Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/309

V tribes adds to them by only allowing certain localities to intermarry, and this is especially marked in those tribes where the social organisation has more or less or completely died out, as with the Kurnai.

Such is, shortly, a statement of the position of the marriage rules of different tribes, and the position may be summed up by saying that all these sexual limitations, whether imposed by the social or the local organisation, have the effect, no doubt intended, of preventing marriages of persons who are of "too near flesh." All these complicated and cumulative restrictions were certainly made intentionally to meet a tribal sense of morality.

It may seem to some that there is no inherent reason why, if a child is to take the name of one of its parents, it should be that of its mother rather than its father, and especially where group-marriages are the rule, unless it be that in the latter case the individual mother is a certainty.

However that may have been, there is the significant fact that in Australia female descent is associated with group-marriage, while male descent occurs in tribes in which group-marriage is either merely a vestigiary survival or remains only in evidence in the terminology of relationships.

My own view is that female descent was the earlier, and male descent the later, institution, the latter being one of a series of social changes which have profoundly affected the organisation of Australian tribes.

If one can judge in this question of the past by the present, I should say that the practice of betrothal, which is universal in Australia, must have produced a feeling of individual proprietary right over the woman so promised. When accentuated by the Tippa-malku marriage, it must also tend to undermine the Pirrauru marriage. Indeed I find that, as the practice of group-marriage disappears, so does the practice of individual marriage grow. This is not individual marriage as we know it, but the marriage practice of certain tribes, which was clearly indicated by an old blackfellow, when he said to me, "A woman can only have one husband, but a man can have as many wives as he can get."

Another phase of this feeling is clearly shown by the