The CC had planned for work on the collection itself to begin first thing on the Monday morning with the development of the Dwelling Check Lists. When no interviewers had arrived at the operations centre by mid-morning, the CC drove off to look for them. It turned out that the interviewer on whom so much depended, because of the unparalleled knowledge mentioned previously, was urgently required in the Post Office to sort the incoming mail (which included Centrelink cheques). The dearth of individuals with the necessary skills and education levels is a well-documented feature of remote Aboriginal communities such as Aurukun. One consequence is the high demands and stress placed on those relatively few Aboriginal people who do have the formal capacity (and the willingness) to undertake administrative tasks. While this individual was critical to the conduct of the census, he was also essential to a number of other concurrent and ongoing community administration processes. This was also true of a number of the other Aboriginal interviewers, for whom managing their work for the census also necessarily included taking account of competing demands on their time from other formal work commitments.
More broadly, the CC had to demonstrate considerable flexibility in managing the census collection process, including managing the work of the interviewers. Competing demands on the interviewers' time came not only from other work commitments, but also from within the Aboriginal domain, in terms of their involvement in the flux of everyday social and political process including commitments arising through formal and informal - 18 - responsibilities to kin. Furthermore, the quite intensive and demanding nature of the actual census collection work was not necessarily in keeping with Wik attitudes and practices regarding 'work'. While obtaining an accurate census count and its ancillary information may objectively have been of importance, and this had been explained to the interviewers, it is typically the exigencies of mundane life which provide the imperatives for Wik people (Martin 1993). This of course was not just the case for the interviewers, but indeed for other Wik residents in terms of their participation in the census.
This inevitably meant that the only effective census methodology was to work within the parameters set by the ebb and flow of life within the township, and the CC was clearly very aware of this factor. One important consequence of this was that it would not have been possible to complete the census over the nominal census night of Tuesday 7 August, and like census collections in other remote Indigenous communities the collection necessarily had to be conducted over a more or less extended period. This of course has implications for the accuracy of the broader census—for example, given a highly mobile population in some regions, conducting the census over an extended period across a region may have the potential to lead to both double counting of some individuals and the missing of others.
However, it also has implications for the type of information collected directly by census interviewers in remote communities, since much (but not all) of the additional time required relates to the level of detail collected on each SIPF that is elicited from respondents, rather than (for example) from local administrative data sets. This in turn relates to what the central focus of the census should be for such remote populations; the basic demographic profile, or the wider questions covered in the personal forms. This issue is raised in the other case studies in this volume.
Effective and appropriate management of the overall census process in Aurukun therefore involved management of such factors as the periodic unavailability of interviewers, provision of proactive support and assistance to interviewers, and being able to direct the actual collections to take advantage of opportunistic lulls in the ebb and flow of community life and its priorities, for both interviewers and general residents. It therefore required a quite difficult balance between flexibility (in dealing with the high levels of mobility and the various exigencies arising during the collection process), and systematicity (in ensuring that the collection encompassed as far as possible all Aurukun residents, and that the accompanying paperwork, particularly the forms, was systematically processed and stored).
Eventually, by late morning on Monday 6 August, the main Aboriginal interviewer was able to leave his other work and come down to the census centre. Together with the CC, he worked systematically through the Shire Council map of the township, assigning family names to each of the dwellings in each sector for the purposes of developing a preliminary the Dwelling Check List. The 'family name' which he assigned was essentially that of the person whom he considered the most significant in the household, equivalent to 'person 1' of the SIHF.
- 19 -However, in many cases a particular dwelling would be considered to be that of an individual who was actually living elsewhere in the township (and sometimes away from Aurukun altogether). Also, the 'family name' assigned to a particular household on the Dwelling Check List would often not be that of many or even most of the residents, who could for instance be in-laws, nephews, nieces, visitors, and so on.
A further difficulty was occasioned by the fact that the initial map provided by the Aurukun Shire Council was out of date. With the help of the principal Aboriginal interviewer, a quite significant number of vacant or unoccupied dwellings were identified and marked on the map. These ranged from derelict houses awaiting either refurbishment or demolition, to houses temporarily vacant under ritual restrictions following deaths. As well, houses constructed since the time that the map had been drawn up were marked and numbered. Even so, once interviewers started the actual work of filling in forms in each sector, a number of changes had to be made to the Dwelling Check List for certain sectors.
Interviewer teams that I observed usually—but not always—started the gathering of information on the SIHF and SIPFs with statements about what the census broadly entailed, and of its significance in terms of getting an accurate count of the population so that Aurukun could receive the necessary levels of funding for housing and other infrastructure.
The teams had to be very flexible, and adapt their interviews to the flux of social life in the township. This meant working around the 'wages or welfare payments, alcohol consumption, conflict and dislocation' cycle to which Aurukun was subjected, like many other remote communities with liquor outlets. It also meant that if there was a group playing cards at a dwelling (a major social and economic activity within Aurukun), the interviewers would leave it till a later time, as it would have caused embarrassment and possibly hostility to interrupt the game.
The procedure usually started with the interviewer attempting to elicit the names and relevant details of residents for the SIHF, before then moving to the SIPFs. In some cases, the Aboriginal interviewer sat beside the respondent, filling in most of the information himself without directly questioning the respondent who watched closely as he wrote it down. In others, people were reluctant to come out of their dwellings and assist in filling out a SIPF. I was advised that one Aboriginal male-only interviewer team had difficulties in eliciting responses from younger women. However, in the cases I observed, I was not aware that this might have arisen because of kinship-based or other restrictions between the person and the interviewer. Rather, it seemed to derive from a strong resistance to being involved in an activity in which the person was totally disinterested. In such instances, the interviewer respected the right of that individual to refuse to participate, in accordance with the importance accorded by Wik to the principle of personal autonomy, and filled in as much of the form as he could himself, with assistance or corroboration from relations on certain questions.
- 20 -The principal Aboriginal interviewer frequently used humour as a device to circumvent the intrinsically alien nature of the census process. For example, in filling in the form for a young woman classified as his daughter-in-law, and therefore notionally subject to avoidance restrictions, he joked his way through the questions, for example: 'You man or women, eh?', and 'You Island woman eh?'. The use of humour was particularly helpful in eliciting information from children, bringing them and their sharp capacity for observation into the census enterprise. For Wik people at least, this could be construed as 'culturally appropriate' behaviour, since by inverting the usual behavioural codes, the Aboriginal interviewer was also framing the enterprise of collecting the census information as an inversion of normal appropriate behaviour. Implicitly, then, he was also creating a sardonic commentary on the 'silliness' of the census and its questions which was only fully appreciated by Wik people themselves. This particular mechanism would certainly not necessarily be appropriate for other groups, and required an insider's sophisticated knowledge of the bounds of acceptable practice.
Some individuals were provisionally listed as residents of a particular dwelling, but a note was made to check and validate their place of residence at the end of the census collection since they moved between a number of households. This was particularly the case for many children and young men.