Did You Know that there have been 100’s of reported sightings of panthers in The Otways since the mid 19th Century?
Folklore or Fact?
I read the recent article about the sightings of big cats in the Otways. Always been a sceptic about these kind of things but in January 2006 we too saw a big black cat. Myself and partner were driving on a dirt track out the back of Lavers Hill (Otways) near my Auntie’s residence when we noticed a big black cat on the road in front of us. It took off up the embankment as we approached in the car. It was about the size of our 2 year old Labrador. Anyway I’m happy to give you the exact locations if you keep a record of sightings.
Received 04/02/2010 by http://www.bigcatsvic.com.au/
Historically stories of big cats roaming The Otways started up in a big way, after fragmentary sightings here and there, in the late 1960s (via newspaper reports and government records) but is part of a broader pattern of Victorian sightings that goes back to the mid 1800s. A lot of the early stories were tied up with circus, pet and menageries escapes and releases by the Acclimatisation Societies, created in order to “enrich” the fauna of a region with animals and plants from around the world, in the 1860s. Consecutive governments, up until the second world war, dealt with the panic by presenting a big dog as the culprit to placate people. In the 1960s it took off again with a flurry of newspaper reports and sightings, and that pretty much is the situation today.
Read more in this book:
Snarls from the Tea Tree: Big Cat Folklore
Fantasy or fact, truly believed or doubted or manufactured, big cat scares have for generations haunted south-eastern Australia. The notion that a big cat has escaped and is at loose, or that the thylacine survives, is exciting and we may wish it to be true; it seems just possible. An ancient landscape of crags and lava cones and endless forbidding bush plays with the mind and is a dramatic backdrop for folklore. Stories of stock kills and claims of paw-prints have some kind of foundation; rumours of ‘beast’ attacks feed a persistent mythology
Paperback: 189 pages
Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing (October 1, 2012)