Australia's Bush Apes

Recently I came upon CFZ Australia's site for Bush Ape and Yowie Resarch:
http://bushapes.blogspot.com/

Which also connects to the Yowie Hunters website:
http://www.yowiehunters.com/

And starts with this introduction:

About us:
There is a wealth of mythology pertaining to the Australian Bigfoot or "Yowie" stretching back over the more than 200 years of European settlement in Australia, as well as numerous legends from aboriginal groups stretching back to the dreamtime (see Rex Gilroy's book "Giants of the Dreamtime" 2001). As a group we are very new and do not profess to have the answers to this phenomenon. This group is attempting, as are others, to piece together the puzzle to find out what is really going on out there.
Is this phenomenon the result of a human unconscious desire for "scary monsters"? Are thousands upon thousands of people imagining things they see? Or is there some kind of cryptic creature out there, running through the Australian bush? Our ideas may be flawed, however, in line with the scientific method, we look for duplication and replication within eyewitness accounts and are putting this information together. This field is full of very diverse individuals with a wide range of their own conclusions, many excellent opinions and findings and we do not discredit any other ideas about the yowie phenomenon, merely present our own conclusions.


And upon reviewing the evidence, I began to believe that the two types were different - that the bush apes (or brush apes) are the Australian equivalent of NAPES in North America while the more usual Yowie types are more of a wildman sub-category (albeit somewhat more primitive than most).

One of Karl Shuker's correspondents had heard of creatures very much like orangutans in New Guinea. I thought very little of that until the following photo came up on a photo search for something else entirely...

...which is very plainly an orangutan's fore and hind foot with the forefoot balled into a fist and the ape walking quadrupedally on the ground; typical of the species. And the tracks are not even much modified from the known orangutans - they are not an independent population that has been evolving in isolation for several thousands of years.

And while the standard Yowie seems little different from a hairy and strongly-built human being, these bush apes seem to be shown as something else more definitely ape-like; something with an inhuman, ape-like foot, which would go along with the more ape-like tracks. I had also seen a couple of other sets of 'ape' tracks just before posting this blog but they were not so clear and in fact I thought the second pair I came across showed obvious signs of having been faked. The end of the heel was as square as a length of board, for one thing.

The more ape-like reports also had certain striking features such as strongly reddish hair and longer hair on the arms and legs - six inches or a foot long, several times the length of the hair on most of the body.

I therefore suggest that these apes are actually only illegally-released orangutans smuggled in from Indonesia and that the ones in New Guinea are the same. My impression is that the actually ape-like reports come primarily out of the jungle forests in Queensland, in the North of Australia.

Best Wishes, Dale D.