James George Frazer

“ In personal appearance, and to some extent also in manner, no two men could well differ more widely than the fast friends, Fison and Howitt. Fison was a big burly man, powerfully and heavily built, with a jolly good-humoured face, a bluff almost jovial manner, tender-hearted but bubbling over with humour, on which the remembrance of his clerical profession, as well as his deep, absolutely unaffected piety, perhaps imposed a certain restraint. Howitt was a small man, with a spare but well-knit frame, light, active, and inured to exposure and fatigue. ”

“ All we can do is to make allowance as far as possible for our individual upbringing, character, and surroundings, to calculate as exactly as we can the personal equation, and to correct our impressions accordingly. If we have done this, and if we are, like Mr. Fison, always ready to pull to pieces the old mental image, at whatever cost, and to build it up again on better evidence, then we have done all that is humanly possible to attain to the truth. ”

“ At first he farmed land at Caulfield, near Melbourne, which belonged to his uncle, Dr. Godfrey Howitt. But the humdrum life of a farmer was not to his taste, and he betook himself to the more adventurous pursuit of cattle-droving. On one of the journeys which he made to the Murray River for the purpose of bringing down herds of cattle to Melbourne, he chanced to fall in with Lorimer Fison. They met and parted, little thinking how closely associated they were to be in after life.
This was the great era of exploration in Australia. ”

“ Right of Succession.—A remarkable custom among the Garos is that a man who marries the favourite daughter of a household has to marry his mother-in-law in the event of the death of his father-in-law, and through her succeeds to all the property, which thus descends through the female line. The sons receive nothing, but have to look to the family into which they marry for their establishment in life. ”

“ And, as the custom of exogamy combined with the classificatory system of relationship is not confined to Australia, but is found among many races in many parts of the world, it becomes probable that a large part, if not the whole, of the human race have at one time, not necessarily the earliest, in their history permitted the practice of incest, that is, of the closest interbreeding, and that, having perceived or imagined the practice to be injurious, they deliberately forbade and took effective measures to prevent it. ”

“ Yet this reflection or picture must itself be pieced together by the imagination; for imagination, the power of inward vision, is as necessary to science as to poetry, whether our aim is to understand our fellow-men, to unravel the tangled skein of matter, or to explore the starry depths of space. Only we must remember that, if imagination is a necessary, it is not a perfect or infallible instrument of science: it is apt to take its colours from the eye that uses it, to tremble with every vibration that pulses along the nerves of the observer. ”

“ A. W. Howitt and myself, there is a long chapter containing a most beautiful theory of the Kurnai system, which I worked out with infinite pains. It accounts for that system so completely and so satisfactorily that the Kurnai ought to be ashamed of themselves for having been perverse enough to arrive at their system by a different road, which further inquiry showed us most conclusively that they did. Students of anthropology who have read our work, and who still survive, will please accept this intimation that the theory aforesaid is not worth a rush. ”

“ As all the marriages which these rules actually bar are abhorred by the Australian aborigines, it is natural to infer that the effect which the rules produce is the effect which they were designed to produce; in other words, that the rules, which have certainly the appearance of being artificial, are really so, having been devised to accomplish the very object which in point of fact they do very successfully achieve. If this inference is sound, the deliberate institution of the Australian marriage system may be taken as proved. ”

“ The exchange of sisters in marriage [9] produced as its natural consequence the marriage of cross-cousins; and the marriage of cross-cousins in its turn produced by a natural consequence the marriage with the mother's brother's widow. All three customs arose simply and naturally through economic motives. Men exchanged their sisters in marriage because that was the cheapest way of getting a wife; men married their cross-cousins for a similar reason; and men married their widowed mothers-in-law because that was the only way of enjoying the old ladies' property. ”

“ We shall not see the rush of cabs, omnibuses, and motors, nor be stunned by their long continuous roar; we shall not see the ivy-mantled walls lapped by the sluggish stream, the old gardens dreaming in the moonlight of the generations that are gone; we shall not hear the drowsy murmur of fountains plashing in summer days or the tinkle of the chapel bell calling to prayer, when the shadows lengthen across the greensward and in the west the stars begin to sparkle above the fading gold of evening. ”

“ If we are really intent on knowing the truth, we must strive to dismiss or disregard these nearer, these familiar sights and sounds, whether harsh and ugly or beautiful and sweet, and to fix our thoughts on the strange and distant scene; and thus by long and patient effort we may come to see in the magic mirror of the mind a true reflection of a life which differs immeasurably from our own. ”

“ From this passage we learn that a man is expected to marry his cross-cousin, the daughter of his mother's brother, in the lifetime of his uncle, and that on his uncle's death he is expected to marry the widow, his mother-in-law. Thus once more we are informed, on the best authority, that marriage with a mother-in-law, the widow of a mother's brother, follows as a consequence from a previous marriage with a cross-cousin, her daughter. ”

“ On the other hand, most of those who are best acquainted with the Australian aborigines, not through books but through personal intercourse, appear to be of opinion that their social systems are the fruit of design, and that they were deliberately devised to ensure the results which they unquestionably achieve. The latter was the opinion of Fison and Howitt, and it is the opinion of their distinguished friends and disciples, Spencer and Gillen. ”

“ Day after day, over ground paved with sharp splinters of flinty stone, through deep dry gorges in the desolate hills, lined with half-dead mulga scrub and studded with great boulders, the explorers and their beasts slowly picked their way, footsore and weary under the burning sun, till coming out on the edge of a bluff they suddenly beheld the great sandy desert of the Cooper's Creek country spread out below and beyond them. ”

“ He is not an heir, for as a male he cannot inherit, and the person whose nokrom he is has nothing to leave, but he is the channel through which the 'motherhood' of the husband maintains its hold on the property of the wife. When possible, this nokrom is the son of the man's sister, and he is expected to marry his uncle's daughter, and the widow also when his uncle dies. ”

“ Fison's missionary work in Fiji I have borrowed mainly from an obituary notice by his old and intimate friend, the experienced South Sea missionary, Dr. George Brown, who says of him: "Dr. Fison and I were close friends for many years, and during those years I had the privilege of sharing in his joys and of knowing more of his trials and difficulties perhaps than any other man. He never "wore his heart upon his sleeve," and so his life often appeared to others to be easier and more free from trouble than it really was. ”

“ It is to be hoped that this warning will be laid to heart by all who view savages through a telescope, whether from a club or a college window. If our glass be a good one and we apply our eye to the end of it steadily, undistracted by the sights and sounds about us, we shall see and hear strange things, things very unlike those which may be seen and heard either in Pall Mall and Piccadilly or in the grassy courts and echoing cloisters of an ancient university town. ”

“ Howitt acutely pointed out how among the Australian savages a certain social advance has been made in the better watered and more fertile districts, particularly on the coast, while the more archaic forms of society linger in the dry and desert interior, from which he inferred that in Australia the first steps towards civilisation have been conditioned by a heavier rainfall and a consequent greater abundance of food. ”

“ When all is done, we may still be in error, but the error will be pardonable.
While Mr. Fison was pursuing his enquiries among the Australian tribes from 1871 to 1875, he was also engaged in ministerial work in New South Wales and Victoria. Returning to Fiji in 1875, [8] he resumed his observations of native Fijian life, and contributed to The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland a series of valuable papers dealing with burial customs, land tenure, riddles, rites of initiation, and the classificatory system of relationship. ”

“ Anthropology in general, and Australian anthropology in particular, has lately suffered two very heavy losses by the deaths of the Rev. Lorimer Fison and Dr. A. W. Howitt, two old friends and colleagues, who passed away at an interval of a few months,—Mr. Fison dying in December, 1907, and Dr. Howitt in March, 1908. To their insight, enthusiasm, and industry we owe the first exact and comprehensive study of the social organisation of the Australian tribes ”

“ Government officials in every department of the service regarded him as a safe and trustworthy guide in all matters affecting the relations of the Government with the natives; and merchants and planters, some of whom at the outset had not been very friendly to the mission, greeted him affectionately and welcomed him to their homes, when his big burly form appeared in Levuka; for he was a man of genial manners and a ready wit, sometimes flavoured with a touch of sarcasm. The natives loved him because they knew that he loved them ”

“ First, they deny that the Australian savages are capable of thinking out a marriage system at once so complex and so regular. But this objection is outweighed by the testimony of those who best know the Australian aborigines personally, such as Dr. Howitt and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, [23] in whose opinion the natives are quite capable both of conceiving and of executing the system in question. That the natives understand their complex system perfectly, and work it smoothly and regularly, is certain. ”

“ A man cannot take to wife a girl of his own mahári, but must select from one of the maháris with whom his family have from time immemorial exclusively allied themselves. In some of the now noblest families there is but one mahári with which, as a rule, they can intermarry. This however is not irrefragable, and should maidens of that particular house be wanting, the young men may choose, or more correctly speaking, be chosen by a daughter of some other. ”

“ These things cannot but trouble and distort the images which print themselves on our brain; yet they are inevitable, since we cannot get outside of ourselves and contemplate the world from the standpoint of a purely abstract intelligence. ”

“ As to the former of these two requisites, one's natural tendency, especially in the beginning of the work, is to form a theory as soon as one has got hold of a fact; and, as to the latter, we are too apt to look at the facts in savagery from the mental standpoint of the civilised man. ”

“ Each man has thus many "fathers" who never begat him, and many "mothers" who never bore him; he calls many men and women his "brothers" and "sisters" with whom he has not a drop of blood in common; and he bestows the names of "sons" and "daughters" on many boys and girls, many men and women, who are not his offspring. ”

“ These systems are of extraordinary interest not merely in themselves, but in their bearing on the history of marriage in general. For the systems agree fundamentally with those practised by races in many other parts of the world ”

“ In the year 1860 an ill-fated expedition, equipped at lavish cost and led by Burke and Wills, had started from Melbourne amid the enthusiasm of the citizens to traverse Australia from south to north. When month after month passed and no word came of the explorers, great uneasiness was felt in Victoria, and on June 18th, 1861, it was decided to send out a search party to their relief Of this party Mr. Howitt was appointed leader. ”

“ It will hardly be denied that these systems, particularly the rule of the four-class or eight-class organisation, that children can never belong to the class either of their father or of their mother, have at least a superficial appearance of being artificial ”

“ The longed-for time came, or seemed to come, at last when he retired from the public service of Victoria in 1901. His retirement was unnoticed by the public and his official colleagues, who perhaps were hardly aware of the honour they had enjoyed in being associated with such a man. He now settled down to the quiet life of a student in his picturesque home at Metung, on the shore of the Gippsland Lakes. Gippsland is a pleasant and a beautiful country, with a climate in the lowlands like that of Italy. The orange grows well there; the mountains are high and snow-capped for months together ”

“ Howitt's life I am indebted to an obituary notice of him by his friend and disciple, Professor W. Baldwin Spencer, which appeared in The Victorian Naturalist, vol. xxiv., No. 12, April, 1908. I have also made some use of an obituary notice published in the Australian paper, The Argus, Monday, March 9th, 1908, p. 7. My notice of Dr. Howitt's explorations in Central Australia is taken mainly from his own reminiscences, as these have been graphically recorded by him in the address which he delivered as President of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science at Adelaide in 1907. ”

“ The machinery was, indeed, simple; it consisted merely in the bisection, whether single or repeated, of the whole community into two exogamous classes. In Australia the application of this machinery to effect this purpose is seen more clearly than in any other part of the world, because in many Australian tribes the bisection has been repeated oftener than anywhere else, or, rather, oftener than it is known to have been repeated elsewhere ”