One final interesting aspect of the 2006 Census collection process in the Alice Springs town camps was some discussion that occurred between Tangentyere and the ABS about the possible use of Tangentyere’s list of 2326 named people present in town camps between June 2004 and June 2005. There was some suggestion that this list might help collectors locate people or act as a form of validation of those counted; however, in the end, the list was not used during the collection process.

Tangentyere’s interest in using the list was partly also a wish to update it, as it was by census time more than a year out of date. Tangentyere saw the census as occupying some of its available research time and opportunity in the camps, and hoped that the ABS might see its way clear to allow them to use the census to update their list as a quid pro quo. As it became clear that the ABS could not under any circumstance allow personal information collected in the census to be transferred to some other database, Tangentyere became somewhat less interested in making their list of names available to the ABS.

In the past, there have often been suggestions that existing lists generated by administration of other processes could in some way lessen the demands of the census on Aboriginal communities and increase its reliability (for example, Martin and Taylor 1996). I have never been as convinced of this argument as some others, feeling that lists are generated for particular purposes at particular times and are often of limited use beyond those particular purposes and times. One issue raised by this example of the non-use of Tangentyere’s list is that the owners of those lists will often want something in return for their use and the ABS has extreme difficulty offering anything. I do not believe that the use of the Tangentyere list would have greatly changed the collection of the 2006 Census in the Alice Springs town camps. I suspect that the majority of the 1200 people enumerated as present in the town camps in July and August 2006 were on Tangentyere’s list of 2326 named people from 2004 and 2005. The people who were present in the town camps did in the end seem to be able to be identified reasonably readily. What the list would have added would have been as many names again of people who could have been asked about. Most of these people would probably have been identified as not currently living in the camps. A few might have then been remembered as living there but were away, or even living there but forgotten—which could have increased the count a little. To pick up this last category of genuinely missed people, it would have been quite a lot of work to go through more than 1300 additional names.

Ten months on, the ABS compared the census counts in four camps with Tangentyere’s survey of 4 August 2005 to see whether there were any significant differences in numbers of people enumerated by age structure or number of dwellings. This was a very modest validation exercise in contrast with some of the early ideas for the use of Tangentyere’s list.

The vast improvement of the 2006 Census on the 2001 Census in the Alice Springs town camps lay in the fact that it reduced the collection task to a reasonably simple and manageable administrative procedure. Any attempt to use Tangentyere’s list as an adjunct to the collection process would, in my judgment, have added to the complexity of the task without greatly enhancing the ability of the CIs to find people. The CIs were successful because they had a familiarity with the town camp environment and were well supported by Tangentyere and the ABS. What Tangentyere’s list could have added to this success was marginal at best.