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

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

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

Indigenous household structures and ABS definitions of the family: what happens when systems collide, and does it matter?

In August 2001 three CAEPR researchers, each based in a different community, observed the conduct of the national Census in the Northern Territory and Cape York Peninsula. The purposes of this research were twofold: to evaluate the ABS’s Indigenous Enumeration Strategy as it was applied in this particular context, and to assess the quality of the data that were collected. This paper, based on research in a remote Northern Territory outstation community, focuses on the questions that were designed to elicit information about household structure. The data collected in the census are a vital tool for the formulation of policy across a very broad range of issues. Pursuing the red herring of forcing Indigenous families and households into mainstream categories is a waste of time and effort, and diverts attention from the significant underlying issues. If the quantifiable population characteristics of Indigenous Australians are to emerge clearly from census data, the questions on the Indigenous form need to be as culturally neutral as possible, in order to minimise misunderstanding on the part of the Indigenous interviewers and respondents. The designers of the census need to step back from the questions on household structure, and decide precisely what information they wish to elicit. Is it information primarily about family structure, or information they wish to elicit. Is it information primarily about family structure, or about the size, age distribution, gender composition, and dependency structures of households? If it is decided that the latter data are the most important, one possibility which would sit more comfortably with the Indigenous facts, would be to add a new type of household to the ABS list—the extended family household

Anthropological theory and government policy in Australia's Northern Territory: The hegemony of the "mainstream"

In this article, we set up a dialogue between two theoretical frameworks for understanding the developing relationships between indigenous Australians and the encapsulating Australian society. We argue that the concept of "the intercultural" de-emphasize

Cross-cultural categories, Yolngu science and local discourses

I will not attempt in this paper to produce a cross-cultural definition of science; a definition of Western science is problematical enough in itself. What I will be concerned with is the local discourse between Yolngu people of North-east Arnhem land and Europeans (represented by the settler Australian population) as evidence of the kind of context in which such definitions might be produced, or, failing definitions, understandings that, in some areas, members of different cultures are able to see a relationship between their systems of knowledge. The area of discourse includes topics that are familiarly bracketed in Western educational curricula as ‘science’. These cannot, however, be taken as unproblematically classified in the West, since not only are the specific boundaries under challenge, but also in some cases the very idea of boundaries between the topics is being questioned. Two obvious topics that recur in discussions about science are knowledge of natural phenomena and systems of logic or thinking about the nature of the world