The Tjial were an

indigenous Australian Indigenous Australians or Australian First Nations are people with familial heritage from, and membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in Australia before British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups: the Aboriginal peoples ...

people of the

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory ...

who are now extinct.

Country

The Tjial's heartland, estimated by

Norman Tindale Norman Barnett Tindale AO (12 October 1900 – 19 November 1993) was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist. Life Tindale was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1900. His family moved to Tokyo and lived ther ...

to encompass about , lay around Old Limbunja. They were wedged between the lower Victoria River and the upper West Baines River.

Social organization

R. H. Mathews Robert Hamilton Mathews (1841–1918) was an Australian surveyor and self-taught anthropologist who studied the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, especially those of Victoria, New South Wales and southern Queensland. He was a member of the R ...

argued that the Tjial, together with two other tribes of the Victoria River Valley, namely the

Bilingara The Bilinarra, also spelt Bilingara and Bilinara, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Northern Territory. Language The Bilinarra language is classified as an eastern variety of one of the Pama-Nyungan Ngumbin languages. It is mutually ...

and Kwarandji, shared an identical classificatory pattern for intermarriage. Mathews argued that the system, classifying women into two cycles, each having "perpetual succession within itself," was one characterized by

matrilineal descent Matrilineality is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which each person is identified with their matriline – their mother's lineage – and which can involve the inheritance of ...

. His schema, he claimed, was quickly adopted by

Francis Gillen Francis James Gillen (28 October 1855 – 5 June 1912), also known as Frank Gillen and F. J. Gillen, was an early Australian anthropologist and ethnologist. He is known for his work with W. Baldwin Spencer, including their seminal work ''The ...

and Baldwin Spencer in their analysis of the class system of the Bingongina, which however redeployed the pattern to argue that the latter had but two moieties exhibiting

patrilineal descent Patrilineality, also known as the male line, the spear side or agnatic kinship, is a common kinship system in which an individual's family membership derives from and is recorded through their father's lineage. It generally involves the inheritanc ...

. A controversy over the interpretation of these data sets arose, with

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, FBA (born Alfred Reginald Brown; 17 January 1881 – 24 October 1955) was an English social anthropologist who helped further develop the theory of structural functionalism. Biography Alfred Reginald Radcli ...

effectively winning the day by arguing that the quarrel over matrilineal/patrilineal descent was confused by a failure to appreciate that "descent" in the abstract is meaningless, unless one takes into account the intricacies of class, phratry and totem relations, and irregularities in the overall system.

History of contact

Writing in 1901, R. H. Mathews classified the Tjial as an "important tribe", but by the time of Norman Tindale's writing, in 1978 they had become extinct. With their disappearance, their lands were taken over by the Ngaliwurru to their north.

Country

Social organization

History of contact

Alternative names

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