
In September 1969 I recovered a 52mm tall giant hominid lower back premolar tooth at a fossil site now covered by Westmead Children’s’ Hospital in Sydney’s west.
The discovery of my first giant hominid fossil footprint followed in April 1970 at Mulgoa, at the eastern base of the Blue Mountains.
Then in May 1972 my late father found the mineralised endocast of a large ‘archaic’ Homo sapien skull at an old Pleistocene site at Tarana, just west of the Blue Mountains; followed by my own discovery of a smaller endocast of a ‘late’ Homo erectus skull-type about 30 metres away in the same strata, demonstrating upon various grounds to be discussed further on in this book, that Homo sapiens were already present in Australia by 300,000 years ago, and that they shared the land with their ‘father’, Homo erectus.
http://www.mysteriousaustralia.com/newspaper-main.html