Maude Wordsworth James

Maude Wordsworth James (19 December 1855 – October 1936, Adelaide), born Maude Crabbe, was an Australian designer, author and songwriter. She was an executive officer of the Kalgoorlie Ladies' Referendum Committee. She is best known for promoting "cooee" as an Australian patriotic symbol, designing cooee jewelry and writing cooee songs. George Crabbe, a famous English poet, is Maude's ancestor.

Life Maude Crabbe was born on 19 December 1855 at sea aboard the ship Morning Star in the Indian Ocean approximately 2,500 kilometers south west of Western Australia. Her parents, Thomas and Alicia Crabbe, were unassisted immigrants sailing from Bristol to Melbourne. Maude was their fourth child, and between 1856 and 1871 her mother bore another 6 children.

In the childhood Crabbe lived in Victoria moving from Williamstown near Melbourne, to Portland, Dunnolly, and finally Maryborough, where she met her husband Charles Wordsworth Scantlebury James. Despite unfavorable landscape views around Kalgoorlie, after a few years James managed to develop feelings of belonging for her home there. In 1908 James left Kalgoorlie and went to South Australia.

Besides designing cooee jewellery James wrote cooee songs. In 1908 her musical score My coo-ee was published in Melbourne. The coo-ee songs of Australia, a pamphlet listing the names of 17 songs with some lyrics for the songs Love surrender and My blue rose, was published in Adelaide in 1913. In 1917 the cooee songs were published in a form of a book called The coo-ee call.

James also collected a 'thousand signatures' by many outstanding people she met, including royalty and gold miners, some of the signatures were embroidered in an autograph 'Cloth of Memory'.