MARRIAGE TABOOS AND “INCEST.”

The marriage taboos are no less artificial, absurd, and fatal to free choice and love.  An Australian is not only forbidden to marry a girl who is closely related to him by blood—­sometimes the prohibition extends to first, second, and even third cousins—­but he must not think of such a thing as marrying a woman having his family name or belonging to certain tribes or clans—­his own, his mother’s or grandmother’s, his neighbor’s, or one speaking his dialect, etc.  The result is more disastrous than one unfamiliar with Australian relationships would imagine; for these relationships are so complicated that to unravel them takes, in the words of Howitt (59), “a patience compared with which that of Job is furious irritability.”

These prohibitions are not to be trifled with.  They extend even to war captives.  If a couple disregard them and elope, they are followed by the indignant relatives in hot pursuit and, if taken, severely punished, perhaps even put to death. (Howitt, 300, 66.) Of the Kamilaroi the same writer says: 

“Should a man persist in keeping a woman who is denied to him by their laws, the penalty is that he should be driven out from the society of his friends and quite ignored.  If that does not cure his fondness for the woman, his male relatives follow him and kill him, as a disgrace to their tribe, and the female relatives of the woman kill her for the same reason.”

It is a mystery to anthropologists how these marriage taboos, these notions of real or fancied incest, could have ever arisen.  Curr (I.,236) remarks pointedly that

“most persons who have any practical knowledge of our savages will, I think, bear me out when I assert that, whatever their objections to consanguineous marriages may be, they have no more idea of the advantages of this or that sort of breeding, or of any laws of Nature bearing on the question, than they have of differential calculus."[177]

Whatever may have been the origin of these prohibitions, it is obvious that, as I have said, they acted as obstacles to love; and what is more, in many cases they seem to have impeded legitimate marriage only, without interfering with licentious indulgence.  Roth (67) cites O’Donnell to the effect that with the Kunandaburi tribe the jus primae noctis is allowed all the men present at the camp without regard to class or kin.  He also cites Beveridge, who had lived twenty-three years in contact with the Riverina tribes and who assured him that, apart from marrying, there was no restriction on intercourse.  In his book on South Australia J.D.  Wood says (403): 

“The fact that marriage does not take place between members of the same tribe, or is forbidden amongst them, does not at all include the idea that chastity is observed within the same limits.”

Brough Smyth (II., 92) refers to the fact that secret violations of the rule against fornication within the forbidden classes were not punished.  Bonwick (62) cites the Rev. C. Wilhelmi on the Port Lincoln customs: