Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/116

90 as a supernatural command, and this would be accepted as true without question by the tribes-people.

That such an identical legendary explanation of the origin of the classes and totems existed in two tribes so far distant from each other may be accepted as indicating a widespread belief in the supernatural origin of a practice which is universal throughout Australia.

To bring into view the class divisions with their sub-divisions and totems, and to consider their bearing upon aboriginal society and the process of social development to which they bear witness, it will be necessary to tabulate a number of cases, taken from such localities as will enable the reader to obtain a fairly representative picture of the whole structure; and in doing so I shall, as before, commence with the Lake Eyre tribes, taking the Dieri as their type.

The progressive alteration of the two-class organisation has been in two divergent directions. In one the classes have been again segmented, producing four sub-classes in certain parts of Australia, and eight in other parts by still further segmentation.

The alteration in the other direction has been caused, either by the production of an anomalous system of class and totem, or by the extinction of the class system altogether, in which case the local organisation usually regulates marriage. The nature and sequence of these changes will be shown in this chapter, and in the following one the manner in which the rules of marriage and descent have been affected.

The Dieri tribal community is divided into two exogamous intermarrying moieties, called by them murdu. In Chapter VIII., which deals with the Dieri beliefs, an account is given of the origin of the murdus. Originally animals, they became human beings, and their descendants are the Dieri and other Lake Eyre tribes. The subjoined tables give the class names and totems of some of these tribes and also show how the same totems are found in all, either by the same or some equivalent name. It must be noted that the