Gigantuan Hominids of the Dreamtime

Aboriginal myth and legend Australia-wide, preserves traditions of giant ancestral beings who roamed the continent in the long-ago Dreamtime. These beings are often described as monstrous, cannibalistic stone tool-making hominids of from 3 to 4 metres height who were of great physical strength, while others were more hominoid in appearance, taller than 4 metres and herbivorous in eating habits.

These monstrous beings, together with modern human height tool-making, fire-making hominids, even more than one pygmy-size race, were the origin of the Yowie, or “hairy man” traditions of our Aboriginal people. In my latest book, ‘Giants From the Dreamtime - The Yowie in Myth and Reality’, I present evidence that the modern human-height, fire-making hominids were Homo erectus, who shared Australia with a larger 3 to 4 metre tall tool-making relative.

The Yowie Exhibition Canberra National Museum

 

 

Eternity Gallery - Changeover of Objects

The following extraordinary Australians joined the Eternity gallery in 2002-2003

Eternity explores the stories of 50 ordinary and extraordinary Australians, based on emotional themes, catching people at
moments when their stories act as windows to larger events in history," said curator Sophie Jensen

Eternity will be launched in the Museum's Hall at 11am on Thursday, 29 May. This is the first major changeover for
any of the five permanent exhibitions of the National Museum since it opened in March 2001. Each Eternity story is told
through a multimedia voyage and a special object.

Other stories being introduced to Eternity on Thursday include Yowie hunter Rex Gilroy.

Harold Wright - travelling tinker and saw doctor from the 1930s to 1960s. His story highlights the chances that people were forced to take during the Depression.
Gilbert Dyett - founder of the Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia (now the Returned Services League).
Tilly Aston - the first blind woman to enter an Australian university and the founder of the Victorian Association of Braille Writers in 1894 and the Association for the Advancement of the Blind (now Vision Australia Foundation).
Geoff Hazel - peacekeeper in charge of a contingent of Australian Federal Police stationed in East Timor.
Linda Agostini - also known as the 'Pyjama Girl', one of Australia's most prominent murder mysteries.
Victor Trumper - legendary cricketer from the 19th century.
Eddie Gilbert - taken from his Aboriginal home at the age of three, he became a household name in the early 1930s for his fast bowling style and his dismissal of Don Bradman for a duck.
Albert Facey - survivor of the Gallipoli trenches and author of A Fortunate Life.
Graeme Clark - world famous for developing the bionic ear, a device that can bring hearing to the profoundly deaf.
Jane Franklin - 19th-century Tasmanian traveller and explorer.
Steven Bradbury - Olympic speed skater who was the first Australian to win a gold medal at a Winter Olympics.
Jane Walker - convict in the isolated Ross Female Factory for 'difficult' women in Tasmania in the 19th century.
Austin Byrne - sculptor who devoted his life to commemorating famous 1930s Australian aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm.
Rex Gilroy - known as the father of yowie research, devoting much of his life to bringing this mysterious creature to the public's attention. Gilroy, Mr Rex (new loan): Cast of a 'yowie' footprint for display in the Eternity gallery.
Marian Knight - a relative of May Gibbs, with whom she was so captivated that Marian never cashed a cheque decorated by May.
Joy Burns - an active member of the Country Women's Association in Western Australia for over 70 years.
Peter Pedals - an entrepreneurial environmentalist known for his application of pedal power as both an energy source and a way of keeping fit.
Emma Miller - the first woman member and life member of the Brisbane Workers' Political Organisation and the foundation president of the Woman's Equal Franchise Association 1894-1905.
Shirley Hodder - the first woman to drive in a major road racing championship in New South Wales.
Tan Le - former Young Australian of the Year who escaped war-torn Vietnam as a child and became the first first-generation Australian to be awarded the honour.
Tommy Tomasi - an Italian worker on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
Rose Sarah Rasey - a missionary and nurse interned by the Japanese in the 1940s.
Bejah Dervish - a Baluchistan cameleer from South Australia.
Eva Castley - a Hungarian migrant who, when trapped under the ruins of her Budapest home in 1944, had her will to live fuelled by her mother's promise of a new dress.
Howard Florey - Nobel prize-winning scientist, who with his colleagues, Alexander Fleming and Ernst Chaim, developed penicillin at Oxford University.

Original Article
http://www.nma.gov.au/about_us/corporate_documents/annual_report/annual_report_2002_2003_html_version/part_5_appendices/appendix_6/