Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/233

V derived by writers, who have not known the actual facts of forcible abduction of wives in the Kamilaroi tribes. English writers have followed these statements and have assumed that it was the universal custom to obtain a wife in Australia by lying in wait for some woman, no matter which, knocking her down with a club and carrying her off.

Mr. Naseby also said that it was not lawful to marry a "female cousin, or a half-sister; but the former did not seem half so shocking as the latter." The unfortunate use of our terms of relationship when speaking of aboriginal customs or practice is the frequent cause of misunderstanding. For instance, our term cousin includes two distinct relationships, according to the aboriginal manner of counting them, namely, that of the children of two or more brothers, or of two or more sisters, which is that of brother and sister; and that of the children of a man on the one side, and the children of his sister on the other, who are in a quite different relation to the former. I take Mr. Naseby's female cousin to mean one of the latter, because he says that such a marriage would be to them less shocking than that with a half-sister, which might be one of the former.

Mr. Cyrus E. Doyle says: "The Northern Kamilaroi placed great emphasis on this, that a Dilbi could not marry a Dilbi, nor a Kupathin a Kupathin.

"A widow did not by any Kamilaroi law belong to her deceased husband's brother. She accompanied the tribe in its wanderings, and got her own living. She might indeed go of her own accord as the wife of some great man, warrior or headman, some of whom had four or five wives, and were considered rich in proportion to their number.

"But an unmarried woman might be taken in the tribal manner by any man who was not too nearly related to her.

"The punishment for adultery was that when a woman was taramu, that is, shifty, wanton, adulterous, the husband complained to his kindred, who carried the matter before the headman, and if the charge was found to be true, her punishment was to be taken without the camp, and to be