Cooee

The explorer Thomas Mitchell, recording an incident in 1832 where one of his men came unexpectedly upon a native camp, wrote that "his debut [was] outrageously opposed to their ideas of etiquette, which imperatively required that loud cooeys should have announced his approach before he came within a mile of their fires." He further explained in a footnote, that a cooey was "The natives' mode of hailing each other when at a distance in the woods. It is so much more convenient than our own holla, or halloo, that it is universally adopted by the colonists of New South Wales."[3]^{:Jan 17}

One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries hinges on the use of "cooee". "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" is solved partly because, unlike everyone else, Holmes recognises the call is commonly used among Australians. However, author and missionary to Tasmania, Reverend John West (1809-1873), reported in 1852 that "cooey" was "not unknown in certain neighbourhoods of the metropolis" (London).[4] In 1864, an English slang dictionary reported: "Cooey, the Australian bush-call, now not unfrequently heard in the streets of London".[5] In 1917, the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas used "coo-ee" as the parting word with his wife Helen, on leaving for the Western Front from which he never returned; a fact commemorated at a 2014 Remembrance service in Glasgow.[6]

The expression "within cooee" has developed within Australian and New Zealand English as slang for "within a manageable distance". It is often used in the negative sense (i.e. "you're not even within cooee", meaning not close to or, a long way off). Another example would be: "They realised they were lost and there was no-one within cooee". It is also use in the abstract (e.g. "How much do you think they spent redoing this place?" "Oh, I don't know, five thousand dollars?" "You're not even within cooee—twenty-five thousand!").

The word cooee has become a name of many organisations, places and even events. Perhaps the most historic of these was the Cooee March during the First World War. It was staged by 35 men from Gilgandra, New South Wales, 766 km (476 mi) northwest of Sydney, as a recruiting drive after enthusiasm for the war waned in 1915 with the first casualty lists. They marched to Sydney calling "Cooee!" to encourage others to come and enlist. A poster read "Coo-ee – Won't you come?".[7] When they reached Sydney on 12 December, the group had grown to 277. To this day, Gilgandra holds a yearly Cooee Festival in October to commemorate the event. Other Cooee Festivals occur across Australia.

Richard White[8] indicates the important means of demonstrating Australian nationality with the call taking on a consciously nationalistic meaning.[7] He also documents its spread through the Empire, to New Zealand and South Africa.