I do not have the space to review, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, the structures of colonial, State and Territory statistics on Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders up to 1966. However, in a sense I do not need to, because the various jurisdictions worked to a common model, that I will call here the protection/assimilation model. I derive this name from the commonly acknowledged periodisation of Australian Indigenous public policy. The era of ‘protection’ was instituted by a wave of colonial, State and Commonwealth law-making that lasted from the 1880s to the end of the First World War. The era of ‘assimilation’ lasted from the late 1930s until the early 1970s, as each State or Territory amended and then repealed these statutes and strove to bring Indigenous Australians within the same legislative and administrative frameworks as all other Australians, invoking the ideal of an ‘Australian way of life’ to which all were tending. I will argue that as the sequence of post-World War Two legislative reforms approached its end in the 1960s, many officials and policy intellectuals pointed to the inadequacies of the statistical archive in its protection/assimilation form.

What were the elements of the protection/assimilation statistical archive? By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, most Australian jurisdictions were keeping some record of what they thought to be the absolute size and the sex composition of the Aboriginal population. The various jurisdictions began to record the ages of Aborigines in different years (Victoria from 1871, New South Wales and Western Australia from 1891, Queensland from 1901, and South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory from 1911). ^[4]From 1860 to 1905, as each colony began to form a specialised administration and statutory regime through which to govern their Indigenous populations, they recorded two other features of the populations: their genetic character (differentiating ‘full blood’ from ‘others’) and their relationship to administrative control. There were two variables within what I am calling administrative control, and each jurisdiction made use of at least one of them. The Indigenous population could be acknowledged as subject to enumeration or as living beyond enumeration, a distinction sometimes conveyed by the distinction between ‘settled districts’ and regions that were beyond settlement and enumeration. The other ‘administrative control’ variable has to do with some kind of institutional authority. Thus, some Indigenous people were classified according to whether or not they were ‘in employ’, or ‘under the Act’ or living within reserves and government institutions.

When the Commonwealth government began to standardise the Indigenous statistical archive in the 1911 Census, it adopted the Western Australian 1901 Census’s version of this classifying practice. That is:

When the Commonwealth collaborated with the States in every June from 1924 to 1941 to make an annual count, they were interested in the size, the sex composition, the age composition, the race composition and the relationship to governing authority of their Indigenous populations. This protection/assimilation model of the Indigenous population lasted about eighty years, continuing until two-thirds of the twentieth century had elapsed.