My analysis of the collection of the 2001 Census in the 19 Alice Springs town camps pointed to the overwhelming demands of the task (Sanders 2002). The household plus personal form structure used in 2001 was extremely cumbersome and quickly wore out interviewers and interviewees. About 25 collector-interviewers (CIs) were employed during a four to five-week period in 2001, with many lasting only a day or two, or a camp or two, before quietly slipping away. The Community Coordinators (CCs) in 2001 had to salvage the situation by giving up on the personal forms about 12 days into the collection process. From then on they focused just on the household forms, augmented slightly with a few hand-ruled columns.

Another inadequacy in 2001 was that visitors in the camps were not being counted. The assumption was that they would be counted elsewhere as absent usual residents. As an observer, I was dubious of this idea. As well as short-term visitors who might possibly be counted elsewhere, the term ‘visitor’ seemed to cover some quite long-term residents of town camps who were still distinguished from the recognised tenants of houses or owners of camps. I judged that the likelihood of these long-term visitors being counted elsewhere was very slight. In addition, not counting visitors did nothing to demonstrate the demands these people placed on town camp services, which was an important issue for the town camp servicing organisation, Tangentyere Council. Any attempt to count visitors in the town camps in 2001 would, however, have only added to the overwhelming demands of the census task, so it was perhaps just as well that this was not attempted.

The results of the 2001 Census, released in 2003, showed the Alice Springs town camps had 973 residents in 189 dwellings or households (Sanders 2004). Tangentyere was dissatisfied with these figures because they did not include visitors but also because they thought this was a significant under-count of residents. It was partly this dissatisfaction with the 2001 Census that spurred Tangentyere to develop its own population and mobility study in 2004 and 2005 (Foster et al. 2005). This study surveyed the town camps four times from mid 2004 to mid 2005, finding at various times between 906 people in 151 dwellings and 1341 people in 195 dwellings (see Table 3.1). These surveys demonstrated that between 16 and 21 per cent of the people counted in the town camps at these various time were visitors. They also led to the compilation of a cumulative list of 2326 named people counted in 255 dwellings in the 19 camps during the course of the year. This study was therefore beginning to show how Tangentyere had a significantly larger service population in the town camps over a year than the resident population at any one time, including visitors.

Through these and other research efforts, Tangentyere had by 2005 developed a strong research unit of its own. In late 2005, the Tangentyere research unit was asked by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to conduct a trial of the new Interviewer Household Form (IHF) for the 2006 Census in one of the town camps. This they did with a combination of enthusiasm and trepidation. The Tangentyere researchers were interested in the census, but were reminded through the trial of the size of the census task and its demanding nature. They were also beginning to realise how the census might potentially crowd out their own research opportunities. I will return to this later, but will conclude here by arguing that in 2006 Tangentyere was far better prepared and positioned for the coming of the census than in 2001.