Twenty one years later, on the eve of launching his third book, the former student and now Tim the Yowie Man says despite researching yowie reports back to the 1800s, which resembled similar sightings of a 'big foot' creature in Europe, he never solved the mystery. But he'll never forget that image:

"..., geez, what the heck is that? It must be some sort of kangaroo, it's pretty big for a kangaroo, it looked like nothing I'd seen before, hairy, ape-like. I didn't know what to think, I ran out of there," he said.

He kept the experience to himself at first, then told friends and, after ABC radio's Rod Quinn invited him on air to talk about it, more radio invitations followed to comment on other mysteries around Canberra.

Tim finished his degree, worked as an environmental economist for a while although his heart wasn't in it. He needed more mysteries, and bigger, Loch Ness monster-sized ones, which led him around the world as a travel writer. Still unsatisfied, he returned to Canberra in search of intrigue.

He dug a little deeper, walked beyond tourist sign-posts and found exactly what he needed. Under piles of rock, behind rusting corrugated iron sheds and moonlit log cabins lay enough suspense to excite him and a curious audience.

In early 2010 then editor of the Canberra Times Rod Quinn offered Tim two pages of Panorama in Saturday's paper, warning that writing 1500 words each week would not be easy.

The son of a Southern Highlands policeman who, like any good ghost hunter, keeps his private life mysterious, Tim rose to the task, confident this region's breathtaking mountains and coastline and rich heritage, often overlooked in a fast-paced world, would sustain his needs.

Waves of emails from readers hungry for stories that solve mysteries fuel his search for the unusual. For example, driving along the Hume Highway, he always wondered about that elaborate-looking tree house behind trees near Menangle. In fact the timber box was not a tree house, not a look-out tower for World War II, or summer get away for a French wine maker as people had suggested.

"Turns out after a bit of snooping around, it was a tank stand for a dairy. They put water into the tank from the nearby Nepean River and ran it out into wooden troughs around the dairy," Tim said.

His new book In the Spirit of Banjo [Pendragon Publishing] has 900 stories like these, 300 or so big ones and lots of quirky little ones. Many stem from a network of contacts in which two people stand out. Retired pastor John Evans who has done two or three bush walks every week for a decade to out of the way places, and Matthew Higgins, a bushwalker and high country historian.

"It amazes me when I go to a place and meet people in the cafe or down the street in the process of doing the story, wherever you go, you end up with two or three more stories you want to go back and cover," says Tim.

On locations like the stick labyrinth on Mount Ainslie and Araluen's fairy tree he is deliberately vague, which annoys people reliant on GPS co-ordinates to find interesting places in the bush. "Only the ones with genuine interest will find [points of interest] and when they do they have gone on a journey, not just gone," says the Yowie Man.