With Dave Martin
The Beast of Mt Best
I reckon every country town I’ve ever lived in, and there have been a few, from the gentle curling waves of the Bellarine Peninsula to the deep, dark forests of the Strezlecki Ranges… there've been rumours of a beastie living up in them thar’ hills.
When I was a student way back in the 1970s, Geelong Teachers College mounted regular expeditions into the Grampians in search of an elusive pair of pumas that had allegedly been released into the wild by American servicemen at the end of World War II. It was a good excuse to spend a weekend in the bush sinking cans and cooking snags over an open fire with your mates but these jaunts were run under the supervision of a group of senior lecturers from the science department who took the whole business very seriously.
Every puma hunter was issued with a puma hunting kit containing plaster of Paris for taking a cast of any puma footprints we might come across, little plastic bags for collecting blobs of puma poo and a couple of photos and diagrams to help you decide whether what you were looking at was two metres of puma with razor sharp teeth and a bad attitude or an overgrown wombat looking for somewhere to have a nice kip.
Needless to say we never did find any pumas… although the rumours persist to this very day… so you just never know.
Down this way we’ve had reports of wraiths haunting the swamps down around Tarwin… tales of ghostly hitchhikers picked up on the highway heading up to Foster North and something wild and wicked spotted from time to time at Darby River down at Wilson’s Promontory.
And normally I’d give no credence to these tall tales, on the basis that these sightings often happen to witnesses of dubious credibility, late at night after a few drinks or a nice big plate of magic mushrooms… but there was this one time.
I was working up at the Mt Best school and living in Foster so from time to time I used to catch a ride on the school bus driven by Tony Morgan. I had heard stories of a black panther living in the forest out the back of Mt Best on Mt Squaretop without paying much attention to it.
On the day in question, we were coming down the mountain out the back of Toora and we’ve come around the corner. In front of us was an enormous black cat walking across the road about twenty metres ahead of the bus.
This huge beast just wandered across the road without a care in the world and disappeared mysteriously into the scrub.
I was sitting up the front with Tony and there was a busload of kids on board… Lizzie Zanella, Louisa and Tom Vale, Danny Grant, maybe a couple of Rudges… Tansy and Geordie… and I think Oliver and Danny Gasperino might have been there too. But none of them seemed to have seen anything.
I just sat there speechless… and Tony just kept on driving as if nothing had happened.
After a while I said to Tony…. “Did you see that?”
There was a long… long… l-o-n-g silence… “Nup.” said Tony.
