3fi IIOKN EXPEDITION — NARRATIVE. 



to tlio womon, tlio l.ittor aro very caioful, on ponalty of sevorf punislimoiit, not to 

 i-'o anywhere neai- to tlieni. Sonu'times an elder riiari will carry ahout on his 

 person, concealed fi'oni \'iew, one of these Gliurina. It was evid(uUly one of these 

 stores the finding and contents of which Iwive l)een ilescrihed liy Dr. Stirling in the 

 Anthropologica-1 section. 



The sacred ceremonies, or quapara,, some of which no white man, unless, like 

 Mr. Gillen, he has gained the most perfect confidence of the hlacks, is allowed to 

 see, aiid wdiich are so jealouslj' guarded that the ordinary white man living 

 amongst the hlacks would have no idea of their existence, are, as l)efore said, 

 intimately associated with these Ohurina and with certain Toteniic suhdi\isions of 

 the four classes or phratries — Panunga, Pultharra, Purula, Kumarra — into which 

 the Arunta Tribe is divided. 



Mr. Gillen has described two of these sacred quapara, which he found to 1)0 

 connected with certain members of the Panunga and Pultharra phratries at Alice 

 Springs, and the other with certain mendjeis of the Pui'ula and Kumai-ra phrati'ies. 

 The first of these is a ceremony tlie oljject of which is intimately associated with 

 the promotion of the growth of the "witchctty" — that is, the grub of a large 

 longicorn beetle, which forms a favourite food of the blacks; the other is a rain- or 

 water-producing ceremony. 



The coupling of the four phratries into two pairs — Panunga. and Pultharra on 

 the one hand, and Kumaria and Purula on the other — clearly points back to an 

 earlier time, when, as in many Australian tribes, there were only two inter- 

 marrying divisions. When four are pi-esent, as Messrs. Fison and Howitt* have 

 said, we may " i-easonal)ly conclude that these four classes were formed by sub- 

 dividing two primary classes, fi'om the fact that they are conqiosed of two pairs of 

 non-intermarrying classes, each pair corresponding to one of the original classes 

 and intermanying with the other pair." Sometimes, as for exanqile in th(i Mackay 

 ti'ibe, t the names for the two original divisions exist side by side witii those of the 

 four subdivisions into which tliey have split, but in the Arunta these two original 

 names seem to have entirely disappeared. 



In certain tribes a furtlier division of the four into eight groups takes 

 place, and with it a consequent greater restriction in regard to the number of 

 women from amongst whom the man's wife must come. 



The relationships, so far as marriage is concerned, of the phratries amongst 

 the Arunta tribe is clearly shown in the articles by Dr. Stirling and Mr. Gillen, 



* K.amil.ai'oi and Kiii-Ti.ai, ]i. ;i7. "t /('■, ]>. -'S 



