Cooee! () is a shout originated in Australia to attract attention, find missing people, or indicate one's own location. When done correctly—loudly and shrilly—a call of "cooee" can carry over a considerable distance. The distance one's cooee call travels can be a matter of competitive pride. It is also known as a call of help, distinct amongst the natural sounds of the bush. The word "cooee" originates from the Dharug language of Aboriginal Australians in the Sydney area. The call was used by Aborigines to communicate with another person at a distance. 'Coo-ee' was typically expressed as a long loud call ending on a shrill rising inflection on the 'ee'. The call was later adopted by the colonial settlers and was widely used as a signal, especially in the bush. It means "come here" and has now become widely used in Australia as a call over distances. History and usage As Cooee is of Aboriginal origin, it is likely to have been in used by some Aboriginal peoples, for many thousands of years. The first recorded reference to the Aboriginal 'coo-ee' call is in the papers of Daniel Southwell, an officer of the Royal Navy and member of the crew of HMS Sirius that sailed with the First Fleet to Australia. He kept a journal and corresponded with his mother and uncle during his period in Sydney from 1788 to March 1791. Southwell's letters had many references to the Aborigines of the Port Jackson district and included a brief vocabulary of their language. In his papers Southwell listed the verb 'to come' as "Coo-sé, Cō-cé, Cō-eé, Cō-é". Francis Barrallier, during his expedition in 1802, recorded the local Aboriginal people using the 'cooee' call near what is now Oakdale, New South Wales. The explorer Thomas Mitchell, recording an incident in 1832 where one of his men came unexpectedly upon a native camp, wrote that "his debut [was] outrageously opposed to their ideas of etiquette, which imperatively required that loud cooeys should have announced his approach before he came within a mile of their fires." He further explained in a footnote, that a cooey was "The natives' mode of hailing each other when at a distance in the woods. It is so much more convenient than our own holla, or halloo, that it is universally adopted by the colonists of New South Wales." Mitchell's observation indicates that the use of Cooee was