origin of the call coo-ee

I received an email today called Coo-e-News. I think that's a clever title for the newsletter, because it's about Indigenous Community Volunteering, which relates to the word coo-ee, and it's online, so it's an example of e-News.

I'm rather embarrassed to admit that until I went to the Napoleon Exhibition in Melbourne a couple of days ago, I hadn't given any thought to the origin of 'coo-ee', this typically Australian word.

The Napoleon Exhibition was bound to be enjoyable, because of the fascination of this powerful historic figure. But for Australians it's particularly worth a visit because of the focus on Napoleon and Josephine's interest in the exploration of Australia. To me, as a lover of word origins, it was interesting to read that the first recording of the cry 'coo-ee' was made by a Frenchman.

 The Free Dictionary defines cooee as

a call used to attract attention, esp (originally) a long loud high-pitched call on two notes used in the Australian bush vb cooees, cooeeing, cooeed, cooeys cooeying, cooeyed (intr) to utter this call n Austral and NZ informal calling distance (esp in the phrase within (a) cooee (of)) [from a native Australian language]

This article on the website of The State Library of New South Wales explains:

Francis Barrallier (1773-1853) was one of the colony's earliest French settlers. Escaping to England with his parents when Napoleon took Toulon in 1793, Barrallier embarked on the Speedy to join the NSW Corps in November 1799, reaching Sydney in April 1800... Napoleon ordered the Baudin expedition, 1800-1804, to conduct a survey of the Australian coastline... Barrallier also took an enlightened interest in the local Aboriginal people and he is believed to have first recorded the Aboriginal call 'coo-ee' which Pierre-Francois Bernier (1779-1803), astronomer to the Baudin expedition (1800-1804), set to musical notation.

I began to wonder which indigenous language was the origin of this word. Various languages are suggested on internet sites, but Richard White at the University of Sydney says it was a surprisingly widespread usage at the time of European arrival in Australia.

Aborigines had used it in various ways, but the remarkable thing is that it seems to have had widespread use throughout Australia, spreading well beyond normal linguistic borders (Hunter had recorded it in NSW, Flinders in Western Australia, Tasman - possibly - in Van Diemen’s Land). Less remarkable when the cooee is acknowledged as a communication and navigational technology, a superbly effective forerunner of GPS, rather than as a word, which Europeans persisted in reading it as.

The article ends by saying that although the word has played a major role in the rise of Australian national sentiment, it is unfashionable nowadays. White adds, 'I was surprised to discover that the vast majority of Australian students in my Australian History class had cooeed in the bush at least once.'

I've cooeed. It's fun. (You have to do it in the bush for the best effect.) 

 If you'd like to hear it, you could listen to this podcast.

Tullamareena and Tullamarine

Recently I visited the historic homestead at Woodlands, home to retired champion race horses.



I was telling my family today what a great place it is to visit, and explaining that it's just beside Tullamarine Airport.



One family member wondered where the name Tullamarine came from. We thought it probably came from a local indigenous language, and it seems it did. eMelbourne says:

Located between Melbourne Airport (formerly called Tullamarine Airport) and Gladstone Park, Tullamarine was a predominantly agricultural township until the 1950s. It now includes both residential and industrial areas, and major manufacturers include Schweppes Cottees, Honda and Caterpillar Australia. Tullamarine is thought to derive its name from Tullamareena, the name of a Wurundjeri boy noted by George Langhorne.

It's news to me that our airport isn't called Tullamarine any more! I wonder when that changed?

I also wondered who that boy was. What brought him to the notice of the invading Europeans?

Wikipedia refers to him as 'a senior man of the Wurundjeri', and notes that at the time he was thought to be 'a steady, industrious man'. In 1838 he was arrested for sheep-stealing and imprisoned. In making his escape, with two other indigenous men, he burned down the gaol.

William Lonsdale, the first Police magistrate of Melbourne wrote in a letter to the colonial secretary on 26 April 1838:
...I was at first apprehensive that some of the blacks had set the gaol on fire...for the purpose of liberating the three who were confined, but to ascertain what I could on this point, I went as soon as I was satisfied that the stores and prisoners were temporarily disposed of after their being taken from the buildings, into the different camps of blacks, of which there were three in the neighbourhood... Describing how the gaol was set fire to, he says that the other black who was confined with him got a long piece of reed which he thrust through an opening in the partition between the place where he was confined in and the guard room, and after lighting the reed by the guard's candle he drew it back and set fire to the thatch roof. The two blacks got off but one was afterwards retaken, viz. Jin Jin. This affair is much to be regretted, keeping up as it undoubtedly will the public alarm and agitation regarding the blacks.

Apparently Tullamareena was later recaptured, sent for trial to Sydney and released without conviction when it became apparent he could not understand English.

He was set free more than 700 kilometres from home. To me that seems to have been cruel and unfair. I hope he found his way back to his own country.

Like all too many Australians, I know little about the history of our own country, so I'm happy that thinking about a familiar word in a different way has opened my eyes just a little to the indigenous history of this area.

Australia's indigenous languages

I've just come home from attending a talk by Dr Rachel Nordlinger about Australia's indigenous languages. She presented the Margaret Lyttle 4th Annual Oration at Preshil School in Kew.

Like most Australians, I am appallingly ignorant about the wealth of languages that existed here before the arrival of Europeans. And about the languages that still exist today.

If I remember correctly, Dr Nordlinger said there were about 700 to 800 languages here when Europeans arrived about two hundred and twenty years ago. As is the case in most places around the world, some languages could be grouped together and were so similar as to be classed as dialects, but even allowing for this, there were about 260 entirely separate languages.

When she said this, I recalled an old map, one I bought many years ago. It was published by the Aboriginal Advancement League, in 1971, and showed 500 'Key Aboriginal Tribes'. The indigenous children in my class spent many enjoyable hours transforming it from a black line-drawing into a colorful celebration of the diversity of indigenous cultures in Australia.



Dr Nordlinger explained that in the indigenous view of things, language is seen as a property of the landscape, so that people who lived in a particular place spoke the language of that area. This contrasts with the European vision of language as an aspect of a cultural group, whereby speakers can move to a new place and take their language with them. A person is defined by the language they speak as well as by the place they live. (I'd love to read more about this.)

Another thing I didn't know was that indigenous children would routinely grow up in a multilingual environment, due to the traditional practice of marrying outside the kin group. (I might not have understood this well, as I don't know much about traditional marriage rules.) For instance, a child might hear her uncle speaking one language and his wife speaking another, and her own mother might speak a third language. Grandfather might speak a fourth language. All these people would understand each others' languages as well.

Throughout human history it has been the norm for people to speak more than one language.

However, we are in an age where languages are disappearing at a disturbing rate, and it is estimated that by 2050 there might not be any indigenous languages spoken in Australia. This is a reflection of a world trend. (I've posted about this previously.)

All humanity suffers when a language dies, because each language represents a different way of seeing the world. On the other hand, I suppose there have been many language 'deaths' over the millennia, and I guess new ones do emerge.

But I can't help wondering why languages are disappearing at such a terrible rate at the moment, and whether this accelerating loss will become unstoppable. I hope not.

Here's an article from The Age about Dr Nordlinger's work.

the King James Bible and Australian indigenous languages

As I walked up the stairs in the Melbourne City Library today, I came across an exhibition about the 400th year celebration of the King James version of the Christian Bible.

After tomorrow it moves to Brisbane.

The first section to draw my attention sat below a poster with a picture of Shakespeare.



It claimed this version of the Bible has influenced our modern English language even more than Shakespeare did.



I was particularly interested in the display about translation of the Bible into Australian indigenous languages, because I think it is an indictment of our education system that most non-indigenous Australians are not only unable to understand indigenous languages, but don't even realise what a wealth of languages existed here prior to European settlement (and still exists).

The role of missionaries in studying and preserving languages around the world is a complex one. Nicholas Evans, in his book Dying Words, launched in Melbourne two years ago, says:

The idea of learning and committing to writing the languages of other, less militarily powerful peoples did not appear until Christianity, with its early urges to proselytize other people in languages they would understand...Ingenious new scripts, developed by polyglot priests for their own languages, quickly launched their traditions of religious translation, later to be followed by other forms of literature...
As would happen again and again in colonial encounters around the world, the partial official tolerance of indigenous languages and cultures did not last long.

Here's one of the short movies available at the online version of the Exhibition:

Australian Indigenous Scriptures from Bible Society Australia.

It was great to hear on this video clip that indigenous communities are taking matters into their own hands and translating the Bible into their own languages. I assume it isn't just the Bible that's being translated, of course.I assume that there would be other literature made available for people who speak an indigenous language.

Australian Aboriginal place names

I took a trip on the Smartbus yesterday, pretending to be a tourist in my own city, and it was most enjoyable. A friend and I boarded the bus at Heidelberg and went to Mordialloc, breaking our journey at Chadstone Shopping Centre.

When we were sitting on the beach at Mordialloc, enjoying the overcast but warm day, I was struck by the fact that Mordialloc sounds as if it might be an indigenous place-name and that it phonetically resembles Woori Yallock, the name of a town in the Upper Yarra Valley.

When I looked on the Dictionary of Aboriginal Placenames in Victoria, I found that the traditional name for the beach I was sitting on was Murdayaluk, with murda meaning low/short and yaluk meaning river or creek.

Woori Yallock means running creek.

There were other places in the database with Yallock in the placename.

As I sat there, I wondered who had rested on this beach in the past, and how they had lived. And I wondered when they had told the newly-arrived Europeans what they should call the place.

Given that before the nineteenth century place names were recorded orally rather than in written form, I guess it's not surprising that the written forms of names were not consistent.

At the Victorian Government's Land Channel, it says:

The widespread use of Indigenous names provides a strong connection to our Indigenous heritage and acknowledges Indigenous culture. However some names may not be strictly accurate because of unfamiliarity with Indigenous language and culture at the time they were originally recorded.

Most of the Indigenous languages did not have a written form when Victoria’s places and features were being named under European settlement (although some Indigenous communities used message sticks to convey information between groups).

The people who first recorded fragments of these languages were not linguists paying careful attention to subtleties of pronunciation they were generally surveyors and explorers, who were usually the first Europeans to travel through the land and record names in their maps, charts and fieldbooks.