A shout-out for the Australian Coo-ee

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Coo-ee is a distinctly Australian call which carries a great distance. The ‘coo’ is long and drawn out followed by a high leap of the voice to the ‘ee’. It became common to call coo-ee to find each other in the bush or, I read, in the streets of London in the 1840s. It became possible to buy Coo-ee wine, bacon and galvanised iron. Being unable to get within coo-ee of something became entrenched in the language. Moving on to 1907, a housewife in Kalgoorlie was anxious to help the family finances and was thinking that Australia didn’t have a unique souvenir which would represent the entire country. Maude Wordsworth James became the Coo-ee lady, registering the word as a trademark. Maude didn’t do things by halves and was soon producing just about everything imaginable with coo-ee printed on it. Spoons, buttons, trinkets, photo frames, bangles, blotters, ear-rings, pendants and lots more. She even produced a coo-ee clock. Every half-hour, instead of a cuckoo, an aboriginal man would pop out of the little door, wave his boomerang and shout ‘coo-ee’. Who said Australians were cuckoo?