In the realpolitik of community funding and representation, this difference between ABS counts, the ABS/NTDHCS ERP, and other indications of the regional population tends to feed concerns that ‘official’ ABS data fail to adequately establish the true usual resident population level, with due acknowledgment that this differs from a service population. Accordingly, the Thamarrurr Council expressed a desire to validate its usually resident population as an essential first step in the construction of a socio-economic profile for the region. In discussions with council members and local service providers, it was decided that the only approach suited to this purpose was to conduct a new count of the regional population employing local people as enumerators and advisors. This activity immediately developed as an exercise in community capacity building among the working groups established as part of the ICCP partnership agreement, especially those concerned with housing and construction, family and women, and youth.

By assembling a team of senior men and women via the Thamarrurr Council and the Wadeye Palngun Wurnangat (Wadeye Women’s Association)―with assistance enlisted via them from representatives of the various clan groups within Wadeye camps and outlying outstations―the basic strategy was to conduct a count of individuals present (including absent usual residents) in the region, and to then cross-check this against the Thamarrurr Housing Office population list to identify and follow-up any discrepancies between the two. Interviewers were instructed to include all individuals who considered themselves to be usual residents of Thamarrurr using the same criteria as applied by the ABS (expected residence in Thamarrurr for more than half of the current year). Where individuals were not asked this question directly, the usual residence status of household members was gleaned from the main respondent or key informant. Typically, as with most survey work in remote Aboriginal communities, this information gathering was a communal activity, although unlike the census and other activities such as housing surveys, the information sought was kept to an absolute minimum, with the focus solely on establishing the name, age, and sex of all individuals considered to be usual residents according to the criteria set.

These dwelling counts took place during most of August 2003, although because of limited resources and the myriad of other activities that placed demands on the time of interviewers, direct visits were made to only 125 out of 151 dwellings in Wadeye. For the same reason visits were made to only two outstations (Fossil Head and Nemarluk), with numbers present at the remainder gleaned from relatives in town, and then cross-checked from Housing Office data. Data for the remaining 26 Wadeye dwellings were drawn from Housing Office records and also validated by the survey team.

This initial exercise revealed a population of 1782 individuals for whom Thamarrurr was considered their usual place of residence. The vast majority of these were physically present, whilst some (fewer than 50) were temporarily absent in places such as Palumpa, Peppimenarti, Daly River, Timber Creek, Kununurra, Wyndham and Darwin. Analysis of this initial count by age, sex and location revealed an apparent lack of young children, young men and outstation residents.

Comparison of this initial population count with the Thamarrurr Housing Office population list produced a new list of individuals who appeared on the latter but not on the former. This new list of some 500 individuals was then interrogated by working groups from the Ngepan Patha Centre and the Thamarrurr Housing Office in consultation with representatives from family groups and other agencies, such as the school and the church. The aim was to apply the same residency criteria to these lists. In the process, many duplicates were found, especially among children under 16 years of age owing to their inclusion under both mother’s and father’s family name. These were deleted. Also found were numerous entries for individuals whose usual place of residence was outside of the Thamarrurr region, particularly in Palumpa, Peppimenarti and Daly River. These were also deleted. A few usual residents who had not been picked up in the dwelling count and who were not found on the new checklist were added, while many of those on the revised list were confirmed as current usual residents, although assigning them to particular dwellings often proved problematic owing to high intra-community mobility. Indeed, one issue for community planning (especially of housing and associated infrastructure), is the difficulty of assigning many individuals to particular dwellings on a fixed basis since the numbers resident at particular dwellings can fluctuate substantially.

Methodologically, this use of population lists to adjudicate on the usual residence status of individuals for those dwellings that were not visited may be seen as diminishing the quality of the final count. However, in the context of high intra-community mobility it may also be seen as beneficial as it reduced the potential for omissions. Certainly, the integrity of community based population lists was established by the fact that the vast majority of those counted were also located on the Thamarrurr Housing Office list. These issues aside, the resulting Aboriginal population amounted to 2034, and this is the figure employed for the purposes of social profiling, unless otherwise stated. Of course, added to this are non-Aboriginal residents. No formal count of these was conducted and so the official estimate of 113 from Table 2.1 is used instead. This produces a total usual resident population for the region of 2147.