Mateship

Paul Jones profited by his brother′s position and counsel to improve himself in navigation and other professional studies, and was so successful in the endeavour, that he was deemed worthy of being appointed, on his return to Whitehaven, to a third mateship in a vessel in the slave-trade.

[…]as, for instance, the contract termed mateship, by which one whaling-ship meeting another forms a partnership in the proceeds of the expedition.

“Don′t mind if I do,” I answered, and thus begun a mateship that in the course of the next few months was to yield to each of us a fairly big experience of adventure, and, what was more acceptable to me, a good round sum in cash.

In traditional Australian culture, “mateship” was expected to bind people not only with their “best mates” or their “great mates” but also with their fellow-miners, fellow-shearers, fellow-“diggers”, fellow-soldiers, or fellow-footballers, and this expectation is one of this culture′s most enduring and characteristic features.¹⁹

While the camaraderie of war is usually an unspoken assumption, it seems peculiar that mateship, usually considered to be the core of the digger ethos and the ‘spirit of the Anzac’, barely appears in the diggers′ own expressions at this time.

A significant element of masculinity in Australian cultural history, and therefore Australian film, is mateship.[…]In times of war, mateship was a measure of the quality of relationship, as a mate was one whom a soldier would happily accompany into the jungle; that is, one who would be dependable and able to offer support.

The bush is the crucible of Australian national identity because it is here that mateship, that linchpin of Australian national identity, was forged.

The mateships of the three last-named animals are solitary, though in the case of wolves, the separated members of various mateships gather in packs during the winter months.

Further, in most cultures without systems of codified laws, long-term mateships are ritually sanctioned by the community. If we are not to have too provincial a conception of marriage, these mateships should also count as marriages.

In Homo sapiens we find two types of polygamous mateships, polygyny and polyandry, and social structures based on these are ordinarily called “families.” Relatively rare in man in an institutionalized form, polyandrous mateships appear to be absent in infrahuman primates.