Copulation is not the cause of conception
Francis James Gillen
[Dr. Frodsham, the Bishop of North Queensland,] told me that he had travelled among the Arunta as well as among various North Queensland tribes, and he asked me whether I was aware that the Australian aborigines do not believe children to be the fruit of the intercourse of the sexes. His lordship informed me that this incredulity is not limited to the Arunta, but is shared by all the North Queensland tribes with which he is acquainted, and he added that it forms a fact which has to be reckoned with in the introduction of a higher standard of sexual morality among the aborigines, for they do not naturally accept the true explanation of conception and childbirth even after their admission into mission stations. The Bishop also referred to a form of communal or group marriage, which he believes to be practised among aboriginal tribes he has visited on the western side of the Gulf of Carpentaria…
“The result of thirteen years’ observation has led me to conclude that while anthropologists may be right in placing the social organisation of the blacks at one end of the ladder of development and Western democracy at the other, they are absurdly wrong in thinking that they can carry the analogy into respective intelligence or even physical development. Speaking from observation I can say deliberately that the Australian blacks, when they are rationally treated, are capable of intellectual development — in one case also to my personal knowledge — of no mean order…
“With further reference to the subject of my conversation with you at Liverpool last year, we often have girls, who are sent to the mission, enceinte [pregnant], and we never dwell upon any wrongfulness of their condition. We have no trouble afterward, neither have we found, at any rate for many years, that the girls persist in the belief, practically universal among the northern tribes, that copulation is not the cause of conception.
“I was speaking this week to the Rev. C. W. Morrison (M.A. of Emmanuel College, Cambridge), who is acting head of the Yarrubah Mission. He told me that among the tribes around the Cairns district in North Queensland the acceptance of food from a man by a woman was not merely regarded as a marriage ceremony, but as the actual cause of conception. Mr. Morrison also added that monogamy was the custom in these tribes except in the case of sisters. This latter fact is borne out by my own observation. One aboriginal, whom I know well, married four sisters and stayed at that, but whether from principle or prudence I am unable to say.”
FRAZER James George: Beliefs and Customs of the Australian Aborigines. Man, Vol. 9 (1909), 145–147
