Our knowledge of these matters has not, of course, been gained at a bound.  Before indicating the present extent of our information, it may be well to give an historical sketch of early discoveries in this field.

Some seventy years ago the attention of students of primitive social institutions was drawn to the marriage regulations of the Indian tribes of North America by an article in Archaeologia Americana[38]; in which the author, drawing his conclusions partly from earlier writers, partly from his own investigations, showed that the totem kin was an exogamous group, while in some cases the kin bearing the name of a given totem were not only exogamous, but not even permitted to choose their wives from any of the other kins at will, being restricted in their choice to certain groups or, in many cases, to a single group of totem kins, according as the tribe was arranged in two or more phratries.

At least two observers had detected the existence of Australian organisations of the same nature as the American phratries, so far as our scanty information from West Australia goes, even before the publication of Archaeologia Americana.  The honour of being the first to publish information on the subject belongs to Nind, who had spent some time in the neighbourhood of King George’s Sound in 1829, and published his observations on native customs in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society[39] for 1832.  Close on his heels came the authors of Journals of Explorations in West Australia, which appeared in 1833, and described journeys undertaken between 1829 and 1832.

The phratries were discovered in South Australia by the Rev. C.W.  Schuermann, whose Vocabulary[40], published in 1844, contains a mention of the Parnkalla phratries, without, however, any indication of their connection with marriage customs and exogamy.  Five years earlier, however, Lieutenant, afterwards Sir George Grey, had observed institutions of the nature of totem kins, phratries, or intermarrying classes in West Australia, and had detected their connection with the marriage laws of the natives[41].

In 1841 and 1842, G.F.  Moore[42] called attention to the grouping of the native divisions or kins, and anticipated Schuermann, as will be shown later.  Grey, before the publication of his Journal, had read the Archaeologia; but though he mentions the naming of “families” after animals, he makes no mention of any grouping, but merely distinguishes between “families” and “local names.”  Some of the names which he gives seem to be those of phratries, and if he had been led by his study of Archaeologia Americana to the discovery of exogamic regulations dealing with the relations of individual totem kins to one another, it seems on the whole probable that he would not have overlooked the grouping of the kins which is, with certain exceptions, of a more or less local character, common to the whole of Australia, so far as our information goes.  Singularly enough this information, very full, relatively, for the eastern and central tribes, has, so far as South-West Australia is concerned, only just been completed, although more than sixty years have elapsed since Grey wrote, the last twenty of which have seen much additional light thrown on the organisation of the tribes of the remainder of the continent.