Cooees across the strand: Australian travellers in London and the performance of national identity

Abstract

Over the nineteenth century, the European ‘cooee’ in Australia shifted from being a functional colonial bush call to being a means of performing a specifically Australian nationality. This article examines the particular circumstances—in literature and music, in trade, war and, most critically, in travel—in which the ‘cooee’ took on selfconsciously nationalist meanings. The cooees of Australian travellers in London predated its entry into a nationalist repertoire in the later nineteenth‐century, part of the process whereby Australian identity was forged out of the relationship between Australia and Britain.