Uncontained subjects: 'population' and 'household' in remote Aboriginal Australia

The particular abstractions represented by the terms 'population! and 'household' are central categories in modern demographic analysis. They form the organizing principles of national censuses in Western liberal democracies such as Australia, and profoundly influence both the collection methodology and the content of the collection instrument. This paper argues that these categories are founded on a particular metaphor, the 'bounded container', that broadly reflects the population and household structures of sedentary societies such as mainstream Australia. Bounded discrete categories are conducive to the collection of reliable census data in such societies, since 'unbounded' behaviours can be controlled for by statistical means. However, remote Aboriginal populations behave in radically unbounded ways. This paper proposes that the dominant metaphor underlymg Yolngu (and much remote Aboriginal) sociality is, instead, the nodal network. It then explores the consequences of attempting to 'capture' nodal network societies in terms of models based on the bounded container

Mutual Conversion? The Methodist Church and the Yolgnu, with particular reference to Yirrkala

A history of the Methodist Overseas Mission in Arnhem Land has yet to be written. The resources for such a task are immensely rich, including archival sources and the writings of the missionaries themselves. While not possessing its own historian, as the Anglican missions do in the person of Reverend Keith Cole, 1 the Methodist Church produced a number of educated and passionate superintendents who wrote detailed accounts of their times and experiences

Re-engaging the economic with the social

'Re-engaging the economic with the social', a submission and response to the Australian Government's Increasing Indigenous Economic Opportunity: a discussion paper on the future of the CDEP and Indigenous employment programs. This submission engages with perceived failures in the discussion paper's conceptualisation of the CDEP target population, and provides several case studies from the Yolngu perspective

Eye To Eye

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. When my daughter turned twelve, we stood toe-to-toe, and she looked me directly in the eye. Clearly, she did not like what she saw. Overnight it seemed, I had grown small and she, tall; as my stature diminished, hers increased. She did everything right; I did everything wrong

Agency, contingency and census process: Observations of the 2006 Indigenous Enumeration Strategy in remote Aboriginal Australia

The Indigenous Enumeration Strategy (IES) of the Australian National Census of Population and Housing has evolved over the years in response to the perceived ‘difference’ of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations. Its defining characteristics are the use of locally recruited, mostly Indigenous collector interviewers, and the administration of a modified collection instrument in discrete Indigenous communities, mostly in remote Australia. The research reported here is unique. The authors, with the assistance of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, were able to follow the workings of the IES in the 2006 Census from the design of the collection instrument to the training of temporary census field staff at the Northern Territory’s Census Management Unit in Darwin, to the enumeration in four remote locations, through to the processing stage at the Data Processing Centre in Melbourne. This allowed the tracking of data from collection to processing, and an assessment of the effects of information flows on the quality of the data, both as input and output. This study of the enumeration involved four very different locations: a group of small outstation communities (Arnhem Land), a large Aboriginal township (Wadeye), an ‘open’ town with a majority Aboriginal population (Fitzroy Crossing), and the minority Aboriginal population of a major regional centre (Alice Springs). A comparison between these contexts reveals differences that reflect the diversity of remote Aboriginal Australia, but also commonalities that exert a powerful influence on the effectiveness of the IES, in particular very high levels of short-term mobility. The selection of sites also allowed a comparison between the enumeration process in the Northern Territory, where a time-extended rolling count was explicitly planned for, and Western Australia, where a modified form of the standard count had been envisaged. The findings suggest that the IES has reached a point in its development where the injection of ever-increasing resources into essentially the same generic set and structure of activities may be producing diminishing returns. There is a need for a new kind of engagement between the Australian Bureau of Statistics and local government and Indigenous community-sector organisations in remote Australia. The agency and local knowledge of Indigenous people could be harnessed more effectively through an ongoing relationship with such organisations, to better address the complex contingencies confronting the census process in remote Indigenous Australia

Seeing Aboriginal art in the gallery

One of the great embarrassments confronting the art world in the postcolonial context is the recent history of the exclusion of much of the world’s ‘artistic’ production from the hallowed walls of the fine art galleries of the West (Sally Price’s ‘civilised places’). One might ask: how was it that it was excluded for so long and who is to blame for keeping all this art out? However, rather than attributing blame, it is much more interesting to analyse the historical process of its inclusion