"Occasionally, but rarely, it happens that a man attempts to prevent his wife's Piraungaru from having access to her, but this leads to a fight, and the husband is looked upon as churlish. When visiting distant groups where, in all likelihood, the husband has no Piraungaru, it is customary for other men of his own class to offer him the loan of one or more of their Nupa women, and a man, besides lending a woman over whom he has the first right, will also lend his Piraungaru."
In the Arunta tribe there is a restriction of a particular woman to a particular man, "or rather, a man has an exclusive right to one special woman, though he may of his own free will lend her to other men," provided they stand in a certain artificial relation to her (74). However (92):
"Whilst under ordinary circumstances in the Arunta and other tribes one man is only allowed to have marital relations with women of a particular class, there are customs which allow at certain times of a man having such relations with women to whom at other times he would not on any account be allowed to have access. We find, indeed, that this holds true in the case of all the nine different tribes with the marriage customs of which we are acquainted, and in which a woman becomes the private property of one man."
In the southern Arunta, after a certain ceremony has been performed, the bride is brought back to camp and given to her special Unawa. "That night he lends her to one or two men who are unawa to her, and afterward she belongs to him exclusively." At this time when a woman is being, so to speak, handed over to one particular individual, special individuals with whom at ordinary times she may have no intercourse, have the right of access to her. Such customs our authors interpret plausibly as partial promiscuity pointing to a time when still greater laxity prevailed—suggesting rudimentary organs in animals (96).
Among some tribes at corrobboree time, every day two or three women are told off and become the property of all the men on the corrobboree grounds, excepting fathers, brothers, or sons. Thus there are three stages of individual ownership in women: In the first, whilst the man has exclusive right to a woman, he can and does lend her to certain other men; in the second there is a wider relation in regard to particular men at the time of marriage; and in the third a still wider relation to all men except the nearest relatives, at corrobboree time. Only in the first of these cases can we properly speak of wife "lending"; in the other cases the individuals have no choice and cannot withhold their consent, the matter being of a public or tribal nature. As regards the corrobborees, it is supposed to be the duty of every man at different times to send his wife to the ground, and the most striking feature in regard to it is that the first man who has access to her is the very one to whom, under normal conditions, she is most strictly taboo, her Mura. [All women whose daughters are eligible as wives are mura to a man.] Old and young men alike must give up their wives on these occasions. "It is a custom of ancient date which is sanctioned by public opinion, and to the performance of which neither men nor women concerned offer any opposition" (98).
ABORIGINAL DEPRAVITY
These revelations of Spencer and Gillen, taken in connection with the abundant evidence I have cited from the works of early explorers as to the utter depravity of the aboriginal Australian when first seen by white men, will make it impossible hereafter for anyone whose reasoning powers exceed a native Australian's to maintain that it was the whites who corrupted these savages. It takes an exceptionally shrewd white man even to unravel the customs of voluntary or obligatory wife sharing or lending which prevail in all parts of Australia, and which must have required not only hundreds but thousands of years to assume their present extraordinarily complex aspect; customs which form part and parcel of the very life of Australians and which represent the lowest depths of sexual depravity, since they are utterly incompatible with chastity, fidelity, legitimacy, or anything else we understand by sexual morality. In some cases, no doubt, contact with the low whites and their liquor aggravated these evils by fostering professional prostitution and making men even more ready than before to treat their wives as merchandise. Lumholtz, who lived several years among these savages, makes this admission (345), but at the same time he is obliged to join all the other witnesses in declaring that apart from this "there is not much to be said of the morals of the blacks, for I am sorry to say they have none." On a previous page (42) I cited Sutherland's summary of a report of the House of Commons (1844, 350 pages), which shows that the Australian native, as found by the first white visitors, manifested "an absolute incapacity to form even a rudimentary notion of chastity." The same writer, who was born and brought up in Australia, says (I., 121):
"In almost every case the father or husband will dispose of the girl's virtue for a small price. When white men came they found these habits prevailing. The overwhelming testimony proves it absurd to say that they demoralized the unsophisticated savages."
And again (I., 186),
"It is untrue that in sexual license the savage has ever anything to learn. In almost every tribe there are pollutions deeper than any I have thought it necessary to mention, and all that the lower fringe of civilized men can do to harm the uncivilized is to stoop to the level of the latter, instead of teaching them a better way."[165]