The communities of A and C are host to three organisations that could potentially have been engaged more fully in the census exercise. These are the community councils of A and C, and the homelands resource organisation, based at A, which services the satellite homelands communities. All three were at the time Indigenous Housing Organisations (IHOs), so had been visited by the CFO during the CHINS exercise. The two community council organisations had originally provided the CFO with a list of potential CCs and CIs for the census. At the initial training session at Community A, in a meeting room at A’s community council office, one employee of C’s community council came along to be trained as a CC. The homelands resource agency had originally agreed that one of its Yolngu employees would be available to act as a CC, but in the event he was away at a course in Darwin when the CFO first arrived and because the CFO did not follow him up he never became engaged in census activities. The resource agency did provide an outside space in which the CFO could sit and do paperwork and also gave him access to the health database, which he attempted to use, unsuccessfully, to check missing date-of-birth information for homelands residents.

It is fair to say that these local organisations were busy, under-resourced and understaffed, and that they therefore did not volunteer proactively to play a more substantial role in the census exercise. For his part, the CFO was content to make use of the facilities they did provide, but he did not seek to involve them further. In failing to get them further involved, he deprived himself of two things that might have made his task much more manageable: the Yolngu and non-Yolngu staff of the homelands resource agency, in particular, were repositories of local knowledge and intelligence about people’s whereabouts on a day-to-day basis; and, had he engaged them more proactively during the CHINS exercise in the business of recruiting potential CCs and CIs, he might not have found himself as shorthanded as he was.

Having said that, neither the CFO nor the organisations are to blame for this lack of mutual engagement. There is a structural problem to be addressed before a more fruitful relationship is possible. We return to address this issue in Chapter 9.