sought "to lay bare the essentials of primeval society, on the assumption that Australia was a storehouse of fossil customs." Mathews reacted against this approach, which was based on the social evolutionary ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, a patron of both Howitt and his collaborator Fison. Howitt and Fison argued that the vestiges of a primitive form of social organisation, called "group marriage", were evident in Aboriginal marriage rules. Group marriage, as defined by Morgan, presupposed that groups of men who called each other "brother" had collective conjugal rights over groups of women who called each other "sister". Thomas argues that Mathews found the idea of group marriage in Aboriginal society "counterintuitive" because "the requirements of totems and sections made marriage a highly restrictive business." The idea that group marriage exists in Aboriginal Australia is now dismissed by anthropological authorities as "one of the most notable fantasies in the history of anthropology." Male initiation Mathews believed that ceremonial life was integral to the social cohesion of Aboriginal communities. Initiation, he explained, was "a great educational institution" intended to strengthen the civil authority of the elders of the tribe. Mathews' first publication on initiation was a description of a Bora ceremony, held by Kamilaroi people at Gundabloui in 1894. He returned to the subject of Kamilaroi initiation in his last paper, "Description of Two Bora Grounds of the Kamilaroi Tribe" (1917), published the year before his death. In the intervening years, Mathews wrote extensively on ceremonial life, mostly in southeast Australia. More limited descriptions of ceremonies in South Australia and the Northern Territory were developed from data supplied by correspondents. Of his 171 anthropological publications, 50 are partly or wholly concerned with ceremony. The majority consist of a detailed description of the initiation ritual practised by a particular community. By 1897, Mathews could claim to have documented the male initiation ceremonies of about three quarters of the land mass of New South Wales. Mathews wrote primarily about the early stages of male initiation. However, he published some data on female initiation in Victoria and he was attentive to the activities that occurred in the women's camps while neophytes were out in the bush being inducted into rituals by the men. Mathews documented initiation at a time when the ceremonies were endangered by colonisation and the consequent loss of access to sacred ceremonial sites. Many of the performers in ceremony who were