Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/216

184 certainly had the equivalent of pirvauru, but I did not then understand the meaning of it. Some 120 miles still further up the river there was the Kurnandaburi tribe who practised pirrauru under the name of dilpa-nialli. This Mr. Thomas has omitted to mention. The tribes on the Barcoo between the Yantruwunta and the Kurnandaburi were, so far as my information goes, of the same organisation in two classes, which were the equivalents of the Yantruwunta, Kulpuru, and Tinawa, which again are the equivalents of the Dieri, Kararu, and Matteri. South-eastward of the Kurnandaburi there was the same organisation, certainly as far as the Wilson River, and probably beyond the Bulloo River, to where tribes would be met with, organised in the two classes, Mukwara and Kilpara, with individual marriage.

Southwards from the Dieri, the class names Kararu and Matteri extended through the Mardala and Parnkalla tribes as far as Port Lincoln, and thence westward to Fowler's Bay.

From the few facts recorded by the Rev. C. W. Schurmann, the opinion is justified, and even accepted by Mr. Lang, that pirrauru existed in the Parnkalla under the name of Kartete.

This gives a range of tribes, in which probably there was the pirrauru system of marriage, for 850 miles from Oodnadatta, the approximate northern boundary of the Urabunna, to the eastern boundary of the Dieri, or that of the Mardala, say immediately between the Flinders Range and the Barrier Range, where tribes of the Mukwara and Kilpara organisations would be met with.

I am satisfied that the equivalent of the Dieri pirrauru extended over this great area of some 500,000 square miles.

Had I realised in the early days of my investigations the extreme importance which would attach to the evidence of this organisation and state of marriage, I