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This paper deals primarily with Australian aboriginal society and culture, and compares these with the society and culture of white Australia in the special realm of the family. It assumes that white Australia is a complex but fundamentally coherent whole, and that aboriginal Australia can also be viewed as a coherent whole, irrespective of regional variations, for comparative purposes. The major distinction between the aboriginal family and the white family is a significant difference in the relationship between social structure and culture in the context of family. The only differentiations in modes of livelihood in an aboriginal tribe were the obvious ones based on age and sex. The familial cultures of aboriginal Australia exhibited a remarkable uniformity, even from tribe to tribe, compared with the diversity of familial cultures in white Australia, but the reverse is true of family structure. Earlier works on the aborigines had over-stressed "group marriage" to such an extent that the presence of some monogamists in the tribe was ignored. A typical aboriginal family consists of a man aged 50 years old or above, two wives, and children. Each family, whether polygynous or monogamous, constituted a separate camping unit with its own shelter and fire.