Once in Darwin, I began my work at the CMU (reported on in Chapter 7). From time to time, I heard from the CFO about progress in the rest of his region. He was beginning to sound pretty discouraged. In a phone call on 29 August, he told me he had returned briefly to A and C and had been unable to find any of the CCs or CIs who still had forms outstanding. There had also been problems with the non-Indigenous count at A, where he had entrusted some of the forms to a staff member of a local organisation for distribution to some of the local employees. This had not happened.
The count at H was complete, but it was five houses short. The floating CFO was now supervising the count at G, but progress was slow. The CFO had left his Assistant to finish up the count at D and F and things were not ‘going real well’. He was going to B, the final community in his region, where the count had not yet started. He thought he would be back in Darwin the next week.
He said he was finding the same problem everywhere: not enough qualified and committed people to undertake the work—‘Checking the forms takes forever. You really have to push them, people aren’t enthused.’
On 9 September I was at the CMU when the CFO called in to his line manager to say that he was not coming to Darwin immediately. His manager reported that he ‘sounded very flat’. He had trained 17 people at B, but only one was left, and they had counted only eight houses so far.
The CFO did come to Darwin later, for the debriefing of the CFOs. I discuss my observations of that debriefing in the first part of Chapter 7. He then went back into the field. He subsequently had some conversations with the CMU about my possible role in the final phase of the count in the A/C homelands. He envisaged that I would go to A8 with whoever was available in the way of CIs and supervise the count there. His line manager at the CMU decided, in consultation with Canberra, that what he was proposing necessitated my being signed up as a CC, rather than being classified as an impartial observer. I agreed to this on the condition that my status as CC applied only to this particular phase of the count.
I had mixed feelings about this development. The boundary between participant and observer, for an anthropologist, is the fulcrum of the anthropological approach to fieldwork and to the analysis of social and cultural processes. The anthropological project is to become part of a process—to ‘see it from inside’—while simultaneously preserving a sense of distance that allows for objective analysis. From an anthropological perspective, the ‘observer’s paradox’—the fact that the observer’s presence has an effect on what is observed—is part of the data. Thus far my active role had been mainly to act as a driver, to enable CCs and CIs to undertake the count in communities other than their own, but, at least in the case of the count at A2, force of circumstance had meant that it was I rather than the absent CFO and Assistant CFO who had selected the CI for the job. In practice, it is a short step from there to being a CC. My worry was that drawing a line in the sand at a particular point in this process of incorporation—although clearly necessary from an administrative point of view—would also affect the way in which my findings would be viewed.