Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/278

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252
NATIVE TRIBES OF SOUTH-EAST AUSTRALIA
CH.

as that of the Wotjobaluk, it may be, in the absence of more accurate knowledge, that the customs of marriage as to betrothal were broadly the same as, or at least analogous to, those of that tribe.

One significant fact has been, however, preserved in the account of the Buandik,[1] that a woman after the death of her husband was common for a time to certain of the men, and that the exchange of sisters accompanied marriage.

Tribes with Two Classes and Male Descent

To the east of the Wotjo nation and of the tribes of south-western Victoria there was a group of tribes which had the class names Bunjil and Waang. These were the Kulin.

The usual law of the class obtained, namely, that Bunjil married Waang and Waang married Bunjil, but in these tribes the name passed from the father to the child, and not, as in the more primitive tribes with two classes, from the mother to her children. As in these tribes there was only one totem of Bunjil, Thara, the swamp-hawk, and none of Waang, no question of totem marriage arises. But in addition to the class law referred to, there was a local rule which required marriages to take place between certain reciprocating localities. In the last section I referred to a similar rule of the Jajaurung tribe, in speaking of the relations of men on the border between the Jajaurung and the tribes belonging to the Wotjo nation. The subjoined diagram gives the result of the application of the local rule in the case of my informant Berak, who was a Waang of the Wurunjerri tribe.

Protector Thomas says that "between the five nearest tribes to Melbourne there is a kind of confederacy or relationship. Thus the Yarra, Western Port, Geelong, Goulburn, and Devil's River tribes, though continually quarrelling, nevertheless are in a degree united. A Yarra black must get himself a wife, not out of his own tribe, but either of the other tribes. In like manner a Goulburn man must get his lubra from the Yarra, Devil's River, Western

  1. Op. cit. p. 13.