562 MATHEWS—THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES. [Oct. 5, 
from among whom the old men will select one or more to exercise 
the function of becoming the parent of A’s future wife. Let C:, 
one of the cousins of A’s father, be a woman who has been thus 
chosen ; then she is fooar to A, because he will by and by marry 
one of her daughters. The old men may also appoint the mother 
of A, or some other woman occupying the same position in the 
genealogy, to be /vvar to the sons of C’. 
I am led to the assumption that the original or autochthonous race 
possessed a somewhat similar organization to that just described, and 
that the tribes under reference escaped subjugation by the invading 
races, either because the latter were not able to overcome them, or 
because they did not spread sufficiently far south and west as to 
come in contact with the original people. 
In going into regions adjoining those with which I have been 
dealing, we encounter tribes possessing two intermarrying phratries 
such as Mattiri and Kararu of Port Lincoln; Krokitch and Kamatch 
of Western Victoria; Muckwarra and Keelparra of the Barkunjee 
tribes; Koolpirro and Tinnawa of the Yowerawarrika people, and 
soon. As I was the first author who reported the two divisions of 
the last mentioned tribe,’ I shall proceed to deal with them as 
typical of the others. 
The Yowerawarrika and allied tribes in the southeast corner of 
Queensland are divided, as I have before stated, into two phratries 
called Koolpirro and Tinnawa. ‘The natives have told me several 
legends respecting ancestral warriors, and I have noticed that the 
most valiant and distinguished men were always said to belong to the 
Koolpirro division. This led me to think that Koolpirro was prob- 
ably the name of a warlike tribe or clan in the remote past which 
had conquered the Tinnawa, an adjoining people, and that each of 
these tribes or clans originally possessed the fooar type of marriage 
laws. 
If we assume that this was so, and that the victors followed the 
present practice of killing all the adult males, but sparing the 
women, together with the little boys and girls, the Koolpirro men, 
whether already married or not, would take one or more of the 
women of the vanquished Tinnawa tribe as wives. As the Koolpirro 
men would already have children by their own women, their offspring 
by the strange women would require to be distinguished from the 
1 Fourn. Roy. Soc. N.S. Wales, vol. xxxiii, p. 108. 
