Cooee

Cooee! (IPA /ku:\'i:/) is a shout used in the Australian Outback mainly to attract attention, find missing people, or indicate one\'s own location. When done correctly - loudly and shrilly - a call of "cooee" can carry over a considerable distance.

The call began as an Indigenous Australian custom – a loanword from the Dharuk, the original inhabitants of the Sydney area,The Macquarie Concise Dictionary, The Macquarie Library, 1998, Sydney, ISBN 0949757950 and has now become widely used in Australia. It was known among White settlers there in colonial times and Watkin Tench refers to the Aborigines of Sydney calling to each other in this way.

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 realises that it is an Australian word. This leads to a suspect.

An expression "within cooee of" has developed. It means "not far from", and seems to be confined to New Zealand and Australian English.

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 northwest of Sydney, as a recruiting drive after enthusiasm for the war waned in 1915 with the first casualty lists. The men marched to Sydney calling "Cooee!" to encourage others to come and enlist. When they reached Sydney on 12 December, the group had grown to 277 men. To this day, Gilgandra holds a yearly Cooee Festival in October to commemorate the event. Other Cooee Festivals occur across Australia. Cooee is also the name of a suburb in the Tasmanian city of Burnie.

Richard White in his article Cooees across the Strand indicates the important means of performing Australian nationality with the call taking on a conciously nationalistic meaning. Also documents spread through Empire, to New Zealand and South Africa.

See ‘Cooees across the Strand: Australian Travellers in London and the Performance of National Identity’ Australian Historical Studies 32(116) April 2001

"Cooee" outside of Australia

India

It is believed that the word "cooee" is also used in the south Indian (Western Ghat) peninsular regions. The word has the same meaning as Australian word "cooee"^{[citation needed]}.

United Kingdom

This word was also used by young children in western Scotland in the 1950s as a means of calling in friends at long distance^{[citation needed]}.

References

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