on 1/5/03 11:47 AM, Helen Hagemann at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Cooee/cooey: is a call, a yell like whoopie, or something exciting!
Max Richards 'at Cooee' responds: I have an interest in this venerable
Australian word because it seemed a suitable name for my wife Marilyn's
speech pathology clinic and therefore this house in North Balwyn, Melbourne,
and our email address.
My first memories of the word cooee are from a song heard in my NZ childhood
late 1940s:
Out of the blue-gums I hear you calling me: cooee, cooee, cooee...
What the other words in the song were I have no idea.
Reflections on the word appear in my epithalamium (echoing Spenser) for
Marilyn...to be within cooee means to be within hailing distance.
Within Cooee
for Marilyn Black of Cooee Clinic
August 2000
Remember, dear, my old coo-eeı call,
in car-parks and other echo chambers?
Coo-ee (Iım calling you! canıt you hear me?)
with the steepest of rising inflections.
Itıs in the dictionary: sound used
to attract attention, esp. at a distance;
used by Aboriginals...copied by settlers.
Coo-ee: the big old carrying vocal wave....
***
We set it up, our house, your clinic.
Out the front, a sign so discreet
passers-by unknowing pass it by!
We set the garden straight with wagonloads
of plants, and curving paths; settling down,
with a puppy, hi-fi, books, an open fire.
Always, your reliable smile. Now
Iım asking: do my smile-lines deepen too?
***
Your speech and language clinic: helping
children (mostly) with auditory
processing, verbalizing, the works.
Our best moments at evening: de-briefings:
how this child is improving,
that doubtful parent suddenly convinced.
And we domestic animal making three
as quiet as quiet could be. Murmurs now
are loud enough, mouth to ear, to and fro.
***
In our home office the screen lights up,
The cursorıs at the mouseıs beck and call.
AppleMac, run softly till I end my song.
Syllables on my mind, on the tip of my tongue
fingers tap keys, deliver symbols shaped
and seen in lines on-screen, set down thus.
Reader over my shoulder, monitoring
the monitor, you eye the screen,
take up images of those symbols.
Together on our tongues syllables form
voiced, uttered, heard, responded to,
shared, tested on our ears; registered.
So these symbols travel as syllables,
touch down, arrive and deliver....
settle at a stand-still.
They are told saveı; shut downı.
The glow of the screen
shrinks to a dot and goes out.
Any particular syllables?
These. To and fro. Contact!
Long live all the necessary senses!
***
Leaving the hi-fi for repair at the makers,
I bring away a receipt made out to us:
Mr and Mrs Marilyn Black. This, dear,
shy attention-seeker that I am,
is our belated nuptial-song, a self-
congratulatory epithalamium.
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