Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/68

42 divisions of the tribe on which the marriage regulations are based. The former are distinguished by certain local names, while the latter are denoted by class names, or totems, and more frequently by both class names and totems.

In the aggregate of the whole community these two sets of divisions are conterminous, but under female descent no division of the one set is conterminous with any division of the other. That is to say, the people of any given locality are not all of the same class or totem, nor are the people of any one class or totem collected in the same locality. This is the rule where descent is in the female line, but when the line of descent has changed to that through males, we find cases in which all the people in a certain locality have come to bear the same class name and totem.

Hence it is evident that the Australian aborigines are divided into tribes which are organised on certain lines in two independent directions. One I have termed the "local" and the other the "social" organisation, and since this is a matter of great importance, I deem it worthy of special consideration.

An entire community, tribe, nation, or whatever it may be termed, is divided socially into two exogamous intermarrying moieties, which for shortness may be designated A and B. In some parts of Australia these two principal moieties or classes have become divided, each into two sub-classes. In Central and Northern Australia there has been a further division of the sub-classes, resulting in eight sub-classes, and the same process has taken place in Northern Queensland."

To the classes and sub-classes together, or to the latter only without the former, a number of lesser groups are attached, having the names of material objects, even of natural phenomena, for which the term "totem" is appropriate. But as their sum only equals A and B, I