Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/322

296 actions towards others. I have shown in the chapters on marriages and on the initiation ceremonies that there are stringent laws which regulate the intercourse of the sexes, which relate to the secret ceremonies of the tribe, which restrict the choice of food, and so on; and these laws or customs are enforced by severe penalties, even in some cases by death itself.

It is quite true that many such laws or customs are obeyed without the dread of physical punishment being inflicted for their breach, by any tribal authority, individual or collective. But such laws or customs are obeyed because the native has been told, from his earliest childhood, that their infraction will be followed by some supernatural personal punishment Take, for instance, the universal law of mutual avoidance of each other by the man and his wife's mother. I know of no rule which is more implicitly obeyed. The belief is that some result of a magical nature will follow a breach of this rule, for instance that the person's hair will become prematurely grey. The nearest approach to a personal punishment for this offence, if it can be so called, which I have met with, was in the coast Murring tribes, where any personal contact, even accidental touching of one by the other, was punished by the man being compelled to leave the district, his wife returning to her parents.

This rule of avoidance would properly come within the statement made by Mr. E. M. Curr where he says, "the power which enforces custom in our tribes is for the most part an impersonal one." This impersonal authority must have been either public opinion or a supernatural sanction. According to Mr. Curr, it is "education," that is to say, a blackfellow is educated from infancy in the belief that a departure from the customs of his tribe is invariably followed by one, at least, of many possible evils, such as becoming prematurely grey, being afflicted with ophthalmia, skin eruptions, or sickness, but above all, that it exposes the offender to the danger of death from sorcery. This is undoubtedly true as to such a case as that of the mother-in-law, or as to a breach of the rule that a novice must not receive food from the hand of a