Thank you Forrest, that's very intriguing: before the 1967 Referendum, the states retained responsibility for Indigenous people within their borders, and held annual Censuses, fairly rough-and-ready affairs involving local coppers and missionaries, with a factor built-in for Aboriginal people still 'outside civilization'.

And as you say, the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics published a paper in 1933, but relating only to 'full-blood' Aborigines. The AFA (Aborigines' Friends' Association) based here in Adelaide, published annual compilations of population estimates state by state from 1928, at least up to 1956. If anybody is interested, I typed them up about ten years ago and they are available at

rmg1859@yahoo.com.au

One problem with earlier census counts involved estimates for populations still believed to be 'beyond civilization' - even as late as the fifties, WA authorities still believed that there were 10,000 such people in remote areas. What is very interesting is how these figures were probably always OVER-estimates of the actual 'wild' population: perhaps people had come in to missions and stations earlier and in bigger numbers, and there were always fewer people 'out there' than the authorities assumed.

But on the AFA counts, it is clear that the Indigenous population had started to increase - at least, in terms of these AFA population estimates - from as early as the late 1920s.

And it probably doesn't even need saying that the population everywhere was probably always greater than the official counts.

Joe

The Census does not test for Aboriginality, it tests for who identifies as Aboriginal.

There are people I know that look European and suffer no disadvantage, yet identify as Aboriginal, simply for the financial benefits that status brings them.

I remember one recent case in the MSM, where well off white looking people, squeezed genuine Aboriginals that suffer real disadvantage, out of a competition, that was created solely to benefit Aboriginal people.

Of course if scholarships and competitions were created to benefit European whites anywhere on the planet, the people organizing them and those receiving such scholarships, would be harassed mercilessly by so called anti-racists.

That is because anti-racist = anti-white.

G'day Alison,

Yes, there are many white people who hop in and claim to be Indigenous. I worked in a university Indigenous student support program and I put a lot of work into publicising courses and recruiting Indigenous students. Many times I was contacted by people who I suspected were not Indigenous at all: they always had a story, often about their mother wwho had been 'taken away' and therefore did not know her family, and 'therefore' could not be checked up on.

One guy pestered me about enrolment until I asked him to put together a family tree, and I never heard from him again. He got into another, slacker, program and was in due course Aboriginal Scholar of the Year. He eventually got a good job in Indigenous policy in Canberra. I found out accidentally that his mother was Italian, a Calabresa, actually a very nice lady, and his father was Austrian, and that they met on the railways back in the late fifties, doing their two-year migrant stint out in the bush.

It's certainly not the fault of Indigenous people if whites exploit opportunities that are not really available for them, of course. Monitoring and vetting procedures in Aboriginal organisations are unbelievably pathetic, so a few whites are bound to get scholarships and jobs and houses which - given the vagaries of discrimination and segregation in Indigenous policy over 200 years - are properly set aside for genuine Indigenous people.

And until some of that trash can be cleaned out of Indigenous affairs, then reconciliation is really a sick joke.

Joe