Diane Barwick noted many years ago that ‘to be Aboriginal is to be born to, to belong to, to be loyal to a family’ (1974: 154) and certainly, kinship in Charters Towers is most often expressed in terms of ‘family’. However, little published ethnographic material exists for the region, and elsewhere in rural and urban Australia, on the practice of Aboriginal kinship expressed as ‘family’ and sometimes ‘mob’. The ethnographic detail I present in this chapter goes some way to addressing the gaps in the literature regarding ‘family’, and on Aboriginal surnames ‘as identifiers of collectivities’ (Sutton 1998: 55-56). Sutton (2003) has since provided exposition on the broad and general characteristics of what he refers to as Aboriginal ‘families of polity’, noting the ‘remarkable continuities across the continent’ of the land-affiliated ‘family’. The character, structure and practice of Charters Towers Aboriginal ‘family’ are parallel to the characteristics Sutton identifies in relation to ‘families of polity’. But I depart from that work by examining the transformations of ‘family’, by demonstrating some limitations of a structural account, and detailing the practice of ‘family’ around and outside of native title processes.