Anthropological Background

Australian Society

Two overriding principles organise Australian society: one, an old man’s attachment to his spiritual estate and two, the division of the ancestor-given natural world into conflicting differences which continually clash to bring energy and life to the world.

The first determines where a man lives and where a family band forms around him. On his estate are spirits left behind by the ancestors on their heroic foundation journey to the Earth. The spirits’ presence obliges him with sacred duties to build and maintain special bonds with them. These duties generate songs, rituals and crafted objects to be used in expressing these bonds. The expression of them is his declaration of ownership of his estate.

This is all he owns, a duty to a place, and this is the essential constituent of his identity. The resources in that place he does not own and they not define him or his family.

Another old man, the focus of another family band, owns his spiritual estate and that is the basis of division of land within a single tribe. The natural resources are not divided because they are ancestral.

The second principle is treated in the discussion of Eagle & Crow. It is the connection to the myth which gives a man his own genesis, which tells him life and fate are governed by a higher reality residing in the origins, tells him he’s doing this because the ancestors did it in the beginning; society is like this because the ancestors set it this way in the beginning.

The two principles together determine how society is organised geographically, legally, customarily and, of course, spiritually.

Geographically, country is divided into tribal territories which are subdivided into individual spiritual estates attached to a family band. A typical band is the old man and his wives (perhaps his brother and his wives), their sons and their wives and their unmarried children.

Legally a wife must come from another tribe, customarily the wife moves in with the husband’s family band – that’s why there are no married daughters in the band. But that is often not the case if her band can’t afford to lose her food-gathering capability (women gather more than three-quarters of the food), a temporary situation which yields to custom as soon as she is replaced by the wife of one of her brothers or cousins.

This leads to the definition of the tribe. It is not the sum of people living on its territory because the wives could come from five or six other tribes (see marriage laws); it is not the sum of those born on its territory because, in the temporary situation noted above, any children, male and female, to which she gives birth while living with her family, still belong to their father’s tribe – by law, a boy must belong to his father’s father’s country in order that first principle above – the old man’s attachment to place – is honoured forever.

So, a tribe is the sum of the people who speak its tongue. (A mother often uses her own tongue to her children as part of their education).

These laws and customs prescribe the coexistence of a number of contiguous tribal territories where different dialects of the same language are spoken, a tribal confederation, a nation, perhaps, the Eagle & Crow nation.

Across the whole nation is another spiritual dimension. The division of the natural world ordains the division of the cultural into two spiritual clans – everyone, regardless of tribal membership, is also a member of one of these clans and by law must marry someone from the other. The sacred duties of these clans require great meetings where each individual leaves the tribal at home and comes to perform his/her clan role with fellow members.

The most important of these performances is the initiation of boys carried out by men of the opposite clan and of other tribes from whom those boys will eventually take their wives. These men press the boys through their rites of passage for years at great meetings until giving their approval for them to join the adult men and marry.

The rites of passage require each boy to undertake sacred duties to one particular spirit on his father’s father’s spiritual estate. Along the way he has also to attend the great meetings where he learns more of those duties from men attached to the same spirit and where he can display his progressive mastery of them.

At home he must give every devotion to his assigned spirit to establish his credentials with the spirit world because he needs them to achieve the most important rite of passage of all – they have to send spirits to his pregnant wives to give life to his children.

In their blessed enduring isolation the Australians must have known a lot of permanence and inevitability. The visit of a spirit from your homeland to conceive a child with a wife whom you’ve brought home to receive it was perhaps, the least inevitable feature of life and therefore the most significant.

A note on women’s spiritual life. Obviously they could not form the same connections to homeland as men could because women spent most of their life living with another tribe. Because of this fact of life a picture of their spiritual life as comprehensive and coherent as the picture of men’s spiritual life has been difficult to draw. A number of factors have worked against such efforts; one, women not saying much to male anthropologists who were not much interested anyway and two, by the time female anthropologists got into the field much more of the traditional societies had collapsed forever.

However this point of view receives correction in Chapter 4 of ‘Arguments about Aborigines’ by L. Hiatt and in Chapter 3 of ‘The Australian Aborigines’ by K. Maddock.

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Black Cockatoo and White Cockatoo people

EXTRACT

‘What are these called?’
‘Nappang.’
‘No, not your teats, these scars across the top of them.’
‘These are my Black Cockatoo marks. They tell everyone I’m a Black Cockatoo woman.’
‘Why do you want to tell people that?’
‘So that a White Cockatoo man knows he can marry me and a Black Cockatoo man knows he can’t have anything to do with me.’

BACKGROUND

BrownJudy’s people were these kind of people as recorded in Dawson p26 and Howitt p124 whose informant was Mr. Cameron. Society was divided into two sections (called moieties by anthropology and called spiritual clans in the section on Australian society) which were exogamous, meaning one’s spouse could not belong to one’s moiety – this was one of the principal laws of marriage. The other law prescribed that one’s spouse could not belong to one’s tribe. So a person belonged to both a tribe and a moiety.

To ensure compliance with their laws the tribes lived as neighbours. Dawson p2 has the Kolor tribe living next to the Kirrae wuurong living next to the Mopor living next to the Kuurn kopan noot next to the Peek wuurong and others in the region of the Hopkins River extending up the to Grampians. Each member of all these tribes was either a Black Cockatoo person or a White Cockatoo person. A Black Cockatoo woman had to marry a White Cockatoo man and it wasn’t hard to find him when he might live just across the river.

The moiety to which one belonged was decided by the line of descent. All of these people took their descent from their mother, or, in other words this tribal confederation had societies with matrilineal descent. The people living in this confederation were divided into several tribes and also into two moieties.

So were people living in the tribes to the east of this confederation, nearer the Yarra-yarra and the Barwong. But they were patrilineal societies with different moiety names and they seldom intermarried with matrilineal societies.

BrownJudy’s people, besides intermarrying within their own confederation, would also have intermarried with the tribes to their north, i.e. those around all sides of the Grampians and extending to the Murray and along the lower Darling – where Black Cockatoo and White Cockatoo people lived in matrilineal societies. (see Howitt ‘Further notes on the Australian Class Systems’ p36 in Journal Anthropological Institute)

Calling themselves cockatoo people reveals a reverence for the birds. One possible explanation for this reverence is connected to the moornong, a yam which was the staple food item of western Victoria dug up by the women with their kannak, digging pole, and cooked in reed-baskets, millaeweetch, to provide moisture in pit ovens lined with hot stones, marree.

‘The cockatoo feeds almost exclusively on this tuber when the plant is in flower ‘ ‘moornong …was usually very plentiful and easily found in the spring and early summer’ (Brough-Smyth The Aborigines of Victoria 1876 Vol.1 p209)

In other words the cockatoos, with their resounding calls, could help the women find the yam when it was ready for harvesting. Furthermore the cockatoos carried the moornong seeds in their droppings.

EXTRACTS

p124 “The Native Tribes of South-East Australia” by A.W. Howitt, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1996

According to the Wotjobaluk, the tribes to the south were related to them, and, as I have said, may have formed another nation, which can be distinguished by the name for “man” in their language, namely Mara. My example is the Gournditch-mara.

GOURNDITCH-MARA TRIBE 2

Classes.	Totems.	Sub-Totems.
Krokitch	white cockatoo	pelican, laughing jackass, parrot owl, mopoke, large kangaroo, native companion
Kaputch	black cockatoo	emu, whip-snake, opossum, brush-kangaroo, native bear, swan, eagle-hawk, sparrow-hawk

The feminine form of the name, either of the class or the totem, is formed by the postfix Jarr, thus Krokitch and Krokitch-jarr.

Download extract p26 from Chapter XI “Laws of Marriage” in “Australian Aborigines” by James Dawson, George Robertson, 1881

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Boomerangs

EXTRACT

‘The other boomerang is used for hitting birds, isn’t it, Peecharn?’
‘That’s not easy to do, you have to be very good with it. It’s easier to trap ducks on a pond by making it whistle through the air above them. That fools the ducks into thinking eagle’s up there waiting for them and they won’t lift off; then your friend can slip in underwater to drown them by their feet.’

BACKGROUND

The yarn about unbuttoning ducks by throwing boomerangs over their heads comes from an article by Wally Cooper on pp 82-4 of a publication, the name of which I failed to record – my apologies to that publication.

In the novel it is used as a yarn by BrownJudy to counter bog-trotter. However, if it is more than just an irresistible yarn then the deeds described in it were most likely accomplished while the ducks were busily distracted by all the debris floating on their pond as a result of the firing of bush nearby.

Alongside Dawson, Wally Cooper is another source for the two types of boomerang. His article begins ‘I make killer boomerangs out of black wattle. I like the dark colours. And the come-back boomerangs, I make out of red gum.’
Later, ‘Once you get them whistling you know you are a boomerang maker.’.

He also makes the point that at least three throwers are needed to maintain the whistling above the ducks.

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Local-tribal-groups

EXTRACT

‘But why does all this keep him back from judy? Why do the old sharps not let him get married?’
‘He has to do the right things by the spirits and know all about them before he brings a wife to live with him; he must know his country so he can provide for his family. More than that he needs the spirits to come to his wife each time she is ready to give birth; the spirit must come to give the baby life. That’s where poopoop comes from, whitefella, poopoop comes from the spirit.’

‘So BrownJudy knew all the time, did she?’

BACKGROUND

This is an ideal case, i.e. the wife moving in with her husband’s group so that their children will be born of his country’s spirits, the spirits to which he has devoted so much of his adolescence and young manhood in his rites of passage.

“Howitt and Fison are quite definite that in SE Aust where there were matrilineal clans the local residential group was the patrilocal band” (Woman’s role in Aboriginal Society, Nicolas Petersen)

(Matrilineal means descent from the mother. Patrilocal means living on the father’s tribal land; band is the set of family members living in the one camp; e.g. 4 married men, one the father of the other three, 12 married women, incl a widow or two, 10 unmarried male children, 3 unmarried female children). Petersen makes the point that Howitt and Fison weren’t anthropologists and didn’t work with any Aboriginal groups.
Petersen makes a case for another residential arrangement where the son-in-law lives with the band of one of his wives. Even though his field-work is in Armhen Land his findings raise the possibility that sons-in-law could have lived this way all over the continent, in particular where the wife’s band was going short from the hunt.

Petersen reports other living arrangements as well.

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Mother-in-law

EXTRACT

‘Why can’t Crow have his mother-in-law?’
‘I thought you worked that out when I told you how a girl and boy are promised to each other.’
‘Yes, I know that, he get’s to marry her daughter or two or three.’
‘Yes, so he can’t have her mother as well.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll tell you slowly.’
‘Not too slow, we’ve got other things to do.’
‘No, we haven’t. You’re my son-in-law, let’s say, and you’re a White Cockatoo man, okay. Now that I’ve told you this, you’re allowed to marry my daughter because she’s right for you, because she’s what?’
‘She’s Black Cockatoo.’
‘Yes, and what does that make me?’
‘You’re Black Cockatoo, too.’
‘So I’m right for you, too. We can marry without breaking the law, which means there has to be another law to stop it.’
‘This is slow, alright. Why stop it in the first place?’
‘Because you’re promised to my daughter. If we got together and I had a girl to you she’d be your daughter, too; then you’d be promised to your own daughter. Got it?’
‘Yes, got it; that’d be game over.

BACKGROUND

Of all the taboo features of Aboriginal life; e.g. certain foods, or certain ceremonies, or secrets revealed under punishment of death, the most prominent taboo belongs to the mother-in-law custom. At base it is a sex taboo but the behaviour associated with it is far more elaborate than just avoiding sex.

“As a preventive of illegal marriages, parents betroth their children when just able to walk. The proposal to betroth is made by the father of the girl…the girl’s mother and her aunts may neither look at him nor speak to him from the time of their betrothal till his death. Should he come to the camp where they are living, he must lodge at a friend’s wuurn as he is not allowed within fifty yards of their habitation; and should he meet them on a path they immediately leave it, clap their hands, cover up their headswith their rugs, walk in a stooping position, and speak in whispers till he has gone past. When he meets them away from camp they do not converse with him, and when they speak in each other’s presence they use a lingo, called wiltkill angiitch in the chaap wuurong dialect and gnee wee banoot in the kuurn kopan noot and peek whuurong dialects, meaning ‘turn tongue’. This is not used with the intention of concealment of their meaning, for it is understood by all.” (Dawson pp28,9)

“We know now that over wide areas of Australia such modes of communication are… obligatory whenever a man is speaking to someone within hearing distance of his mother-in-law. Typically they consist of some fifty or so substitutes for the most common words in everyday discourse…” (‘Arguments about Aborigines’ Hiatt p147)

“Institutionalized avoidance between in-laws was practiced in almost one-fifth of… some 350 societies in widely separated parts of the world” (Hiatt p142, quoting from a report written in 1889)

As a woman ages she becomes more influential because of her role as mother-in law. While she has given up her sexual and child-bearing and foraging role to the younger women, including her co-wives, she still has the elder men paying dues to her and guides the younger women in making contracts about their daughters with other men. The mother-in-law custom played a vital part in maintaining Aboriginal societies“ … as neither patriarchies nor matriarchies but double-gendered gerontocracies.” (Hiatt p77)

Further reading can be found in Chapter 8 of Hiatt which is titled ‘Dangerous mothers-in-law and disfigured sisters’

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Poopoop

EXTRACT

‘Lucky poopoop.’
‘Baby is poopoop, is he? And where does poopoop come from, tell me that?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I think so. What about you?’
‘Of course I know. Don’t you think I know? Why are you asking that? You think I don’t know.’
‘No, I just threw it in.’
‘You’re like my lady. She thinks I don’t know. She asked me once and I thought she was kidding. Later on she asked me again and I just smiled. I could have hit her with the broom. All you whitefella think blackfella doesn’t know. Take me back to the house now.’
‘I don’t think that. It was just chat.’
‘This is no chat. Why did you just ask that? Why poopoop?’
‘I don’t know.’

BACKGROUND

BrownJudy is often questioned about where poopoop comes from. This question keeps popping up through the book like it kept popping up in Australian anthropology.

This theme is the subject of Hiatt ‘Arguments about Aborigines’ chapter 7 “Conception and Misconception”.
Hiatt recounts many occasions when anthropologists in the field sought the answer to this question without success and further multiplied the confusion about whether or not the Aborigines were living in ‘…ignorance of the role of the father in procreation.’

These doubts persisted for more than half a century from the earliest reports out of Australia during the 1890s. Consequent reports from highly trained observers failed to clear it up and speculation in’…the armchairs of Europe…’ only added to it.

Hiatt’s conclusion is that the Aborigines knew all the time (as BrownJudy says) but anthropology didn’t find this out from men, who answered nearly all the questions, because they were unwilling to speak about something so important and so sacred.

It was important to men because, in the face of the reproductive powers of the female, they still claimed the principal role, that of providing the child-spirit from their country to the vagina to give life to the child. Copulation cleared the path for the spirit whose life-giving ingredient was far more important to the unborn than menses or semen.

It was important to men because this role was very hard-earned through an adolescence of ordeal which persisted into young manhood; once earned, once proven that a man could bond with the spirits on his country then he was allowed to bond with women.

Anthropology, while looking long and often at Australian procreation, just didn’t get it two facts; one, that the spirits reigned and two, that the men were the principals. It seems this saga of “misconception” continued as long as the questions failed to get it or, perhaps, until female anthropologists were able to speak to women.

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Revenge

The revenge episode in the novel can only be fully appreciated by reference to the Anthropological Note in the introductory parts of the book.

An important rider on the Anthropological Note

N.B the word ‘paramount’ is not one of mine; I found parts of these remarks written by me on the back of some sheets I’d photocopied in the State Library of Victoria; I think it’s a quote from a source I didn’t note, apologies to that source.

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Tribal Confederation

A confederation is a set of tribes, living on separate yet contiguous territories, who inter-marry with each other and who share a common language but distinguish themselves by their own dialect of that language. The tribes also share the same laws, customs and religion.

This example of a confederation is taken from Dawson Chapter 1.

“…the Mount Rouse tribe is called ‘Kolor’ after the Aboriginal name of the mountain…the language of the Kolor tribe is called “…‘Chaap wuurong’, meaning ‘soft’ or ‘broad lip’ in contradistinction to other dialects of harder pronunciation…”
“The Kuurn kopan noot tribe is known by the name of its language… meaning ‘small lip’ or ‘short pronunciation’
“The Hopkins tribe is called after its language, ‘Pirt kopan noot’…meaning ‘jump lip’
“The Spring Creek tribe is called Mopor…its language is called ‘Kii wuurong’ meaning ‘Oh dear! lip’
“The Port Fairy tribe is called ‘Peek wuurong’ meaning ‘kelp lip’.
“The Mount Shadwell tribe and its language are called ‘Kirrae wuurong’, ‘blood lip’.
“The Camperdown language is called ‘Warn Tallin’, ‘rough language’. The Colac language is ‘Kolak gnat’, ‘belonging to sand’ …The Cape Otway language is ’Katubanuut’, King Parrot language’…”
“At the annual great meetings of the associated tribes, where sometimes twenty tribes assembled, there were usually four languages spoken…”

To illustrate how tightly these tribes were confederated we have only to examine how their common marriage laws operated amongst them. First of all every person in every tribe was either a Black Cockatoo or White Cockatoo person. Across all the tribes an individual was Black Cockatoo because his/her mother was Black Cockatoo – in other words the confederation was matrilineal, the line of descent being through the mother not the father.

To use another kinship term an individual is called ego. Let’s say ego is a Black Cockatoo Kolor person whose mother was a Black Cockatoo Kuurn kopan noot woman whose mother was a Pirt kopan noot woman. Therefore the laws forbade ego from marrying any Black Cockatoo person as well as any White Cockatoo person from Kolor and Kuurn kopan noot and Pirt kopan noot. Ego could marry a White Cockatoo spouse from Kii Wuurong whose mother could be a White Cockatoo Peek Wuurong woman whose mother might be a Kirrae Wuurong woman.

Now for the purposes of the mother-in-law custom let’s say ego is male. So his mother-in-law is Peek Wuurong. But she could be a Kolor woman i.e. from his own tribe in which case the burden of the custom on ego could well be enhanced, similarly if she was a Kuurn kopan noot woman from his mother’s tribe.

If you’re looking for a fresh challenge for the mind then have a crack at Australian kinship. Dawson has 14 pages of kinship terms in two languages (Appendix pp lxiv-lxxvii).

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Widows

EXTRACT

‘When a man is killed his brother takes his wives. My husband may have been killed by his brother to get me. I don’t know. That’s when I left, I couldn’t risk going back to find out. I hated him, he was cruel to his wife. I didn’t break the law by leaving. There’s no law about widows, it’s only the right thing to do. An old widow can leave her dead husband’s country to help out with her daughters where they’ve married. A young widow should stay where she married because her husband’s family has married off all its young women. She should stay where her children were born so the boys can learn about their own country as they grow up. That was my lot and I didn’t want it.

BACKGROUND

The requirement for a widow to marry her dead husband’s brother is not a legal one only a customary one. It arises because a family band does not wish to lose a female member. In obedience to the marriage laws, this band has lost all their own females to other tribes. Females are needed to gather most of the food and cook it, mind the young and the old, assist with marriage arrangements and much more.

To allow for the age of the widow this is not a legal requirement. An older woman may prefer to live with and assist one or more of her daughters. To do so she could be permitted to move to another tribal land. A younger active widow would be released, if at all, most reluctantly.

Due to this widow custom the prime suspect in the death of her husband is his brother. The suspicion enforces another custom, that of the brother taking charge of the burial, mourning and revenge of the dead man.

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