226 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



custom." If the intercourse has been with a woman 

 who belongs to the class from which his wife comes 

 he is called a thief ; if with one with whom it is alto- 

 gether unlawful for him to have intercourse, then he is 

 called iturka, the most opprobrious term in the Arunta 

 tongue. " In the one case he has merely stolen 

 property, in the other he has offended against tribal 

 law." 1 The status of the children does not depend 

 upon paternity. There is no such thing as an illegiti- 

 mate or adulterine child. Any child a woman may 

 have is reckoned to the phratry and class of her hus- 

 band, and he has presumably some sort of property in 

 it, though according to native belief he is concerned in 

 the procreation at most in a wholly subordinate way, 

 as we have seen in a previous chapter. 2 



If the central tribes are an extreme example of the 

 indifference among the patrilineal natives to what we 

 regard as female virtue, it is certain that a similar 

 attitude may be traced elsewhere. Among the tribes 

 about Maryborough in Queensland the unmarried 

 girls, with perhaps some widows, camped away from 

 the main camp and there were courted by the young 

 men. At the end of the puberty ceremonies marriages 

 were arranged after the fashion of the rape of the 

 Sabines ; and unless a man kept a good look-out upon 

 his lubra it was more than probable that she would be 

 missing after such a raid by the men in want of wives. 

 Wives were lent to strangers. Women however who 

 were always laying themselves out to attract men 



1 S. and G,, Cent. Tribes, 98-100, 106, 381. 



2 Supra, vol. i. p. 237 ; S. and G., Cent. Tribes, 68, 72 ; North. 

 Tribes, 96. I use the terms phratry and class for moiety and 

 subclass. 



