The
result is more disastrous than one unfamiliar with Australian
relationships would imagine; for these relationships are so
complicated that to unravel them takes, in the words of Howitt (59),
"a patience compared with which that of Job is furious irritability."
These prohibitions are not to be trifled with. They extend even to war
captives. If a couple disregard them and elope, they are followed by
the indignant relatives in hot pursuit and, if taken, severely
punished, perhaps even put to death. (Howitt, 300, 66.) Of the
Kamilaroi the same writer says:
"Should a man persist in keeping a woman who is denied to
him by their laws, the penalty is that he should be driven
out from the society of his friends and quite ignored. If
that does not cure his fondness for the woman, his male
relatives follow him and kill him, as a disgrace to their
tribe, and the female relatives of the woman kill her for
the same reason."
It is a mystery to anthropologists how these marriage taboos, these
notions of real or fancied incest, could have ever arisen. Curr
(I.,236) remarks pointedly that
"most persons who have any practical knowledge of our
savages will, I think, bear me out when I assert that,
whatever their objections to consanguineous marriages may
be, they have no more idea of the advantages of this or that
sort of breeding, or of any laws of Nature bearing on the
question, than they have of differential calculus.
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