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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.

The social life of the primitive Australian aborigines has been a fascinating field of scientific interest and rheoretical speculation for several generations of European and American sociologists and social anthropologists. Knowledge of the native family and kinship systems and their associated esoteric totemic rites, for example, stimulated such social theorists as Emile Durkheim and Lewis H. Morgan. The present article is an attempt to present some results of investigations done in Australia. Special emphasis is given to the several typical forms of kinship found in Australia and the principles underlying the organization of the immediate family and larger kinship structures. A somewhat different method of kinship analysis, which applies not only to Australian but to any other systems, is used in an effort to remove the strangeness and complexity from the minds of those, who have not specialized in this field of family research. The kinship terms are always designating instruments organized around the individual who places his various kin by the use of them, and by so doing, also socially places himself as the designator. In other words, Ego anchored in his immediate family, looks out at his kinship world and places all the kindred in relation to himself by means of his kinship terms and in so doing also socially orientates himself.

This article informs that with the acceptance of a technique comes an opportunity to use it for making cross-cultural comparisons. There are now reports available of two Australian studies using the "Day at Home Questionnaire." The primary hypothesis underlying the present study is that there are no differences between the '"Day at Home" material from Australia and New Zealand. With a testing of this hypothesis as the main purpose, a description of the normal family patterns in Wellington, New Zealand, was also attempted. The Wellington sample is comparable both with the Melbourne sample and the Perth state school sample. The questionnaire asks about family decision making, action, and tension in 31 areas of family life. Being designed to obtain information about family structure from children, the 31 areas cover characteristic activities of a child's day at home. It should be stressed that the answers are those of children and thus reflect their knowledge of family behaviour. Whether the questionnaire can give useful or significant information about family structure in a particular culture will depend to a large extent on more general characteristics of that culture, and particularly on whether many second order decisions are made.

Familism is identified by a structural network of rights and duties which contributes to the support of the family and by the commitment of members to this system. These characteristics are found to be associated with the establishment and development of family farms among Macedo-Slav settlers in Australia. Evidence includes positive relationships between size of farm and a) number of adult males in the family labor force and b) familistic opinions. Descriptive data shows that integrated family work groups make possible accumulation of savings for land purchase and are the basis for efficient farm maintenance. Land purchasing power is increased by loans from kinsmen. The findings suggest that familism aids in acquisition of modern farms by immigrants as it did a half century earlier in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis of 1960–64 annual statistics of the Marriage Guidance Council of Victoria, Australia shows an increase in Council activity. Age at marriage was higher among Council clients than among people married and divorced in Victoria. No influence of the age difference between husband and wife was noted in those coming to divorce or to seek help from the Council. Marriages of longer duration and with greater numbers of children tended to seek help from the Council rather than a divorce. A slightly higher proportion of mixed Australian-immigrant marriages occurred among Council clients than among all marriages in Victoria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on differentials in age of women at completion of childbearing in Australia. Over 90 per cent of Australian women marry sometime before the age of 45. Of these, perhaps 85-90 per cent bear at least one child. The duration and timing of the period of childbearing will therefore be of considerable importance not only to the women and their families most directly involved but also to the society itself. This wider relevance arises, in part, from the nuclear family's importance as the primary unit of consumption; in part, from the degree to which childbearing determines the extent to which a woman will want, or be permitted or able, to engage in activities outside the home; and in part, from the importance of the timing and duration of childbearing to welfare and insurance programmes designed to protect children and their mothers. It has been pointed out that while the propaganda in support of family planning has tended to emphasize the timing of childbearing, the actual practice of family planning has tended to focus primarily on the limitation of childbearing.