"We of the Never-Never, " by Jeanie Gunn (1902)

"We of the Never-Never, " is one of Australia's classic books and reflects the 'whitefellas" attitude of the day.  The recently married Mrs Gunn had spent almost all of her working life in Melbourne and as a newly wed she spent a little over a year on the remote Elsey cattle station near the Roper River in the Northern Territory.

 

She describes the remoteness of her situation very well and I am about to follow her footsteps to go and live and work on a remote cattle station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. I do this over a 110 years later and although I have the comforts of a house, a land-line telephone and the weekly mail plane, I will not have access to my social network. So no inter web, Facebook, Twitter, Viber, Skype. Yikes!

 

My destination is Mount House Cattle Station  which is on the northern side of the Leopold Ranges and after a three hour drive east of Derby on the Gibb River Road and is the second or third road on the right situated on the banks of Adcock Creek. My holiday ends 23 July and next day I fly to work!  I shall be teaching the "Gang of Four" children ranging in ages from 10 down to 6 and there is a little tag along of 4 who, I suspect, will be joining us.

The title of this blog may require an explanation:

The word "cooee" originates from the Dharuk language of the original inhabitants of the Sydney area. It means "come here" and has now become widely used in Australia as a call over distances. It was known among white settlers in colonial times and Watkin Tench refers to the Aborigines of Sydney calling to each other in this way.  It is very effective.  Try it!

 

An expression "within cooee of" has developed. It means "within a manageable distance", and seems to be confined to New Zealand and Australian English, and is often used in the negative sense (i.e. "you're not even within cooee", meaning not close to or, a long way off). Another example would be: "They realised they were lost and there was no-one within cooee". It is also used in the abstract (e.g. "How much do you think they spent redoing this place?" "Oh, I don't know, five thousand dollars?" "You're not even within cooee - twenty-five thousand!")

Cooee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooee (accessed 20 July 2014)