Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/307

V conversation between him and his wife is carried on in a tone which her mother cannot overhear. When the mother-in-law goes for firewood, she crouches down as she goes in or out, with her head covered. If the son-in-law should climb a tree to take a hive of native bees, his wife may sit at the butt of the tree, but her mother stays a long way behind with her head covered. When he has got the hive, he goes away, and then she comes up and helps her daughter to cut up the comb and carry it away.

In connection with the remarriage of widows, which has been incidentally referred to in this chapter, special mention may be made of the practice which is probably universal in all the native tribes, by which a widow becomes the wife of a brother, usually the older one, of her deceased husband. The most primitive form is evidently that of the Lake Eyre tribes, where a man's Tippa-malku wife becomes the Pirrauru wife of his brother during his lifetime. This practice is part of the system of group-marriage, traces of which are still discernible in the systems of relationships of tribes whose marriage rules have progressed far from the older practice. In the Kurnai tribe, for instance, a woman is, by their terminology of relationship, the titular Maian, or spouse, of each of the own or tribal brothers of her husband, and after his death becomes the actual Maian of his elder surviving brother. In this instance we can recognise the familiar features of the Dieri Pirrauru marriage.

The late Mr. M'Lennan considered that the Levirate was derived from the practice of polyandry. It seems to me that we may with more reason seek it in the practice of group-marriage, which I venture to forecast will be ultimately accepted as one of the primitive conditions of mankind.

The evidence adduced in this chapter seems to show beyond doubt some of the stages of social change through which the native tribes have passed. This is specially evident when one considers the marriage customs in connection with the development of the class organisation, and the change of descent from the female to the male line.

The social changes are relatively small in degree, and