If a man and a girl began to keep company, he was branded on the back with a charcoal, while her mark was cut into the skin (because “she asked the man").  It was expected they would marry, but if they did not nothing could be done.  If it was the man who was unwilling, the girl’s father told the other men of the place, and they gave him a sound thrashing.  Refusing a girl was thus a serious matter on these islands!

The missionaries, Haddon was informed,

“discountenance the native custom of the women proposing to the men, although there is not the least objection to it from a moral or social point of view; quite the reverse.  So the white man’s fashion is being introduced.  As an illustration of the present mixed condition of affairs, I found that a girl who wants a certain man writes him a letter, often on a slate, and he replies in a similar manner.”

On the island of Tud it often happened that the girl who was first enamoured of a youth at his initiation, and who first asked him in marriage, was one who “like too many men.”  The lad, being on his guard, might get rid of her attentions by playing a trick on her, making a bogus appointment with her in the bush, and then informing the elder men, who would appear in his place at the trysting-place, to the girl’s mortification.

Various details given in the chapter on Australia indicated that if the women on that big island did not propose, as a rule, it was not from coyness but because the selfishness of the men and their arrangements made it impossible in most cases.  On these neighboring islands the women could propose; yet the cause of love, of course, did not gain anything from such an arrangement, which could serve only to stimulate licentiousness.  Haddon gathered the impression that “chastity before marriage was unknown, free intercourse not being considered wrong; it was merely ‘fashion along we folk.’” Their excuse was the same as Adam’s:  “Woman, he steal; man, how can he help it?"[182]

Nocturnal courtship was in vogue: 

“Decorum was observed.  Thus I was told in Tud a girl, before going to sleep, would tie a string round her foot and pass it under the thatched wall of the house.  In the middle of the night her lover would come, pull the string, and so awaken the girl, who would then join him.  As the chief of Mabuiag said, ’What can the father do; if she wants the man how can he stop her?’”

On Muralug Island the custom is somewhat different.  There, after the girl has sent her grass-ring to the man she wants,

“if he is willing to proceed in the matter, he goes to the rendezvous in the bush and, not unnaturally, takes every advantage of the situation.  Every night afterwards he goes to the girl’s house and steals away before daybreak.  At length someone informs the girl’s father that a man is sleeping with his daughter.  The father communicates with the girl, and she tells her lover that her