acquisition of the terms which flowed trippingly from the
tongues of the natives became difficult for Europeans. The
Rev. G. Taplin (editor of the "South Australian Folk-Lore")
exclaimed that is was "remarkable how precisely the Australians designate relationships for which we have no distinctive name."
Bearing this fact in mind, and knowing that though handed down only by oral tradition the tribal laws were implicitly obeyed, let the reader observe the accompanying tree, or intra-tribal marriage code, recorded by the good Roman Catholic missionary, Bishop Salvado, in Western Australia. It is selected, not as the most complicated, but as one of the simplest recorded. It may be asked whether, as some such code exists throughout the continent, it does not carry conviction with it that the tribes brought their polity from afar. That they did so, and that local changes were sometimes effected, is more easy to believe than that a homogeneous system was excogitated by hundreds of tribes independently throughout the continent.
A glance at this tree, and a knowledge that generally children were betrothed to members of the permitted totems within the tribe at an early age by their parents, will show how little dependence can be placed upon the following statement in a work published by the Government of Victoria in 1878:[1] "A tribe is in fact an enlargement of a family circle, and none within it can intermarry. A man must get a wife from a neighbouring tribe either by consent, or by barter, or by theft." A more erroneous statement could hardly be made, though it is contained in an elaborate Introduction by the editor who probably was misled by reading that marriages were exogamous as to the totem, and imagined that they were exogamous as to the tribe. Doubtless there were marriages outside of the tribe, but they were exceptional luxuries; arising from conquest in a warlike raid, or, if two tribes were friendly, from barter.
The Gipps' Land district, separated from the interior by the mountain-barrier of the Australian Alps, probably, as Mr. Howitt supposes, facilitated changes in custom to the full extent to which absence of intercourse with other tribes
- ↑ "Aborigines of Victoria." Edited by R. B. Smyth.
