Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/163

III tribe on the Pine River near Brisbane, whose country overlapped that claimed by the Chepara.

The equivalence of class or sub-classes long ago attracted my attention when I was studying the organisation of the Kamilaroi tribes. I found on comparing the class divisions of any large group of allied tribes such as the Kamilaroi, that the several tribes have more or less marked differences in their classes and sub-classes, either in the names themselves or in extreme cases in their arrangement. These differences are often merely dialetic variations of name; but in other cases they amount to differences in the structure of the system itself. When a still larger group of tribes is examined the variations become wider and the differences greater. Nevertheless the general identity of structure and of the fundamental laws of the classes over wide areas proves, beyond doubt, that these varied forms are substantially equivalent.

I may note here that the boundaries of a class system are usually wider than those of a tribe, and that the boundaries of any one type of system have a still wider range, and include those aggregates of tribes which I have termed nations. All such aggregates are bound together by a community of class organisation which indicates a community of descent.

A few instances will show how this equivalence of class is recognised. In the Wotjobaluk tribe the two class names are Krokitch and Gamutch. To the north the Wotjobaluk adjoined the Wiimbaio, whose class names are Mukwara and Kilpara. A Wotjobaluk man, who was Krokitch, told me that when he went to the latter tribe he was Kilpara, and that the people there told him that Gamutch was the same as Mukwara.

A similar statement was made to me by a man of the tribe which is the next to the Wiimbaio up the Murray River.