For the purposes of the census, the settlement of B and the outstations serviced by the HA are counted as two separate Indigenous Areas (IAs), each with its own CCs. For the HA communities the CFO had appointed two CCs, one local Indigenous and one non-Indigenous, both HA employees. They had different responsibilities: the non-Indigenous CC was in charge of logistics—chartering planes, keeping to the budget, and so on. The Indigenous CC was responsible for overseeing the administration of the census on the ground, and for recruiting and helping in the training of the enumerators. The CFO envisaged his own role as strategic—coordinating the enumeration in the region as a whole, recruiting and training appropriate CCs, and keeping a watching brief on the various stages of the process and the training of the enumerators.
At community A there were six enumerators (henceforth E1–6), all but one of whom were residents. The non-resident (E1) was another HA employee who is the son of a sister of X and Y. He acted as the community contact and de facto CC for the exercise. Therefore all the enumerators were well known to other community members, and had detailed knowledge of who lived where, how everyone was related to each other, and of people's present whereabouts.
Fig. 3.2 shows in simplified terms how the enumerators are related to each other and to the apical ancestors (X and Y) of the two major lineages represented at the community. Both E1 and E2 are ZC (sister's children) of X and Y. E2 is the most senior male ZC to the landowning group—a position of some importance in the local social system. E3 is his wife. E2, E4, E5, and E6 are all teachers in the school. E4 and E5 are granddaughters of X, and E6 is one of Y's granddaughters. The significance of these facts will emerge in due course.
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I chanced to meet E1 in the local town centre on Friday 3 August, the day after I had arrived from Canberra. The CFO had already informed him that I was coming to community A to observe the census. He told me that he was one of the enumerators there, that all the enumerators had received their training, and that he was driving down to the community to start the enumeration on Monday (i.e. on the day before census day itself). I surmised therefore that I had missed out on the training and that it had been completed despite the disruption caused by the funerals. It appeared that my only access to information about the training process would be through debriefing the CFO and (if possible) the CCs and enumerators. Accordingly, I arranged to see the CFO on the following day. The account of the training process given below is based on what I learned at that meeting, and on a later meeting with the CFO after the enumeration at community A had been completed.
The CFO told me that the training of the CCs and the compilation of the Dwelling Check Lists for B and the HA outstations had been successfully carried out. The CCs had a map of each community that had to be covered, and a SIHF had been allocated for each occupied dwelling, and each had been given a Census Record Number (RNO). The CCs had been taken through their responsibilities and had been given a set of principles to work to. The Indigenous CC for the HA had been given responsibility for recruiting the enumerators for the HA communities because, the CFO reasoned, he was the person with local knowledge about who could speak to whom and how to get the job done most efficiently. He had suggested that the enumerators be organised to work in teams of two, to avoid problems of people having to speak directly to 'poison' (avoidance) relations.
It was the training of the enumerators that had been disrupted by the funerals. There had been one day of training at community B, in which the enumerators had been shown the training video. It was shown to them all the way through without interruption, in order to give them an overview of the procedure. The emphasis in the training that did occur was on procedure, on ensuring that the enumerators explained properly to the interviewees what the census was, and on the issues of confidentiality and the security of the data. They also spent some time discussing the questions which the CFO predicted would cause difficulties: the questions on kinship (on the SIHF, and Q. 4 and Q. 5 on the SIPF—see Appendices B and C), and Q. 39 on the SIPF, which asks whether the respondent agrees to having their name and address and other information from their form kept in the National Archives and then made publicly available after 99 years.
The CFO was doubtful that the kinship questions would yield useful data, because he was aware that local Indigenous kinship terms and English terms are different. The enumerators were instructed use to English kinship terms first, and to use local terms only in cases where clarification was needed. The CFO went through the basic English kin terms to ensure that the enumerators knew the meaning of terms such as niece, nephew, uncle and aunt as well as of the more core kinship terms of the English (henceforth Anglo-Celtic) system.
The CFO spent some time with the enumerators on Q. 39, explaining its meaning and getting them to practice asking each other the question and to devise a local-language version to use during the enumeration. His main concern was that the taboo on the use of- 34 - the names of dead people would lead people to answer 'no' to the question, so the emphasis given was to the forms being locked away in Canberra for a considerable period of time.
Because of the interruption to their training, the enumerators had not had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the forms in detail, nor to practise going through them. On the Monday the CFO was planning to go to community A with the Indigenous CC and E1 to finish the training. His intention was to let the CC and E1 conduct the training; he would intervene only as necessary, if something had been missed or clarification of some point was needed.