Many people, especially children and teenagers, were not aware of even their approximate ages. Not infrequently, respondents were unsure of the ages of their adult children, of co-resident in-laws, or of actual or classificatory grandchildren living in the household.

These questions were enormously problematic for Wik people, both in terms of the opaqueness of what it was that was being sought, and in terms of their potential to seriously misrepresent a fundamental set of principles in Wik society (see also extended discussion in Morphy, this volume). One non-Wik interviewer stated that Q. 4 and Q. 5 were 'stupid' and 'offensive'.

The meaning of Q. 5 in particular caused considerable difficulty, including to the interviewers. Some respondents, for example, stated that their closest relation in the house was their child. Others however, ignored closer genealogical relations to nominate a person who had a closer classificatory or other relationship (see immediately below). For Wik people, 'closest' relation refers not just to genealogical distance, but also to the complex combination of that factor and social and political distance.

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Often after prompting from the interviewer, people gave their relation to 'person 1' in terms of the simple English equivalent of the Wik kinship term. However, the core conceptual problem is that the kinship system for Wik people provides a fundamental organising principle for their society. Wik kinship terminology is 'classificatory', in the sense that it does not simply refer to close consanguineal kin, but has specific principles by which terms can be extended to classes of people in certain actual or putative relationships. Thus, for example, one's grandfathers and grandmothers are not just the parents of one's actual father and mother, but also include all those persons who are classified in the same generation as one's parents' parents. As another instance, those whom one terms 'father' include not only one's genitor, and possibly also one's mother's husband, but additionally all those whom these individuals classify as 'brothers'.

'Person 1' therefore could have in his or her household more than one mother, a number of cousins, several grandfathers, and a number of sons and daughters who might or might not be their or their spouse's actual children. All these terms would be the English equivalents of particular Wik classificatory kinship terms. Additionally, it could not be assumed that even closely related individuals within the same household shared the same family name; for example, a child could be living with his mother but have taken his father's surname. Conversely, individuals sharing the same surname and living in the same household at the time of the census would not necessarily be from the same nuclear family, although in all likelihood they would be 'family' in the Wik sense.

More broadly, co-residence (even in the limited sense of who sleeps where), commensality, family groupings, and domestic economic units are not necessarily coterminous—for instance, people who live together may not eat together. In common with the situation reported for other Aboriginal groups (Altman 1987; Anderson 1982; Finlayson 1991; Smith 1991, 1992), basic economic and social units of Wik society are comprised of linked households rather than individual ones (Martin 1993). Furthermore, what Aboriginal people themselves refer to as 'families' are typically dispersed across a number of households, as shown in Fig. 2.1 overleaf. This describes a cluster comprising five households drawn from a single 'family' group based on a focal individual and his descendants.

It is clear from the above, and from the observations by Morphy (this volume), that the versions of household relationships recorded on personal forms and which inevitably used English equivalents of Wik kin-based reckoning of relationships could at best offer an impoverished version of the complex maps of social relations with which such traditionally-oriented Aboriginal people operate.

Of course, the census is not designed to reproduce ethnographic realities. However, one can presume that the inclusion of this question in the general census is an attempt to get a broad handle on the changing composition and structures of Australian households over time. The mismatch between the actual complexity of remote Indigenous households such as those in Aurukun, and the impoverished versions that would be recorded on census forms is such as to render the data essentially worthless for this purpose. At most, one could deduce that almost all households involved complex extended family structures.

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Furthermore, serious concerns must also be asked regarding the validity of the ABS using such data to ascertain family types within households, and the comparability of these findings with those from other sectors of the Australian community. Preliminary results from the 2001 Census provide a breakdown of 'family types' for Aurukun. Table 2.1 provides a summary of the published data, excluding for my purposes here those families where the reference person and/or spouse or partner did not state their Indigenous status. Family types are broken down into couple families with and without children, one-parent families, and other families.

The preceding argument suggests that it is quite invalid to attempt to derive such putative 'family structures' within a particular household, modelled as they are on those of the general Australian society, from the information recorded on the SIHFs and SIPFs. This information comprises for this purpose only the occupants' family names, the English terms for their relationships with 'person 1', and potentially the name of another person in the household to whom they are more closely related, and their relationship to that person. Attempting to cross-validate the nature of the relationship recorded by reference to family - 23 - names would add no additional rigour, for the reasons outlined above. Such doubts are exacerbated by, but not confined to, issues surrounding the difficulties people had in answering Q. 5 on the SIPF.

Responses to this question were treated idiosyncratically by individual respondents. Some with long-term de facto partners stated that they were 'married', while others in the same situation stated that they were 'never married'. At least one person in a long-term relationship refused on principle to have 'married' entered as his status, insisting that if it could not be entered as 'de facto' it had to be entered as 'not married'.

A series of well-known but nonetheless important issues underlie the difficulties people faced in responding to these questions. Firstly, there is the fact of high mobility rates. People may not be sure where they lived one year ago, or even more five years ago. Phrasing in terms of last 'dry season' as suggested on the SIPF did not necessarily assist. Asking if the dwelling where they are being enumerated is where they live 'most of the time' may not be particularly meaningful for (say a young man) who moves on a frequent basis between households, or even between communities. For many people, it is mobility which is the norm, rather than stability in terms of place of residence—I was asked by a middle-aged man who had visited me in Canberra two months previously if I still lived in the same house!

Related to the above, there is both a high attrition rate and a high construction rate of houses in Aurukun. For many respondents, it was difficult to specify where they lived (say) a year ago, because the house they thought they might have been in no longer existed. While some of the new houses had been erected on sites occupied by now-demolished houses, others were on entirely new sites. While the township streets were named, there was not a conventional lot numbering system. The numbers used on the form were those allotted to houses by the Shire Council, which were not on a street but on a township-wide basis. This made the coding of places of residence one and five years ago even more problematic.

These practical difficulties underlie another issue; it was not clear to the CC or interviewers whether the SIPF aimed to determine only mobility between communities or SLAs, or also that within communities and SLAs. The latter is well demonstrated in ethnographic studies (see discussion above) but whether this is a useful output from a national census may be another question.

I should note here that some difficulties were occasioned by Q. 6 on the SIHF (see Appendix B), regarding from whom the particular house was being rented. All housing stock in Aurukun (apart from government housing for teachers and so forth) is owned by the Aurukun Shire Council. People seemed to idiosyncratically fill in one of the 'community housing group' or 'Government housing authority'.

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These questions caused problems for interviewers and respondents alike. For a start, my observations of the relatively few Aboriginal people of mixed ancestry in Aurukun were that (for some) Q. 11 and (particularly) Q. 13 caused both embarrassment and bafflement. This is despite the fact that, unlike certain regions in the Northern Territory, to be of mixed descent is not the subject of adverse comment by other Wik Aboriginal people. Rather, the question directly raised (in a semi-public context) the issue of the individual's paternity. Wik interviewer, respondent, and Wik audience, would all have known in each case the imputed paternity of the individual, since such matters are the stuff of everyday gossip and speculation. However, respondents of full descent were not confronted with the same dilemma, whether or not there might be speculation about their actual paternity, since Q. 11 and Q. 13 allowed them to still preserve a general anonymity.

Questions 11 and 12, regarding where the respondent's parents were born, also occasioned diffidence in responses from some, not because they were of particular moment, but because on the contrary the answer was so self-evident. This was but one illustration of an inevitable issue; the necessary question and answer methodology of the census form can result in diffidence, embarrassment, or even hostility for people who, within their own cultural milieu, use quite different means of eliciting information, or of validating information that is already known to be shared. The interviewers often avoided this problem by either prompting the answer for such questions, or simply filling them out without comment.

This question clearly caused embarrassment to many if not most respondents. Mostly, interviewers did not even ask this question, or if they did, it was in a clearly rhetorical manner ('You speak English well, eh?'). All interviewers I observed entered either 'well' or 'very well' to this question, even in cases where, to the best of my knowledge, the individuals concerned, young teenagers for example, had quite a limited grasp of English. These observations were borne out in the preliminary census results released for Aurukun and its outstations by the ABS, and shown in Table 2.2 below. These data suggest that the overwhelming majority, some 75 per cent, speak English well or very well, which is not borne out by ethnographic observation.

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To make sense of these results, it is important to understand that these responses were not technical in nature but symbolic. As described below, Aurukun had been a church mission until 1978, and the missionaries had placed considerable emphasis on teaching English. As the result of their internalisation of the missionising enterprise within a particular Aboriginal framework, for Wik people of older generations in particular, to be able to speak English well is a sign of being 'civilised', of not being a 'myall'. In arguments, people will disparage others' English capabilities, and conversely boast of their own relations' fluency (Martin 1993). To answer this question with a statement of objective limited capacity, therefore, in a more or less public place (since interviews were almost always conducted outside dwellings with numbers of people present), would have had a powerful negative symbolic import.

Aurukun had been a Presbyterian, and later a Uniting Church, mission until 1978. Some (usually) older respondents stated that they were Uniting Church. Many others, especially younger people, stated either that they had no religion, or that they did not wish to answer the question. In fact, the religion question seemed to be largely meaningless to younger respondents. Some interviewers did not provide this option when discussing this question. Not one person that I observed answered 'Traditional Beliefs' to this question, even when interviewers (following discussions with myself) specifically asked this and provided some explanation of what this term might mean. These observations were borne out in the preliminary census results released for Aurukun and its outstations by the ABS. A summary is shown in Table 2.3 below. This data suggests that only a little over 1 per cent of Aurukun's Indigenous population adhere to traditional religious beliefs.

Yet, Aurukun can still be considered one of the most traditionally oriented communities in Queensland. The Wik people, including those in Aurukun, had only recently had native title over much of their traditional lands recognised, in a process which required extensive documentation of traditional beliefs and practices to be presented to the State government for the purposes of a consent determination. There is a strong system of belief in 'supernatural' forces underlying much of mundane life, including a strong attribution of causality (including through sorcery) which is quite distinct from that of even religious non-Aboriginal Australians (see e.g. McKnight 1981; Martin 1993; Sutton 1978). Why would people therefore resist acknowledging their traditional beliefs?

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It could be that one factor is a reluctance to have what lies in the private or internal Aboriginal domain exposed to non-Wik people—but against that argument, Wik people are notoriously outspoken in their views about their cultural distinctiveness. Alternatively, it could be that equating 'Traditional Beliefs' with, for example, 'Uniting Church' in a question about 'religion' is confusing to people. To test this hypothesis, I actually asked this question of respondents myself on two occasions, including using Wik Mungkan, but with no different result.

It could be argued that Aboriginal respondents could see this question in some ways as seeking complementary information to Q. 15 (how well do you speak English). As discussed above, the latter was clearly interpreted by Aboriginal interviewers and respondents alike as being equivalent to asking whether the person was a 'myall' or uncivilised, and it is conceivable that answering Q. 16 in terms of holding 'Traditional Beliefs' would be similarly interpreted, in the context of a census form whose ultimate purpose and destination were quite opaque to almost all Aboriginal people in Aurukun.

In any event, whatever its origin, if this response is broadly consistent with that from other remote Aboriginal groups, one would have to question both the utility of this question (at least as phrased), and also any inferences that might be drawn by subsequent research on the census data concerning the incidence of traditional beliefs amongst remote Aboriginal people.

My observations were that if the way in which answers to these questions were given was typical, the census is unlikely to provide a reliable source of data on education and training levels of Aboriginal people in remote communities.

For example, attendance at the Aurukun school has been very low for many years now. Yet, most people that I observed stated in response to Q. 19 that their children went to school, although some rationalised the fact that children were around while the census collection was taking place (during school hours) in terms of such factors as teasing or fighting in the school.

Even for questions concerning post-school courses undertaken, it proved very difficult to elicit clear responses from this cut-and-dried question and answer format. There have been an absolute plethora of training courses which Aurukun people have been involved in over the past few years, and respondents were often vague about the technical details of these courses.

Many respondents were not sure of what their before-tax income was. In fact, there is a good argument that Q. 28 (on income) should have followed Q. 29–35. This is would have allowed a logical progression from the general to the particular in the information being sought. Most people are on CDEP, and working from that fact to the number of hours worked would then have allowed the informed interviewer and respondent to jointly estimate the fortnightly income more accurately.

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As with dwelling locations, difficulties were encountered in precisely identifying the addresses of people's workplaces; for some CDEP participants, it was entered as 'the yard'. Where interviewers were aware of who worked on CDEP and how many days they worked, the 'hours worked' question was relatively straightforward, since participants worked either two or four seven-hour days. For those on Jobsearch, living in an area where there was virtually no work available, there appeared to be some confusion as how to answer Q. 37 and Q. 38, regarding looking for and availability for work.

Census interviewers had a lot of trouble in developing meaningful explanations of this question, and respondents had considerable difficulty in providing meaningful responses to it. In some instances, no attempt was made by the Aboriginal interviewer to provide an explanation, and after an uncomfortable silence, the respondent stated that the information could be kept. Attempts to explain the option in terms of providing a resource for future generations to research family links and so forth made no sense to people at all. For one thing, Wik people hold a deep knowledge of kin links and of the flux of political and social relations—reflected in household compositions at any given time—which is quite independent of any administrative recording of such relations. For another, this question is at the end of the SIPF and follows the manifestly problematic attempts to ascertain information on familial links in Q. 4–6.

The format of this item in the SIPF assumes that the interviewer directly interviewed the person named in the form. This was not so in many cases. The interviewer presumably then could have left both Q. 39 and Q. 40 blank. However, interviewers in some of these instances seemed to assume that their signing off the Declaration was not just in relation to Q. 39, but in relation to the information in the form as a whole.