the vocabularies differ to such an extent that members of different tribes are not mutually intelligible.  How far the occurrence of identical kinship organisation and nomenclature should be taken as indicating a still larger unity than the nation is a difficult question. Prima facie the nation is a relatively late phenomenon; but the distribution of the names of kinship organisations, as will be shown later, indicates that communication, if not alliance, existed over a wide area at some periods, which it is difficult to suppose were anything but remote.

The idea of the tribe has already been defined.  It is a community which occupies a definite area, recognises its solidarity and possesses a common speech or dialects of the same.

Between the tribe and the family occur various subdivisions, known as sub-tribes, hordes, local groups, etc., but without any very clear definition of their nature.  It appears, however, that the tribal area is sometimes so parcelled out that property in it is vested, not in the tribe as a whole, but in the local group, which welcomes fellow-tribesmen in times of plenty, but has the right of punishing intruders of the same tribe who seek for food without permission; for a non-tribesman the penalty is death.  In some cases the local group is little more than an undivided family including three generations; it may then occupy and own an area of some ten miles radius.  In other cases the term is applied to a larger aggregate, the nature and rights of which are not strictly defined; it may number some hundreds of persons and form one-third of the whole tribe; it seems best to denominate such an aggregate by the name of sub-tribe.

The term family may be retained in its ordinary sense.

Superposed on the tribal organisation are the kinship organisations, which, in the case of most Australian tribes, are independent of locality.  Leaving out of account certain anomalous tribes, it may be said broadly that an Australian tribe is divided into two sets, called phratries, primary classes, moieties, etc. by various authors; the term used in the present work for these divisions is phratry.  Membership of a phratry depends on birth and is taken directly from the mother (matrilineal descent) or father (patrilineal descent).

In Queensland and part of N.S.  Wales the phratry is again subdivided, and four intermarrying classes (sometimes called sub-phratries) are formed, two of which make up each phratry.  In North Australia and Queensland a further subdivision of each of these classes is found, making eight in all.  Descent in the classes is indirect matrilineal or indirect[37] patrilineal, the child belonging to the mother’s or father’s phratry as before, but being assigned to the class of that phratry to which the mother or father does not belong.  The classes of father and son together are called a couple.  The parent from whom the phratry and class name are thus derived is said to be the determinant spouse.