ON THE ORGANISATION OF THE AUSTRALIAN TRIBES. 135 
The unit of aboriginal society is, therefore, not the individual, but the group. It 
is the group which marries the group and which begets the group. The idea of the 
relation of individual to individual, and of the parentage of the individual, without 
reference to the group, is of the later origin, and is the result of a number of social 
forces acting in the same general direction, and producing change. 
It is of no little interest to observe by the aid of such analytical investigations as 
those which I have discussed in this memoir, that custom among the Australian 
savages 1s not so fixed and unchanging as the laws of the Medes and Persians were 
said tobe. Savages are, no doubt, among the most conservative of peoples. They 
look upon custom as being sacred, and their reply, ‘‘ Our fathers did so,” is to them 
an unanswerable argument as to the authority and wisdom of any practice. But it is 
now quite evident that their customs have not been in the past unchanging. We 
certainly cannot notice a process of change in any given custom, partly because our 
period of observation has been far too limited, partly because probably the changes 
have been brought about by small and almost imperceptible degrees. Yet there are 
not wanting pieces of evidence which show that change in custom may have been 
brought about, not only by what may be called the orderly process of change, but 
by violent innovation by some strong and masterful Headman, such as the Jalina 
herein mentioned. The instance quoted in “ Kamilaroi and Kurnai” of half-sister 
marriage in a Kamilaroi tribe looks much like such a case, and the evidence that in 
some of these tribes superior authority is acknowledged in the Ipai class supports the 
view. 
The impulses which produced change in custom may, as it seems to me, have 
acted from within the community, and the causes which set those impulses in motion 
must have been diverse in kind and degree; they must have arisen at different times 
during the long age in which the aborigines have roamed over Australia. Changes 
have, therefore, been produced in the different tribes, of different degrees of intensity, 
and at different times, or it may be also that analogous changes were not in progress 
in the tribes affected by them at precisely the same time. However this may have 
been, it is worthy of note that the changes in custom affecting the social organisation, 
the class divisions, marriage, and descent, have all been in one great direction, 
following parallel courses in a line of advance on the same road along which the 
civilised races of the world have already long since passed. 
The changes which have taken place have been from the general to the special, 
from group marriage to individual marriage, from a group relationship to a 
specialisation of the different group relations. These are precisely such changes as 
might have been forecast from a consideration of the laws which have governed the 
evolution of language and of society. 
