Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/288

262 A girl was frequently promised when still a little child, and her future husband claimed her when she was grown up, a sister being exchanged for the woman he received as a wife. Marriage was permitted between the father's sister's child and the mother's brother's child, so that we find here a trace of the older Urabunna rule still remaining among the later changes accompanying paternal descent. But in the case of the Yuin tribes this was only if they belonged to intermarrying localities.

As an illustration of their marriage rules I quote the principles laid down for his son's guidance by an old Braidwood man. "No one should marry so as to mix the same blood, but he must take a woman of a different name (Mura, totem) than his own; and besides this, he must go for a wife to a place as far as possible from his own place." This man, being of Braidwood, went to Moruya, and he had to give a sister to the brother of his wife. The old men, when at the initiation ceremonies, told me that the rule was that the "waddy-men," that is, those who get their living by climbing trees for game, must go down to the sea-coast and obtain wives from the people who get their living by fishing. Thus these people, by their reciprocating local divisions, and the rules relating to them, supply each other with wives. The limits of the district within which wives were thus obtained by exchange of sisters is indicated by the round which the boy's tooth, which is knocked out at the initiation ceremonies, is carried, the tooth being passed on from one Headman to another. In the old times the limits were—Bem Lake, Delegate, Tumut, Braidwood, and so on to Shoalhaven, and thence following the sea-coast to Bem Lake. This Bem Lake, however, was within the country of the Krauatungalung Kurnai, and its inclusion shows that intermarriage took place between the latter and the Yuin. That this was so is also shown by what I heard some of the Yuin say of the mother of one of them. When she was just marriageable, say about twelve or thirteen years of age, she was brought by the Krauatun-Kurnai to Twofold Bay as a wife for one of the Yuin of that place. She ran away from that place with the father of the man first mentioned, and