‘Coooeeeeee.’
The call of the wild
‘Coooeeeeee.’
It erupted out of nowhere breaking the peace of the early hours of a weekend morning in Melbourne. And then moments later from a little further down the road, a faint but clear, ‘coooeeeee’, in return.
It woke me up - yes. Confused me and frightened me, yes. But also, it made me want to jump right out of bed and ‘coooeeeee’ right back so that these cooee-ers would know they had a friend in me too-eeee.
The beauty of those two syllables that have a power to cut through the night and travel an amazing distance, filled me with old memories. A visceral two-syllable collision that immediately transported me into the bush where I was first taught to cooee as a child.
‘Cooee’ is derived from the Dharug language from Eora, from the word gawi meaning to ‘come here’. It had an unfortunate encounter with European colonists, who recorded it in the 1700s and then somehow found its way to waking me up in my Melbourne bed in 2023.
There is an incredible romance to the idea that this call of our First Peoples from thousands of years prior and 900 clicks up the highway from where I was sleeping, might still ring out through the night in a similar way it had always done: to get your friend to ‘come here’. There was a strange beauty that thousands of years later, in this modern world the ancestors could not have possibly imagined, the cooee was the best way to get your friend to find you so you could get an uber home at 5am.
It took me back to being a kid in the eighties where I’d developed calls that I launched into the boring afternoon sky in the suburbs to get the attention of one of my brothers. It worked well if they wanted to play with me but gave away my location if they had been trying to lose me from tagging along.
My son and I have a call that we do: ‘ka-kwahhhhh’. It has a deeply anti-melodic tune that irritates everyone but us. ‘Ka-kwahhhh’, I say, ‘Ka-kwahhh’ he tweets in return. Sometimes when we can’t find each other in a department store we simply throw out the instantly recognisable ‘Ka-kwahhh.’
There is a rich tradition of call and response in music, travelling back to Sub-Saharan Africa, and brought to America as slaves were set to work in fields. In sea shanties they are also all the rage - developed to deal with the boredom of raising and lowering sails, because yes, raising and lowering sails can be boring. Even the humble kindergarten has taken a leaf out of the sea-shantier’s book and is a ripe environment for the musical call and response to help ease the boredom of cleaning up playdough.
Not exactly with the same rich history perhaps, but Australia also proudly boasts one of the most confusing and galvanising call and responses this country may have encountered since the cooee. The Angel’s hit song, ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face’ … again has a response that shocked the band when it first happened at a gig in Mount Isa in 1983. ‘No Way, Get Fucked, Fuck off’, the crowd screamed back at them.
And unlike the rich and storied histories of call and response that have belonged to our First Peoples and that of other cultures around the world, it is not clear where or how the call and response to the Angels’ song came about. There is strong speculation it was a DJ who was upset with his girlfriend who had come to his gig who encouraged the crowd to send her a message.
After that first gig in Mount Isa, it travelled around the country, the way things used to travel before the days of the interwebs -that is via good old fashioned people power. Mount Isa crew would find themselves at gigs on the coast and would teach it to those kids. Those kids would find themselves travelling down south and would teach it to the southerners and so on, until it is now a question on the Australian citizenship test, right after the question about Don Bradman.
I hope in thousands of years from now, someone will be innocently sleeping in their futurist bed and will be awoken by a call that breaks the silence of the early morning, ‘Am I ever gonna see your face again?’ Only to hear off in the distance, ‘no way, get fucked, fuck off,’ as a couple of friends find their way to order a hovercraft to get home at 5am.