Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia

class, totem kin. "Blood" and "shade." Kamilaroi ty

often do hold initiation ceremonies and other ceremonials in common; although the language is usually syntactically the same, and though they contain many words in common, the vocabularies differ to such an extent that members of different tribes are not mutually intelligible. How far the occurrence of identical kinship organisation and nomenclature should be tak

munity which occupies a definite area, recognises its solid

l group, which welcomes fellow-tribesmen in times of plenty, but has the right of punishing intruders of the same tribe who seek for food without permission; for a non-tribesman the penalty is death. In some cases the local group is little more than an undivided family including three generations; it may then o

y be retained in i

malous tribes, it may be said broadly that an Australian tribe is divided into two sets, called phratries, primary classes, moieties, etc. by various authors; the term used in th

ivision of each of these classes is found, making eight in all. Descent in the classes is indirect matrilineal or indirect37 patrilineal, the child belonging to the mother's or father's phratry as before, but being assigned to the

s own phratry. This custom is termed exogamy. When the husband removes and lives in

s of animals or plants; a body of human beings stands in a certain peculiar relation to the totem species and is termed the totem

operation and meaning of those described above. He distinguishes in certain tribes of New South Wales kinship organisations running across the phratries; these are of two kinds, according to the author, but t

ratries are named Dilbi and Kupathin; Dilbi is divided into two classes, Muri and Kubi; Kupathin into Kumbo and Ipai. The Dilbi totems, which may belong to either of the classes, are

rations of relatives. When we come to deal below with marriage regulations it will be shown that husband, wife and child under the four-class system all belong to different classes; there were therefore in each group at least three classes, if not four, and consequently members of two phratries. If we assume that the same conditions prevailed among the Kamilaroi, the local groups would the

ies it is clear that the local group may also have members o

e rule is that Muri marries Butha (a female Kumbo) and their children are Ipai and Ipatha: Kubi marries Ipatha and their children are Kumbo and Butha;

e of the Kupathin phratry, the Kumbo class, and either the emu, bandicoot, or black snake totems; suppose he marries an emu woman; then his children are of the Kupathin phratry, the Ipai (or Ipatha) class, and the emu totem. These regulations are naturally more complicated among the

gh the mother or through the father. Taking the Kamilaroi again, the Muri-iguana man brings into his group a Butha-emu woman; their children are Ipatha-emu. If, therefore, a local group is made up of the descendants of a single family, the phratry, class, and totem nam

tion to generation, though her totem name does not of necessity remain the same. The class name alternates both in the case of the family and of the wives in successive generations. It has already been pointed out that reckoning of descent in th

und. Before indicating the present extent of our information, it may b

is conclusions partly from earlier writers, partly from his own investigations, showed that the totem kin was an exogamous group, while in some cases the kin bearing the name of a given totem were not only exogamous, but not even p

ia Americana. The honour of being the first to publish information on the subject belongs to Nind, who had spent some time in the neighbourhood of King George's Sound in 1829, and published his observations on native customs

out, however, any indication of their connection with marriage customs and exogamy. Five years earlier, however, Lieutenant, afterwards Sir George Grey, had observed in

hich he gives seem to be those of phratries, and if he had been led by his study of Archaeologia Americana to the discovery of exogamic regulations dealing with the relations of individual totem kins to one another, it seems on the whole probable that he would not have overlooked the grouping of the kins which is, with certain exceptions, of a more or less local character, common to the whole of Aust

arge part of the continent subdivide each phratry into two or four classes or "castes," as they were frequently termed by the early investigators. The effect of the class system is to further limit the choice of a given individual, restricted to one-half of the women of the tribe under the simple phratry system, to one-fourth of them or one-eighth, as the case may be. Probably the first person to publish the fact of the existence of these classes, which he regarded as differing in rank, was C. P. Hodgson43, who found them in 1846 among the blacks of Wide

mention of their connection with marriage regulations. And Earl, at a later period, omits in like manner to say what constituted membership of a caste, though he states that they differed in rank. The names-Manjarojally (fire people), Manjarwuli (land people), and Mambulgit (makers of nets, perhaps, therefore, water people), as well as the

nthropologist, a class of which England has produced all too few. In 1853 the Rev. William Ridley published the first of many studies of the Kamilaroi speaking tribes, and, thanks to the impetus given to the investigation of systems of relationship and allied questions by Lewis Morgan, was the pioneer of a series of efforts which have rescued for us at the nick of time a record of the social organisation of many tribes which under

the persistent efforts of Mr Howitt, by Dr Frazer's little work on Totemism, and by other students, until it seemed that the main features of Australian social organisation had been clearly established, when in 1898 the researches of Messrs Spencer and Gillen seemed to do much to overthrow all recognised principles, so far as the totemic regulation of marriage was concerned. How far

best known example, we may now pass, after this brief historical sketch of the development of

ght classes. We also know approximately the limits of the matrilineal and patrilineal systems. New South Wales, Victoria, the southern portion of Queensland and Northern Territory, the eastern part of South Australia, and the coastal regions of West Australia, are now known with more or less accuracy from the point of view of kinship organisations. On the other hand, from the Cape York Peninsula, and the part of No

perhaps in the northern portion, running through the centre of the continent in Lat. 137°, are found two phratries without intermarrying classes; for the area west of Lat. 130° we have, it is true, only one datum, which gives no information as to the area to which it applies; this portion of the field t

orth of South Australia and broadens till it embraces the whole coastline of West Australia, the north-eastern area excl

the Gulf of Carpentaria and Roebuck Bay, extending

sections, so that the final result is as though they were an eight-class tribe. In the same way the marriage regulations of the two-phratry Dieri are such that choice is limited among them precisely as it would be if t

esidence of the pair. Local exogamy also prevails among the unorganised Kurnai. The Chepara appear to have had no organisation, and among the Narrangga ties of consanguinity constitut

of an irregular line running from Long. 137° to 140° or thereabouts. In addition a portion of Victoria and the region west of Brisbane form isolated patrilineal groups. The pro

scent is matrilineal, save that in North Queensland a small tribe on the Annan River p

he Anula and

Vol

l. I,

lary, s.v

Journals,

bulary, p. 3 etc.;

n Reminiscen

Years Wande

. 88, Narrative of a Voya

, I, 393; cf. Kamilar

he Yuin, the Wiradjeri and o

RULE OF

LASS ORGA

HRATRY ORG