In the meantime, the two CCs recruited and trained to cover the other A and C homelands had gone to the final phases of the funeral at A10. They were under a heavy obligation to attend, as close relatives of the deceased, and this took precedence over their duties to the census. This brings me to a separate but equally important theme: the drop-out rate of Indigenous CCs and CIs is often a cause for comment, but it is necessary to understand why they drop out.[5]
Most Yolngu do not keep diaries. They might sign up in good faith to be a CC or CI, for example, only to be reminded a few days later that they have a medical appointment with a specialist who is paying one of their periodic visits to the area. For a homelands person, this means a plane ride into A. One of the CIs at C3 found himself in this situation. There are, however, more systemic reasons why people are likely to fall by the wayside during the count.
The people who are most likely to be recruited as CCs and CIs in a region such as this are the rare individuals with the requisite levels of literacy in English. They are ‘better educated’ in a Western sense, and this means:
they might already have a job
because they tend to be among the most able, intelligent and competent people, they are in demand for local events (such as funerals) and their status in their own community is judged by their commitment to participating in such events
at the same time, they are expected—by their relatives and by local non-Indigenous staff of organisations—to represent the interests of the community at the interface between the Yolngu world and the encapsulating society
they often have a sense of ‘civic duty’ that impels them to take part in the non-local event that is the census, despite competing demands on their time, because they have an understanding of the local consequences of more global processes.
People like this are in constant danger of burn-out. Aboriginal communities are conceived of popularly as places where people sit around on ‘sit-down’ Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) money and do nothing much. The situation of the general population is the subject of a different study—in which this view would be disputed. The situation of the most able and the most Western-educated—and therefore most literate—is, however, as stressful as any in mainstream society in terms of competing and conflicting demands on their time.
As with the CFOs, I would argue, the current operation of the IES puts many local CCs and CIs in a no-win situation. The enumeration process necessitates a sustained and intensive effort, and, since it often proves impossible to recruit sufficient numbers of people for the size of the population, it can involve a very heavy workload.
In the way in which the IES is organised at present, this is an intractable problem. Competing demands often force CCs and CIs to abandon their census work—temporarily or permanently—and this in turn places heavier demands on the remaining CCs and CIs, and also on the CFO, who must then somehow recruit and train replacements. If he or she has already moved on to another subregion, clearly there is the potential for the census effort to stall completely. This is what happened in the case-study area and, as a result, the count in the A and C homelands—with the exception of the area covered by the C3 team—was a prolonged and tortuous affair. The relative smoothness of phase one was a bit of a false dawn. I conclude this section with two short case studies that illustrate the conflicting demands on people acting as CIs and CCs. Some details have been changed to protect their anonymity.
One of the CCs recruited originally for the A and C homelands was back at Community A after the completion of the funeral at A10. He was ready and willing to restart work as a CC/CI. The CFO had in the meantime gone to start the count in a different region, leaving the Assistant CFO at A. She was very pleased to see the CC again, as his help was sorely needed at A and in some of the A and C homelands, where the count had temporarily ceased. We made plans to leave for A2—another homeland that had been visited once and found to be empty of inhabitants (they too had been at the funeral at A10, but were now known to have returned home). We had heard that the previous evening there had been a death, but the identity of the person who had died had not been confirmed. Just as we were preparing to leave for A2, two policemen arrived at the CC’s house, asking him to identify the body. An hour later, he returned with the news that the dead person was one of his clansmen, a close ‘father’ of his. Although visibly upset, he insisted that he would carry on work because he realised that his help was badly needed. We were just about to leave when a group of senior clan leaders called him over. They were anxious to begin planning the funeral, which was to take place at A8, and wanted him to be a part of the discussion. (Most of the inhabitants of A8 were back home now after the end of the funeral at A10, and this meant precision planning was now needed for the count there because once the funeral ceremony began it would not be possible to go there.) It was impossible for the CC to refuse, so the count at A2 was postponed yet again.
The attrition rate among the CCs at A and C, who had never been numerous in the first place, had necessitated the ad hoc training of extra people, whenever they could be found. One person who already had a part-time job volunteered to work on her days off. She was assigned a workload in A, which she completed conscientiously and efficiently. It was then decided to use her as the CI for some of the remaining A and C homelands. With her help, the count at A6 was completed. (One entire A6 household was still away at A12, where the funeral had just ended. This household was not followed up until the forms had been returned to the CMU in Darwin, when it was realised that they had been missed.) The CFO and his Assistant were pleased and relieved that the homelands count was getting under way again. Then, unfortunately, the daughter of the leader of the A9 community died in hospital. This particular CI and her family were related to the dead woman in such a way as to make it imperative that they become involved in organising her funeral, which included arranging for the body to be flown back from Darwin. The family at A9 wanted a short funeral and they needed to arrange it quickly because the girl’s mother was herself due to go to Darwin for an operation. The CI tried valiantly to continue her census work, but after a couple of days it all became too much. The family was relying on her, as a literate person, to complete the bureaucratic arrangements and she still had her part-time job on top of that. And, despite the family’s desire for a quick and uncomplicated funeral, ‘Yolngu politics’ about where the funeral should take place began to manifest themselves. On one occasion, when this CI was helping someone to fill in the form for their household, she was reproached for doing this work when she should be attending to funeral matters. She asked to be relieved of her obligations to the census until after the arrangements for the funeral had been completed. After the funeral was over, she came back to work as a CI.