They weren’t looking for anything unusual. They were just fishing.
Two mates were three days into a canoe trip along the Murray River near Mildura when something pulled their attention toward the New South Wales bank. A stretch of riverbank that looked different — a distinct microecosystem tucked back from the water, the kind of place that doesn’t see foot traffic. They pulled up and walked about 50 meters in from the bank to have a look around.
That’s when one of them said it out loud.
“I feel like we are being watched.”
The witness posting to r/AustralianCryptids noted the dark irony of that moment. They were in a spot they could “nearly guarantee” hadn’t seen humans in some time. There was no logical reason for the feeling. But it was there, shared between both of them, unprompted.
Then they looked down.
What the Print Shows
The original post includes a photograph taken on the spot, and the print is worth examining carefully.
The impression is pressed into sandy riverbank substrate — the kind of material that takes and holds detail well. What’s visible in the photo is a large, flat-footed impression with no discernible arch, four distinct toe impressions at the top, and what appears to be a second partial print to the lower right. There are no claw marks anywhere in or around the impression, which immediately rules out most large Australian animals. Dogs, goannas, wombats, and kangaroos all leave claw or nail marks in soft sand. This print has none.
The witness has a size 13 foot. They pressed their own foot into the ground beside the print for comparison. Their foot didn’t match in two critical ways: it was smaller, and it left an arch. This impression was both larger and completely flat-footed in a way that no human print would be.
The one genuine limitation of the photo is the absence of a scale reference. There’s no ruler, no coin, no hand in the frame. Readers will have to take the witness at their word on the size comparison, which is a fair thing to note. The anatomical details — the flat foot, the four toes, the absence of claws — are visible in the image regardless of scale. But the size claim rests on the witness testimony alone.
Yowie or Bunyip? The Locals Are Split
When the witnesses described what they’d found to people in the area, most had no explanation. But among the Aboriginal residents they spoke to, two names came up: Yowie, or Bunyip.
That split is worth sitting with for a moment, because these are not interchangeable creatures in Indigenous tradition.
The Yowie is Australia’s closest equivalent to Bigfoot — a large, bipedal, hair-covered cryptid reported across the Australian bush for generations, with roots deep in Aboriginal oral history long before European settlers arrived and began logging their own encounters. Yowie reports cluster along the east coast, particularly in Queensland and New South Wales, and typically describe a powerfully built creature ranging from around six to ten feet tall. The flat-footed, large bipedal print profile fits the Yowie description well.
The Bunyip is a different kind of entity entirely — traditionally associated with swamps, creeks, billabongs, and waterways, described variously as amphibious, multi-limbed, and deeply threatening. The Murray River setting would fit a Bunyip attribution geographically. But the print itself — bipedal, flat-footed, toe-forward — doesn’t align as cleanly with most Bunyip descriptions, which tend toward something more aquatic and less humanoid.
The fact that local Aboriginal residents are split between the two attributions suggests this part of the Murray corridor may carry its own regional lore that doesn’t map cleanly onto the national versions of either creature.
The Sensation That Came First
It would be easy to focus entirely on the print and skip past the detail that preceded it. But the “being watched” sensation deserves its place in this account.
Both men felt it. Neither had said it until one of them did. They were in an isolated stretch of bush with no visible reason for the feeling. And moments later they found a print that didn’t match any known animal in the region.
Whether that sensation was instinct, coincidence, or something else is impossible to say. But it’s a detail that appears consistently in Yowie encounter reports — the feeling of being observed before anything is seen or found. Researchers who track these accounts note it often precedes physical evidence by just a few minutes.
These two men didn’t go looking for a Yowie. They went looking for fish. What they found on that riverbank near Mildura raises a question that experienced trackers, zoologists, and cryptid researchers would all answer differently.
The print is in the sand. The toes are visible. The arch is missing. And whatever made it, at some point, was standing in that exact spot — in a place that almost never sees humans — while two people on a canoe trip felt, correctly, that something was watching them.
Have you seen something unexplained? Email Reports@ParaRational.com
