In this book, we have largely taken the existence and the nature of the census as ‘given’, as a necessary part of the armoury of the modern nation-state. We have focused on ways to make the census in remote Indigenous Australia more effective, in its own terms. We have also pointed to the limitations of the census as a means of capturing and elucidating the social processes and cultural values that pattern the ‘facts’ of Indigenous demography. We have drawn attention to the culturally constructed nature of Indigenous responses to such questions as those on language and religion, and to the distortion of Indigenous family and household structures that occurs when Western categorisations are imposed on them (see also Morphy 2007). We have also drawn attention to the ‘silences’ in the data. In particular, the census is silent on significant aspects of remote Indigenous economic activity, such as income derived from art production and the contribution of subsistence activities such as hunting and gathering. This wider question of how Indigenous populations are represented in the census is discussed in most detail in Chapter 8. It has also been addressed previously to some extent in the literature (Ellanna et al. 1988; Jonas 1992; Martin et al. 2002; Martin and Taylor 1996; Morphy 2004, 2006, 2007; Smith 1992).

In making such observations, however, we are also alluding to a literature that we have not addressed explicitly in this monograph: the work of anthropological demographers who critique the cultural assumptions underlying the construction of demographic categories (for example, Bledsoe 2002; Kertzer and Fricke 1997; Szreter et al. 2004), and who examine the role of state instruments such as the census in the construction of sub-national identities (for example, Kertzer and Arel 2002). Taken together, critiques such as these point to the essentially political nature of the census as a tool by which the state makes its citizens ‘legible’ and thus able to be acted on (Scott 1998). Benedict Anderson (2006: 163) calls the census—specifically in the context of colonial states—an ‘institution of power’. As colonised subjects, the Indigenous people of Australia find themselves being categorised and made legible in terms of the assumptions of the settler state that now encapsulates them. The view of them that is constructed in this way feeds in turn into government policy settings and programs. Currently the state—through measures such as the ‘National Emergency’ intervention in the Northern Territory—is inserting itself ever deeper into the lives of Indigenous people in remote areas. As bodies such as the United Nations recognise (Taylor 2007a), there is an urgent need for a critique of the categories that underlie the census and also other survey tools that the state deploys to capture the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of Indigenous Australians.