That portion of Cape York Peninsula extending from the Cape to about the fifteenth parallel of south latitude, in the state of Queensland, is occupied by a considerable number of Aboriginal tribes with different names. Of these tribes I am best acquainted with the Chūnkūnji people on the Batavia River. The Gamete tribe occupy the country to the north of the Chūnkūnji whilst the Tanegute tribe is to the South. The Ngerikudi language is spoken about Mapoon on the Batavia and as far south as Duyphen Point. Dialects of this language are used all the way from the Jardine River to the Archer River, or perhaps further south. In all these dialects there are two pronouns in the first person of the dual and plural—one that is used when the person addressed is included, and another which excludes the person addressed.

The community is divided socially into two primary phratries or moieties or groups—whichever of these names we choose to employ for purposes of distinction. These two divisions are named Chamakunda and Kamanutta; the former is again bisected into two sections called Lankenami and Nameguri, and the latter into two, called Pakwikki and Pamarung. In these names there is no distinction between the masculine and feminine.

In addition to the partition of the community into phratries and sections, there is a further subdivision of the people into lesser groups, which bear the name of different animals, plants or inanimate objects, to which the name of totems has been given by the anthropologists of America and Europe.

Intermarriages are regulated as follows: a man of the Chamakunda phratry and Lankenami section marries a Kamanutta woman of the Pakwikki section. This is the normal rule of marriage and is the one shown in Table II. In such a case, a man’s son’s child marries his sister’s son’s child. But it is quite lawful for a Lankenami man to espouse a Lankenami woman, which represents the marriage of a man’s son’s child with his sister’s daughter’s child.

Another variation of the intermarriages of the sections allows the Lankenami man of our example to marry a Pamarung or Nameguri woman. In other words, a man of any given section can marry into one or other of the three remaining sections, or else into his own. Or, to express it in another form, a man of any given section has potential marital qualifications over all the four sections of women. It is needless to add that these facts altogether disprove the existence of exogamy among the tribes with which we are dealing.

Reference to Table 2 shows us that the children follow the phratry of their mother, but they do not adopt the name of her section. They are Pamarung, being the supplementary section of their mother’s phratry. That is to say, the section name of the progeny is invariably determined through the women. The totems remain constantly in the same phratry as the women and are accordingly transmitted from a mother to her children.

Although the totems as well as the sections and phratries are perpetuated through the women, this does not constitute exogamy. We have already shown that a man Lankenami, for example, can marry into either phratry.

The totems, called by the natives idite, are divided between the two phratries in the same manner as the people themselves. The totems of each phratry are common to the two sections of which it is composed; thus the totems attached to Chamakunda are common to the sections Lankenami and Nameguri, and the Kamanutta totems are common to the Pakwikki and Pamarung sections.

When the boys are about 12 years old, they are taken from the control of their mothers by the chief men, and are passed through a course of initiation formalities, analogous in their main features to those practised by the Kamilaroi and Kumbainggeri tribes and described by me elsewhere. Scars are raised upon their bodies, the septum of the nose is pierced and a front tooth punched out of each youth. The novices are required to pass through the ordeal of inauguration at not less than three meetings of the tribes called for that purpose, and on each occasion fresh scars are added to those previously made on the body of each novice.

In my ‘Ethnological Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of Queensland’,^[7] published by the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Brisbane, I detailed the sociology of a large number of important tribes in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The mass of information therein supplied will be sufficient to prove that exogamy is quite impossible amongst any of the tribes dealt with in this article.