136 ON THE ORGANISATION OF AUSTRALIAN TRIBES. 
The principal points which thus stand out as prominent landmarks in this field 
of investigation are as follows :— 
1. The group is the sole unit. The individual is subordinate in the more 
primitive form of society, but becomes more and more predominant in the advancing 
social stages. Thus group marriage becomes at length completely subordinate to 
individual marriage, or even practically extinct and forgotten where descent has been 
changed from the female to the male line. 
2. An Australian tribe is not a number of individuals associated together by 
reason of relationship and propinquity merely. It is an organised society governed 
by strict customary laws, which are administered by the elder men, who in very 
many, if not in all, tribes exercise their inherited authority after secret consultation. 
3. There are probably in all tribes men who are recognised as the Headmen of 
class divisions, totems, or of local divisions, and to whom more or less of obedience 
is freely given. There are more than traces of the inheritance by sons (own or 
tribal) of the authority of these Headmen, and there is thus more than a mere 
foreshadowing of a chieftainship of the tribe in an hereditary form. 
4. Relationship is of group to group, and the individual takes the relationship 
of his group, and shares with it the collective and individual rights and liabilities. 
The general result arrived at will be that the Australian savages have a social 
organisation which has been developed from a state when two groups of people were 
living together with almost all things in common, and when within the group there 
was a regulated sexual promiscuity. 
The existence of the two exogamous inter-marrying groups seems to me to almost 
require the previous existence of an undivided commune, from the segmentation of 
which they arose. The evidence which I have collected, and which I have elsewhere 
noted as to the occasional recurrence of license, even in the class divisions 
themselves, is most important as indicating a reversion to ancient practice. The 
aborigines themselves recognise the former existence of the undivided commune in 
their legends, but I do not rely upon this as having the force of evidence. * 
It seems to me that the once existence of such an undivided commune may well 
be provisionally accepted as being in the highest degree probable. The evolutionist 
is led to its contemplation logically. The special creationist may accept it as showing, 
if it pleases him to place the matter in that light, to what a pitch of moral 
degradation man had fallen from his once high estate. 
* The Dieri and the Woeworung both say that their class divisions were formed in consequence of a command 
conveyed froin their great Supreme Being. 
