264. Australia
The human history of Australia is as detached from that of the remainder of the world as its biological history. The race is distinctive: sub-Negroid, it might be called. The languages relate to no other. The culture is primitive and well characterized. The isolation of Australia was aided by the fact that the one approach to it other than by a sea-voyage of some length, the approach across Torres Straits, was blocked by New Guinea, the area of most backward culture in Oceania. The Papuans did not possess enough civilization to hand on much to the Australians; but they prevented higher elements from Asia from flowing to them.
The Australians lacked not only all agriculture and domestic animals, but pottery, the bow, and apparently the harpoon. These deficiencies would at once stamp their culture as pre-Neolithic in type, were it not that they grind some stone implements.
All in all, Australian culture is unusually meager on the industrial and economic side. Houses, clothing, weapons, boats, tools, are most scantily developed: often lacking and always rude. This poverty of Australian material culture cannot be explained wholly from the prevailing desert character of a large part of the continent, since the natives of the most favored regions were not appreciably better off as regards variety of arts conducive to comfort.
Social organization is much more complicated than the arts. Most of the Australians are divided into moieties, which frequently are subdivided into four classes or eight-sub-classes, all exogamous. A frequent peculiarity is that the child belongs to a different class from both its parents. So far as the moiety is concerned, custom varies locally as to whether the child is born into the mother’s or father’s side of the community. Frequently there are also hereditary totemic groups. These may be subdivisions of the moieties or descend independently of them. A few tribes, chiefly in southeastern Australia, are without moieties or classes; some are totemless ([Fig. 29]). The moiety scheme of course prescribes equally that one must marry into the opposite moiety and out of one’s own. The extension of this principle to classes and sub-classes still farther limits the group among whom marriage is permissible, thereby emphasizing its prescriptive character. Where the individual belongs to a third or different class from his parents, his wife must come from the fourth or remaining one, and his children will belong again to the first or second, according as moiety descent is patrilinear or matrilinear. Consequently he has blood relatives in every class; and conversely all the members of each class stand in a certain defined kinship to every individual in the community, according to their respective sex and age. This means not only that certain relatives are within the absolutely prohibited degrees, but that others are prescriptive spouses. These are only a few of the innumerable ramifications and variations of Australian social organization.
The origin of these social schemes is in dispute. Some ethnologists interpret them as original inventions of the Australians, manifestations of their peculiar primitiveness. Others look upon then as evolved somewhere in the region between India and Melanesia where analogous institutions are frequently encountered, and as carried into Australia by diffusion or migrations. The contiguity of Australia to the Indo-Melanesian area of totems, moieties, unilateral descent, etc., is not likely to be wholly a matter of coincidence (§ [110]). Moreover, the strongest development of this type of organization within Australia is on the whole in the northern part, the tribes that show least or none of it being in the south, farthest from the presumptive entrance via New Guinea. On the other hand, certain features of the systems are confined to Australia: the classes and sub-classes, the occasional coexistence but non-relation of totems and moieties, for instance. These variations must have originated among the Australians; and this raises the question whether many other traits may also be indigenous. The most probable course of events would appear to have been the importation of the basic pattern of exogamy, followed by its diffusion with numerous new growths in Australia.
Religious status fits the same interpretation. Ceremonial practices are often, both abundant and elaborate, but ring the changes on fundamentally primitive concepts like imitative magic, bewitching, taboo, adolescence and other crisis rites. These concepts, as implicit in a series of customary acts, might all have been imported at a very early time; in fact in the main very likely go back to Palæolithic culture. On this foundation the Australians developed their locally varying superstructures of religion, which often differ conspicuously in specific content, and into which they poured a notable quantity of imagination or social creativeness. They evolved nothing of a fundamentally “higher” type of cult because of their unusual degree of insulation from all the more important later streams of culture. There occurred no significant import of either new religious elements as such, nor of material factors like agriculture which might have raised the economic status, increased the population,[40] forced a political organization, and ultimately led to the growth of basically new religious patterns among the Australians themselves.
To return to material culture, it may be noted that the boomerang groups with Australian rites and social organization in being a highly specialized form of a fundamentally simple and presumably early type, namely the throwing stick or flat club. Crescentic throwing sticks are in use in Asia and America: they fly faster and straighter than rod shaped or knobbed ones. The Australians alone added the twist which gives the boomerang its peculiar flight. They may have been led to evolve this feature through not having higher types of weapons such as bows and arrows to engage their interest and energies. At any rate, the discovery of the quality imparted by the twist may have been made by accident, such as the warping of an implement, and random experimenting may have brought the improvements.
Whether the relatively unimportant implements of ground stone in Australia represent an invention made there or should be considered one of the small group of culture elements which like the moiety system may have been imported subsequently to the main stock of Australian culture, remains to be ascertained. This main stock is certainly ancient, and in its content may be regarded as approximately equivalent to the Palæolithic culture of Europe and probably connected with it by an early diffusion; although in the specific forms taken by their corresponding types the two cultures obviously differ greatly, as indeed the lapse of time and stretch of distance between them would render inevitable.