This research was conducted with financial support from the Australian Research Council (ARC Linkage Project LP0668432), and with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) as an industry partner.

We would like to thank the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) as an institution for being so open to this research, which we recognise is at times quite critical of their processes and procedures. We acknowledge that perhaps the best that can be hoped for—in the extremely complex exercise that is the national census—is constant administrative self-awareness and continuing evaluation of the task. We would like to think that we have aided the ABS in that sort of process. We would also like to thank the many individual ABS employees in the field and at the Census Management Unit in Darwin and the Data Processing Centre in Melbourne who assisted us in our research and allowed us to look over their shoulders as they worked. Finally, we thank the case-study communities and their organisations and the many individual community members who allowed us to observe the progress of the 2006 Census. We hope that our findings and recommendations will result in changes that will ultimately benefit them, as individuals, organisations and communities.