WITH HIS SHORT-CROPPED hair, neat beige slacks and tan, Dean Harrison is the epitome of the slick sales manager. But there is another side to this seemingly conventional man. In his spare time he hunts yowies - two-metre tall, ape-like creatures that, he says, live in large numbers in Australia's remote mountains, forests and backwoods.
Harrison is a believer. He believes in yowies with the same fervour that Billy Graham believes in God. He has the same wild-eyed look of conviction, no more so than when he is relating one of his many yowie encounters. 'I've faced the aggressive yowie, the one that wants to tear your head off, and I've faced the shy yowie, which is much gentler. They have personalities as varied as humans,' he says gravely.
'Once I was sitting in a creek bed when a yowie started coming towards me, hopping from rock to rock and using tree branches to swing on. He came and sat right down beside me. I could hear him breathing. It gave me goosebumps.'
Harrison, 32, from Beenleigh near Brisbane, Queensland, runs an outfit called Australian Yowie Research. He has amassed sophisticated sound-monitoring and camera equipment worth A$18,000 (HK$72,000) largely from his own pocket. ('Don't talk to my wife about it,' he says, when quizzed on where the money comes from.)
He heads a small team of part-time yowie fanatics, many of them professional people, some of them ex-military and all of them, from the look of his publicity material, excessively keen on dressing up in camouflage fatigues and spending nights camped out in the woods in search of their giant prey. 'We're a rare bunch,' he proclaims. 'We're not just hobos or backyard hicks. These people are professionals.'
That most Australians regard the idea of a species of hairy hominids living among them as ludicrous does not deter him in the slightest. He admits, with masterly understatement, that public opinion is 'divided' over whether these mythical beasts exist or not. He maintains that many people do believe in yowies, but are wary about coming forward for fear of being mocked. 'People who know the bush and who work in areas where there are yowies - police, national parks rangers, the military - all confide in us.'