Before we leave Dr Howitt’s work it is necessary to refer again to the Kurnai.  The most important point in connection with the Kurnai, so far as the present work is concerned, is that, contradictory to Bulmer’s statement[168] that unmarried men have access to their brothers’ wives, and sometimes even married men, Dr Howitt mentions[169] as a singular fact that he recalls one instance of a wife being lent in that tribe.

Dr Howitt however holds that there are traces of group marriage in the tribe, and refers to the fact that the term maian[170] is applied to a wife by her husband and by his brother, whose “official wife[171]” she is thus declared to be, and that a brother takes his deceased brother’s widow.  He regards this rather unfortunately named custom of the levirate as having its root in group marriage.  Now maian is applied, not only by a husband to a wife, but by a wife to her husband’s sister, and by a sister to her brother’s wife.  If therefore the use of the term proves anything, it proves, not group marriage, as Dr Howitt understands it, but promiscuity, the prior existence of the undivided commune, and this, as we have seen, Dr Howitt declines to accept on the strength of the philological argument.

We are therefore reduced to the levirate as a proof of the former existence of group marriage.  But there is nothing whatever to show that it is not a case of inheritance of property.  For the Australians, as for many other savage peoples, the married state is the only thinkable one for the adult, and that being so it is natural for the widow to remarry.  She has however been purchased by the exchange of a woman in the relation of sister to the deceased, and if the widow were allowed to pass to another group, the property thus acquired would be alienated.  Moreover the marriage regulations require the woman to marry only a tribal brother of the deceased.  It is therefore in every way natural for a brother to succeed to a brother.  No arguments for the prior existence of group marriage can be founded on the levirate, any more than an argument for primitive communism can be founded on other laws of inheritance.  At most the maian relationship is evidence of adelphic polygyny[172].

For the Urabunna we depend on the information gained by Spencer and Gillen on their first expedition.  Here the circle from which a man takes his wife is much more restricted than among the Dieri.  Not only is he bound to choose a woman of the other moiety of the tribe, but he is restricted to a certain totem[173] in that moiety, and to the daughters of his mother’s elder brothers (tribal) in that totem.  Hence although the kami relationship of the Dieri is unknown among the Urabunna, the choice among the latter is more limited.