Some Yolngu people who have jobs in the main settlements but who have a strong attachment to a clan homeland—a situation that is likely to become more and more common—find it hard to categorise themselves as a ‘usual resident’ of one place rather than the other.[7] This must be a dilemma for certain people in the mainstream as well, but in the Yolngu case the attachment to their clan lands is more than just one of sentiment; it is the foundation of their social and spiritual identity. For Yolngu, the distinction ‘my country/not my country’ is more salient than the distinction ‘resident/visitor’. This is also a factor in many other Indigenous societies, and it can affect how people categorise themselves on their census forms (see also Chapter 8).
People do not necessarily think of themselves as either ‘residents’ or ‘visitors’ in the places where they happen to be at census time, and for those who are highly mobile it is difficult for them and for others who might be answering the census questions on their behalf to decide how they should be categorised. At one end of the spectrum are the dhukarrpuyngu (‘people of the track’): young men (and increasingly young women) who are highly mobile, and who cannot really be classified as residents anywhere. They are not, however, homeless in the mainstream sense of the term. Wherever they go in their travels they will be staying in the households of more sedentary relatives.
Dhukarrpuyngu have the potential to either be missed completely or double-counted—forgotten because their movements during a rolling count mean that they are not present in any community at the time that it is counted, or double-counted because they are present in more than one place during the count, and are included in the households where they are staying, either as a ‘resident’ or as a ‘visitor’. Some children are also highly mobile. There are the children of young and/or ‘bad’ (a Yolngu judgment) mothers, who circulate between the dwellings of other relatives, typically of the grandparental generation. Others are children who just ‘love to travel and visit their family’, and do so when an opportunity presents itself. Children as young as five or six have considerable autonomy, and parents have no anxiety about them as long as they are with trusted family members. In the enumerations I observed, I was able to pick up several instances where dhukarrpuyngu and mobile children were double-counted or not counted at all.
While it is possible, with a bit of local knowledge and a bird’s-eye view, to track down instances of double-counting, it is far harder to pick up on people who have not been counted at all. To do so requires having a mental map of an entire community or region, and to notice absence rather than presence. No one involved in the census counts, from the CIs to the CMU, is in a position in which they have an overview of an entire regional population and simultaneously have the knowledge to pick up on absences. The CIs and the CCs have the local knowledge but not the overview, and the CFO and the CMU have the overview but lack the knowledge.
At the other end of the spectrum are individuals who are permanent residents either at a homeland or at a settlement. On the homelands, these tend to be the senior men of the community and their close families. Although their residency status tends to be unambiguous, this does not mean lack of mobility, for it is precisely such people who tend also to have responsibility for the organisation and conduct of ceremonies, and they are often away from home. In addition, only one of the A/C homelands has its own store, so even the most sedentary are often away from home shopping ‘in town’. This often entails an overnight stop, and sometimes a more prolonged stay if the money runs out or the vehicle breaks down. During the count at C3, for example, an average of three small plane-loads of people came and/or went shopping each day, and vehicles were coming and going constantly.
In between the two extremes are a large number of people who, for a variety of reasons to do with their family affiliations, personal circumstances or personal preferences are hard to categorise as residents of any one particular place. I give two rather different examples in the short case studies below.
At C3 there is one household where the father of the family has a job at A. The rest of the family resides at C3, and he joins them at weekends. At the time of the count, the house was empty—the entire family had gone to A ‘for a holiday’ because it was the school holidays. The CCs and CIs at C3 considered the whole family, including the father, to be residents of their house at C3, so the household form was filled in with the help of relatives. They were first put down as PTA, but then it was decided that they might not be counted at A since they had gone from there to the funeral at A10. They were moved ‘inside the form’—that is, they were counted as if they had been at C3 during the count. On double-checking the form completed at the house at A where the father of the family usually stayed, I found that they had all been counted there as well—as residents—before leaving for A10. Their Yolngu names had been used on the C3 form but their English given names had been used on the form at A, and their ages had been estimated at C3 while their dates of birth were entered at A. In a final twist, the parents—but not the rest of the family—appeared on a form completed at A10, once the funeral was finally over. By this time, the family in question had gone back to A. This form had been filled in by someone who was normally resident in the house at A, but who was still at A10. The CI had given her the form to fill in herself. She treated the form as the household form for her house in A, rather than counting herself as a ‘visitor’ at A10, and included the C3 husband and wife as usual residents of that household. In effect, then, the house at A ended up with two forms, and these forms had different but overlapping sets of ‘usual residents’.
When it was possible, eventually, to do the count at A10 there were still many ‘visitors’ there who had not yet returned home after the funeral. It was decided that these people should be counted, just in case they were not caught later when they went home (the count had already been completed at some of the places, such as A, where they were usual residents). Only those who stated that they had definitely been counted elsewhere were excluded. There was one middle-aged man there from B1, a homeland that was not in the remit of the CCs and CIs who were covering the A/C homelands. B1 was not, however, his clan homeland, and he was often also to be found at the settlement of B. Later, at the CMU in Darwin, I looked at the forms from B1 and from B and found that this man had been triple-counted. As well as featuring as a visitor at A10, he had been counted as a PTA (‘visiting B1 and then at funeral at A9’) on a form at B and moved ‘inside the form’ on the grounds that he had not been at B1, but at the funeral at A9 when the count was done there. Finally, he had been counted as a PTA at B1 (‘at funeral at A10’) and moved back inside the form on the grounds that he would not be counted at A10. He was identified by his English given name on one form, by one of his Yolngu names on another form and by another of his Yolngu names on the third form. At A10, he had himself given his date of birth, but on the B and B1 forms his age had been estimated. The estimates differed by a decade, and neither of these imputed ages coincided with his real year of birth.
During the course of the count—a period of about four weeks—this man’s real movements had been: B to B1, B1 to A10, A10 to B, B to B1, B1 to A9, and finally A9 to A10. Such a pattern of movement is commonplace for senior Yolngu men with ceremonial responsibilities.