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The cats’ tales go on: seeing is believing Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Kyle Barnes
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HE old hunter points to the ground beside his handcut 159-year-old red-box shed. This is where he made two casts of a big cat’s paw print. Up his drive is where he saw a big sandy-coloured animal bound away a year or two later.
Geoff Green, a 79-year-old retired professional game hunter and farmer, lives on his property at Strangways, near Guildford. It was there he joined the legion of people, including the many who wrote to The Local after its first report of a possible paw print hoax, to report sightings of a “big cat”. But he did more. With decades as a deerstalker here and in New Zealand, author of a book on the topic, as well as a hunter of huge bulls in the Northern Territory and a keen amateur historian, he plunged deeply into this much remarked-upon world. The paw marks measured almost 12cm long and as wide. To him they were an echo of the first appearance of big cats in the 80s. So were stock losses by his neighbour, Clay Harris. Geoff photographed the remains of a sheep on the Harris farm about five years ago where, says Geoff, 300 sheep and two calves have been taken by a strange beast or beasts. Inside Geoff’s house, where upstairs resembles a museum of Australian and Scottish history, he shows a letter from another renowned deerstalker, the late Neville Smart, who lived in the Strathbogie Ranges. “I saw a fourth one [cat] run, up a log 12ft off the ground, then spring to a rock nine yards, then disappeared to mid-air behind some trees. About as big as a fox. Very spectacular,” Smart wrote. Smart reported seeing six pumas in the Strathbogies. A sighting at Daisy Hill near Maryborough in 1990 was remarkable because it was made by Geoff Woess, who had a long experience with big cats, including owning a black leopard and a puma in his private collection. The animal he saw resembled a black panther. That year too, a farmer near Maryborough shot at two huge “pumas” which killed two of his rams. Geoff believes the cats will eat lambs but kill a big sheep or kangaroo and return to eat it the next night. He saw a gutted roo about 15km from his home. For two nights he waited and watched without seeing the cat, but on the third night he returned to find the remains of the animal, except for a foreleg, moved to nearby bush. “All these are facts,” he says, “not tall stories. I believe they are mountain lions. Two-thirds of the sightings are black and the rest are sandy.” His evidence, he says, is from reliable witnesses: bushmen. A ram’s nose was bitten off, its skin peeled back and stripped of flesh in Violet Town, 170km north of Melbourne in July 1999. A Melbourne dentist reportedly made a plaster cast of a big cat paw print at the Howqua River, near Mt Buller in 1993. It measured 12cm across and the front and back legs were 90cm apart. Three years earlier three men said they saw a big cat at Licola, in the alpine high country. A half-eaten carcass of a big roo was found in the Nuggety Ranges outside Maldon in March 2004. Nearer home, the Australian newspaper reported in 1990 that Daylesford rabbiter John McPhailand made a cast of a cat paw. He said a neighbour lost 300 sheep, all killed and skinned the same way. Geoff shows a cutting from the Ballarat Courier from 1995 reporting sightings. Although printed on April Fool’s Day, the story did not seem a hoax. “I’ve heard that many stories, I only remember the ones that are fair dinkum,” says Geoff. “The rest I forget.” These stories began sometime in the 1870s and are probably best summed up by authors Tony Healy and Paul Cropper in their 1994 book, Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia; no matter how strong the evidence no one “will ever fully believe in any of these creatures” until they see one.
Above, Geoff Green and the plaster casts he made from prints in his driveway; right, Geoff's friend, the late Neville Smart, ran tours in Victoria and Tasmania
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