The approach to Indigenous enumeration in Western Australia was ‘standard’—that is, to attempt to count everybody, everywhere, in the same week. This was very different to the approach adopted in the Northern Territory, which was a ‘rolling count’—that is, to train and then count, move to the next place, train and then count, and so on. I shall refer to the area covered by the CFO as the ‘southern Kimberley’—an area stretching from Balgo and Mulan in the east to Jarlmadangah/Mt Anderson in the west, and incorporating the dozens of localities in between.[4] The first step was to coordinate across this vast area and to organise training sessions for community members at semi-centralised locations. These training dates did not always eventuate—people might have had more pressing matters to attend to or might simply have forgotten. Already we seem to be seeing how the ‘standard’ count might not work. The time lags between the first, introductory visit—in which the CFO might meet the chairperson and make an administrator aware of a return date for training—and the return to train was problematic. The CFO, from the outset, therefore had to backtrack, to attempt again to train in communities that might have missed out on his first run. This pattern of backtracking—returning to places throughout his area to catch up—was to become quickly established. The size of the area, and the time required to drive between these communities—some of them, such as Balgo, are more than 300 kilometres of dirt road away from the main highway—clearly jeopardised the CFO’s ability to coordinate the exercise.
It was not clear how much use had been made—or could have been made—of the report from the CFO of the 2001 Census. The 2006 CFO commented that this report was not of much use, since the 2001 Census depended on collaborating with a number of smaller Community Development Employment Project (CDEP) organisations that had ceased to exist, so there was a vacuum in many localities at the organisational level. It was also notable that this same CFO had been involved in conducting the Community Housing and Infrastructure Needs Survey (CHINS) only two months before, yet the CHINS data seemed to have no role in informing the planning process for the census—for example, planning the number of forms (on average, one for each house) for each community. That fundamental matters such as the number of forms required had not been estimated before the count—so that forms were still being ordered from Perth during the official census week (8–11 August)—set the whole process back further.
On the first training day in Fitzroy Crossing for Bunuba CIs, only three people came out of six who had been identified by the CC from Junjuwa. The training for MWW was the next day and was attended by two different Bunuba people to replace those who had not shown up the day before, and one of the original team. Fortunately, on both training days, the Bunuba Inc. vehicle was available to ‘round up’ people who had agreed to attend, as the training was between 5 and 10 kilometres away from people’s home communities. Had this vehicle not been available, there could have been much poorer attendance. The MWW training was well attended and included both of the CCs already mentioned. As people accustomed to managing the intrusion of bureaucrats and other outsiders, they encouraged all the CIs present to ask questions—there certainly were many more questions on this second day than on the first. These two CCs also stated in the MWW training session that they were to be the contact people if any CIs encountered difficulties—they were both infinitely more available, via phone or in the office, than the CFO, who returned to Fitzroy Crossing only periodically. In any event, I reluctantly took on a similar role for Bunuba people, mainly in contacting the Perth Census Management Unit (CMU) when necessary, or attempting to follow up CIs’ and CCs’ inquiries with the CFO after hours, via phone, or when he was camping at Fitzroy Crossing, generally on his way to somewhere else. I was able to do this because, unlike the CCs and the CIs, I had a mobile phone; this meant that I could call the CFO after hours, but it also meant that he could call me after hours and leave a message to pass on to the Bunuba census team. A more thorough planning process would have considered what avenues for communication were available.
Even at this early stage of the process, the CFO was under pressure and was rushed; the training suffered as a result. The CC of Bunuba, for example, who was to be managing five other people and attempting to coordinate the enumeration of more than 100 households, received barely more training than did the CIs. Nor did she receive a Community Coordinator Manual, which probably would have been very helpful, especially the ‘frequently asked questions’ section. That the CFO was already rushing at this stage seems to have compounded other difficulties that arose later.
For example, there was little opportunity for questions during the training, and indeed few arose in the first session I attended—perhaps no surprise given that none of the CIs tried out the form on each other (as was supposed to happen). The training essentially consisted of watching the training DVD, followed by the CFO reading through the Interviewer Household Form (IHF) and then people filling out the various forms to enable them to be paid. As I did not observe the CFO training, I cannot comment on the adequacy of the CFO’s own training in informing his understanding of some of the issues that would arise with particular questions. Critically, Questions 11 and 12 (see Appendix A), which attempted to distinguish between people who were away and people living and/or staying at a dwelling, were not well explained. In particular, people did not understand that those written down as normally here but away and unlikely to be counted elsewhere were supposed to be moved ‘inside the form’ to Question 12. I doubt a single form in any of the Bunuba communities was completed in this way—resulting in very limited information being collected for these residents. In any case, CIs were repeatedly unsure how to handle the various states of ‘being a resident’ that they encountered, and were quite relieved to leave people off (to be caught up with ‘later’, which often did not happen) when, for example, they were down at the supermarket, or doing contract mustering.
Part of the reason why the training was not especially effective, it seems to me, is that it did not succeed in contextualising the whole census exercise. There could have been greater effort in the DVD to demonstrate what the census information was used for—or, if not in the DVD, the CFO himself could have gone through some of the previous census data for that region, and for particular communities that people came from. In other words, it might be useful for people to consider what the impacts are when the count is not accurate in terms of a concrete example from their own community, which they can relate to. For example, ‘If we do not count all the kids under the age of five living in Fitzroy Crossing now, then the number of kids in each of the classrooms will just keep getting bigger because the government won’t know to send more teachers for us.’
In addition, the training sessions took place on 18 and 19 July—that is, at least two weeks before any CIs started interviewing. Arguably, even if the training had been adequate, the CIs would still have forgotten some of the more subtle or tricky aspects of the form outlined in the training. Adopting the ‘standard’ approach—especially when it entails such a time lag between training and the real count—should require that there is an avenue for questions to be answered. Such an avenue might be provided by, for example, a toll-free phone number. The manual provided by the ABS was not referred to by any of the CIs I was observing, perhaps because very limited reference was made to it during the training.
Between the training and the beginning of the count in Junjuwa, the CFO and I went out with an older man and traditional owner for some of the station country to Leopold Downs Station to ascertain roughly how many people, and houses, might be on the pastoral excision communities. This seemed to be part of the brief of the CFO—that is, these particular outstations, but not the station itself. The station workers—that is, those living at the homestead rather than on pastoral excision communities—were not, however, considered part of the brief of the CFO, despite the fact that the station in question was owned by Aboriginal people. While there was a non-Indigenous manager there, he had five Indigenous people working alongside him and reckoned there were another five or so out on the stock camp. Enumerating these workers, as well as the non-Indigenous station staff, was, however, deemed to be the responsibility of the mainstream enumerator for the area. One can but wonder at the efficiency of having two different ABS staff visit the same station—which is some 60 kilometres from Fitzroy Crossing—the one to enumerate Indigenous communities there, the other to enumerate staff and workers, the majority of whom were in fact Indigenous.
A crucial part of the planning was to establish the correct Master Dwelling Checklist (MDC) and draw from that the Interviewer Dwelling Checklists (IDCs) that were to guide the CIs.[5] In the case of Bunuba, the CC did not understand this process, although the MDC for the largest community, Junjuwa, was begun with the CFO’s help, on the basis of a map of Junjuwa provided by the Bunuba Inc. housing officer. All except one of the MDCs and related IDCs were drawn up along the way, or even after the count had been done, on the basis of the number of IHFs filled in for a particular community or outstation. The validity of the MDCs and IDCs as checking mechanisms after the fact was completely undermined—although in my observation they were in fact largely accurate, apart from one house that was missed on the MDC and the IDC and was not enumerated at all. The main reason, it seemed, why CIs filled in IDCs was their understanding that it was on the basis of these forms that they were to be paid. Indeed, the CFO would never have realised that the IDCs and MDCs had been created after the count—rather than before it—if it had not been for the fact that the Collection District (CD) numbers to be filled in at the top right corner of each were missing. He had neglected to explain to the CC what these numbers were, or to provide her with the list for her area to ensure that none were missed.
The correct procedure was for the CFO to work with the CC in drawing up the MDCs, being sure to include the correct CD number and the correct regime of Census Record Numbers (CRNs). The CC was not, however, informed about CRNs until the data collection was complete, except for a handful of houses. The MDCs and IDCs were therefore drawn up yet again. Fixing the CRNs on the IHFs was a little trickier and required lots of scribbling out and, in some cases, necessitated filling out a whole new form.
The IDCs were very useful for identifying for the CC—who would follow up such things—if houses had been missed, for example, if there was no one at home at the time that the CI first called. It was, however, never clear to her, or to me, what the ‘persons counted’ boxes—for males and females—on the MDC and the IDC were for, when they were to be filled in, or by whom. Were they, for example, to be filled in by the ICs once they considered their interviewing work done, or by the CC once she and the CFO had checked the forms and made certain they were correct? It was also not clear whether they were to include visitors at the house in these totals, or people written down who were normally there, but who were away for the interview. This would, of course, have impacted on whether people were paid correctly.