Food, conception and totem

A.R. Brown (1912)

In the Ingarda tribe at the mouth of the Gascoyne River, I found a belief that a child is the product of some food of which the mother has partaken just before her first sickness in pregnancy. My principal informant on this subject told me that his father had speared a small animal called bandaru, probably a bandicoot, but now extinct in this neighbourhood. His mother ate the animal, with the result that she gave birth to my informant. He showed me the mark in his side where, as he said, he had been speared by his father before being eaten by his mother. A little girl was pointed out to me as being the result of her mother eating a domestic cat, and her brother was said to have been produced from a bustard. It may be noted that the girl (the elder of the two) was a half-caste, probably, from appearance, of a Chinese father, and had a hare-lip. The younger brother was a typical blackfellow boy. The bustard was one of the totems of the father of these two children and, therefore, of the children themselves. This, however, seems to have been purely accidental. In most cases the animal to which conception is due is not one of the father’s totems. The species that is thus connected with an individual by birth is not in any way sacred to him. He may kill or eat it; he may marry a woman whose conceptional animal is of the same species, and he is not by the accident of his birth entitled to take part in the totemic ceremonies connected with it.

I found traces of this same belief in a number of the tribes north of the Ingarda, but everywhere the belief seemed to be sporadic; that is to say, some persons believed in it and others did not. Some individuals could tell me the animal or plant from which they or others were descended, while others did not know or in some cases denied that conception was so caused. There were to be met with, however some beliefs of the same character. A woman of the Buduna tribe said that native women nowadays bear half-caste children because they eat bread made of white flour. Many of the men believed that conception is due to sexual intercourse, but as these natives have been for many years in contact with the whites this cannot be regarded as satisfactory evidence of the nature of their original beliefs.

BROWN A.R. (1912): Beliefs Concerning Childbirth in Some Australian Tribes. Man, 12, 180–181 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2787775