Ecology
Wik-Mungkan territory covered a strip of land from 30 to 50 miles wide running parallel to the Gulf of Carpentaria, but separated from it by coastal peoples such as the Wik-Natera or Wik-Kalkan who lived south of the Archer River. Their land, extending over 7,800 square kilometres (3,000 sq mi), was watered by five major watercourses, the Watson, Archer, Kendall, Holroyd and Edward rivers flowing down to the west of the Great Dividing Range to the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. A variety of distinct habitats exist, from flat woodlands to mangrove to rocky ridged spurs and poor melon hole land, the last separating them from the peoples to their east.
The year had two seasons-the dry May to November period under south-east winds, broken by the onset of storms and humid conditions with the brief wet season, beginning in November, with north-westerlies blowing in from December continuing through to April, resulting in extensive flooding of the coastal flatlands. A division of labour existed, with men hunting and women foraging, armed with a digging stick (katjan) and a dillybag. Yams (mai watea) and arrowroot (mai woppa) were a wet season staple, followed by waterlilies. In the wet season they camped in the upper reaches of the riverine system. Their inland hunting grounds were of three types: grass plains, river courses and thickly timbered forest lands. As the dry-season came to an end, they would build dams and kiddles to trap fish swimming up river as the rains began to restock the rivers. A particular type of vine containing a poisonous substance that would spur fish to leap out of the water was used to dose waterholes, allowing them to be captured from the banks.
Fire-stick farming was employed annually at the start of the dry season to flush wallabies and other prey from their grassland haunts, or, once a patch of land was consumed by a controlled blaze, to allow the women to fossick for bandicoots, snakes, goannas and other small game in their burrows. They trained their dogs to refrained from eating prey they managed to quarry.
Abundant food could be readily secured on the grass plains: nutritious roots and fruit could be culled by foraging, while hunting could rely on wallaby, ducks, ibis, flying foxes jabiru and emu. The wooded hill areas abounded in iguana, snakes and opossums, while extensive stands of flowering bloodwood and messmate yielded up plentiful supplies of honey. The rivers were well stocked with fish, such as sardine-fish, Catfish, Rock cod, white fish, schnapper, barramundi and stingray, all speared from swiftly paddled canoes breasting the incoming tides and even the poor country around the Kendall river supplied rich stocks of bream. Two types of crocodile were hunted, the upper river Freshwater crocodile and the estuarine saltwater crocodile: the eggs of the former were a winter staple in the upland rivers. The roots of a coastal swamp rush called panja was an important vegetable source towards the end of the dry season. Cooking ovens were improvised by lighting a fire in a hole, fanning it to flame with feathers plucked from a black-necked stork (jabiru). Pieces of ant-bed (termite mound) were then spread on the coals, and food laid out on top, with a tea-tree bark cover placed on top, and the whole lidded with sand to make a slow bake.
Increase ceremonies, while thought of as ensuring the food supplies of any one clan in whose territory they were conducted, also catered to distant relatives in other peoples who would be invited in to partake of the abundance once a given territorial group had had its fill.
Social and kinship system
McConnel's initial reports state that the clans were patrilineal. Claude Lévi-Strauss reports that though marriage among the Wik-Mungkan was matrilateral, [lower-alpha 1] marrying one's father's sister's daughter, and one's mother's brother's daughter, was allowed. A strict ban prohibited only bi-lateral cousin marriage.
Exogamy meant kinship networks ran through the clans, meaning that in times of local abundance in any variety of food stock, relatives outside a given clan area would be called in to partake of the bounty, creating on such occasions large encampments.) The elderly were well-cared for, having a right to certain foods forbidden to the more active people, who would supply them with choice snake and stingray food that was taboo to the younger members. The centre of family life was the hearth, reflected in the words for father (pan tuma: man of the fire) and mother (wantya tuma: woman of the fire).
McConnel described the Wik-Mingkan kinship and marriage system in 1934, arguing that, in its essentials, with minor variants, it could be extended to apply to all the Wik peoples. Affirming that in its general lines it reflected the general structure typical of Australian Aboriginal peoples, differing only in lacking a 4 or 8 section system, she discerned 5 features:(1) localised exogamous (patrilineal) clans; (2) with each people divided into two exogamous moieties; (3) with sororate and levirate marriage; (4) modified cross-cousin marriage; (5) with a comprehensive classificatory terminology.
Runaway marriage (maritji) was accepted as orthodox if the kinship link considered the couple's relationship licit. When mimicked by theatrical performances of the practice at large corroborees, maritji often elicits much laughter. Bride kidnapping, though traditionally practiced when no spouse could be obtained by the usual means, was, according to a white informant, undertaken by formal prearrangements made between the raiding people and the group from whom the woman was to be "snatched", so the actual raid was a symbolic artifice rather than an act of violent intertribal competition for a scarce resource.
The Wik-Mungkan call coastal neighbours north of the Archer and Watson rivers "bad speech" (Wik-waiya) peoples (such as the Anjingit, the Aritingiti, the Adetingiti and Lengiti) because they find their languages difficult to understand.
Totem system by territory
The word for totem was pulwaiya, roughly "old forebear", whose place of origin thereby became an auwa or totemic ritual site, and the place where one returns to on death. The Wik-Mungkan are thought to have been composed of approximately 30 patrilineal clans, each with distinct territorial rights, before the white man's arrival. A clan could have more than one totem, and they were complementary to each other, not reduplicated. [lower-alpha 2] One's clan totem influenced one's birth name. Thus a member of the "meteor" totem could receive the name Aka(ground)-battana (hits), and the kangaroo totem could endow a child with the name pampointjalama (kangaroo sniffs the air and smells a man). The prefix mai refers to vegetable food (maiyi), while that of min refers to meat (minya).
Where confusion exists as to the precise state of a clan, those which are numbered (a) (b) etc., indicate presumed sections of one clan, though the totemic groups thus listed may have been independent.
Archer River [lower-alpha 3]
Kendall River
Holroyd River
Edward River
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