Gundooee A SOLITARY EMU
Booloowah TWO EMUS
Oogle oogle FOUR EMUS
Gayyahnai FIVE OR SIX EMUS
Gonurrun FOURTEEN OR FIFTEEN EMUS.
I fancy the brains that could have elaborated their marriage rules were capable of workaday arithmetic if necessary, and few indeed of us know our family trees as the blacks know theirs.
Even the smallest black child who can talk seems full of knowledge as to all his relations, animate and inanimate, the marriage taboos, and the rest of their complicated system.
The first division among this tribe is a blood distinction (I phratries'):—
Gwaigulleeah LIGHT BLOODED
Gwaimudthen DARK BLOODED.
This distinction is not confined to the human beings of the tribe, who must be of one or the other, but there are the Gwaigulleeah and Gwaimudthen divisions in all things. The first and chief division in our tribe, as regards customary marriage law, is the partition of all tribes-folk into these 'phratries,' or 'exogamous moieties.' While in most Australian tribes the meanings of the names of phratries are lost, where the meanings are known they are usually names of animals—Eagle, Hawk, and Crow, White Cockatoo and Black Cockatoo, and so forth. Among the great Kamilaroi tribe, akin in speech to the Euahlayi, the names of phratries, DILBI and KUPATHIN, are of unknown significance. The Euahlayi names, we have seen, are Gwaigulleeah, Light blooded, and Gwaimudthen, Dark blooded.
The origin of this division is said to be the fact that the original ancestors were, on the one side, a red race coming from the west, the Gwaigulleeah; on the other, a dark race coming from the east.
A Gwaigulleeah may under no circumstances marry a Gwaigulleeah; he or she must mate with a Gwaimudthen. This rule has no exception. A child belongs to the same phratry as its mother.
The next name of connection is local, based on belonging to one country or hunting-ground; this name a child takes from its mother wherever it may happen to be born. Any one who is called a Noongahburrah belongs to the Noongah-Kurrajong country; Ghurreeburrah to the orchid country; Mirriehburrah, poligonum country; Bibbilah, Bibbil country, and so on. This division, not of blood relationship, carries no independent marriage restriction, but keeps up a feeling equivalent to Scotch, Irish, or English, and is counted by the blacks as 'relationship,' but not sufficiently so to bar marriage.
The next division is the name in common for all daughters, or all sons of one family of sisters. The daughters take the name from their maternal grandmother, the sons from their maternal great-uncle.