This winter, a large-scale search will be made by Rex Gilroy, who began research into yowies back in 1957.

Over the past 55 years, Mr Gilroy, 68, a cryptozoologist, claims to have amassed several thousand accounts of male and female hairy primitives - claims of sightings from 1790 to the present.

“Pioneer period reports of these hominids give the yowie mystery some credibility,” Mr Gilroy said.

“I have also gathered over 200 plaster casts of footprints.

“Today there is enough evidence to show that two distinct races of yowie are involved in the mystery and that they are present-day surviving forms of ancestors who entered Australia from Asia when a land shelf joined Australia to mainland Asia.”

Mr Gilroy and his wife Heather are gathering sighting reports and any other evidence of yowies throughout the Bega and surrounding districts, as part of a major winter 2012 field search program.

They operate the not-for-profit Australian Yowie Research Centre based in Katoomba.

“The yowie or ‘hairy man’ - the women were hairy too - are an ancient Australia-wide Aboriginal tradition,” Mr Gilroy said.

“We have old pioneer period accounts of Australopithecine-like apish male and female beings seen around the Bega area.

“Back in the mid-19th Century the beings were called ‘the Black Monster of Bega’ due to their longish dark hair and forward-projecting apish faces.

“One account from 1913 involved surveyor Mr Phillip Mills and two geologists camped on a Bega mountainside one night, when a seven-foot-tall (2.1metres) upright-walking ape-like male hominid emerged from bushes near their camp in the campfire glow.

“One man grabbed a revolver, but the being turned and moved off into the scrub.

“Heather and I have gathered many such pioneer tales.

“In 1915 outside Bega township a young man was milking a cow on the edge of scrub, when he discovered he was being watched from bushes by a dark-haired, ape-like female creature about five-foot tall (1.5metres).

“When she realised she had been spotted she ran off into scrub”.

The Gilroys will be searching the Bega district with a number of assistant field investigators and are confident of turning up more evidence of the “hairy people of Bega”.

They would welcome any information from readers about yowie sightings in the Bega Valley. Contact them at PO Box 202, Katoomba, NSW, 2780; call (02) 4782 3441; or email randhgilroy44@bigpond.com.