In order to comply with confidentiality requirements, I use letters of the alphabet to designate the major hub settlements in the Yolngu-speaking area, and for the homeland communities I use the letter of the hub settlement to which they are attached, followed by a number. To further disguise the area of the case study, I have assigned a number of homelands to hub settlements that differ from the one that, in reality, is their service centre.

The Yolngu-speaking area contains roughly 6000 Aboriginal people—most of whom are speakers of one of the Yolngu languages—and also the mining town of Nhulunbuy. There are six hub settlements in the area, ranging in size from more than 1000 people (Galiwin’ku/Elcho Island) to just more than 200 people (Gunyangara/Ski Beach). These have been assigned the letters A–F. There are two other settlements—G and H—outside the Yolngu area proper that will also figure in this account.

The homelands that form the focus of this case study are A1–12 and C1–5—that is, 17 of the estimated 76 inhabited homelands in the Yolngu-speaking area.^[1] The CFO for the Yolngu-speaking area was responsible for the enumeration at all of the Yolngu settlements and homelands, as well as Groote Eylandt and Numbulwar and its homelands. There are, in total, more than 10,000 Aboriginal people scattered throughout this remote area of 37,000 square kilometres.

The CFO had hoped to cover settlements A and C and all their attached homelands in the first week of the enumeration, starting on 6 July. He had decided that the best strategy was to try to complete the count in one subregion at a time, so that he and/or the Assistant CFO could be present for most of the count, leaving to start the CC and CI training in the next subregion only when the count was nearly complete. Unfortunately, things did not go to plan; the count in communities A and C and their attached homelands was still incomplete many weeks later. In theory, the CFO’s initial strategy was a sensible one in terms of logistics and efficient use of time. In practice, it proved completely unworkable.