IIOKN EXPEDITION— ANTIIUOPOLOOV. 
1G5 
Uiifiiitlifuluess iu a wife is frequently punished hy eauterizing the vulva in a 
horrible manner. 
As a general rule a young girl remains in her father’s camp until her breasts 
are well developed. If she has been assigned to a man, he is then invited to take 
her without further ceremony. In the rare cases where (he girl has not been 
assigned or, if the intended husband, perhaps a member of a distant group, be not 
available, she is sent to the lubras’ camp (erlukiverra). Here are camped all the 
unattached females of the tiibe. It very often happens that the girl has been 
given to a man who already possesses one or more wives, and these sometimes 
strenuously object to a further addition. In such a case, rather than disturb the 
harmony of his domestic life, the peace-loving blackfellow sends the girl to the 
erlukiverra^ where she awaits his pleasure. Being still a single girl, she is known 
as erliikivurrurina. 
The possible daughters of unmarried women are generally assigned, it may 
be years, before birth, so that it often happens that a woman is mothei-in-law 
{/ualcha-mura) to a man before she has a child, but whenever tlie female child is 
born she belongs irrevocably to the man to whom she has been assigned. 
The mother-in-law is obliged to furnish the man who marries her eldest 
daughter, or the man to whom this daughter is assigned, with all her spare hair for 
the pui-pose of making string for his head-dress or waist-girdle {ideara). She 
must not give her hair to anyone else, nor must the actual or prospective son-in-law 
accept hair from any other woman. This ollering of hair is generally made with 
some little ceremony by the father-in-law, or, if the mother-in-law be a widow, 
it is delivered through the daughter. 
Amongst the southern portion of this tribe when a girl is old enough to enter 
into sexual relations with her assigned husband, and when he has expressed a wish 
to cohabit with her, she is taken into the bush by the men of her husband’s class 
and then forcibly held down by four men, while a Hat piece of wood with a Idunt 
point at each end, prepared for the occasion, is thrust into the vagina. This 
operation being completed, the men in turn have connection with the girl, who is 
then instructed to go to her husband’s camp, where he awaits her arrival, having 
remained there while the brutal programme is taking jdace. Hero, at Alice 
Springs, the practice is less brutal, for though a stick is sometimes u.sed, it is the 
husband who performs the operation in his own camp, and he alone has the 
subsequent relations. 
