'Coo-ee was not simply a bushranger play set in the 1860s, but a hybridised cavalcade of stock characters, dialogue, situations, settings and catalyst objects drawn from the European roots of melodrama and remoulded for early federation Australia, interspersed with patriotic speeches.' Anna Bemrose, 'E. W. O'Sullivan's Coo-ee; or, Wild Days in the Bush: people's theatre or political circus?', Australasian Drama Studies 30 (April 1997): 87-103.