Interesting article Joe. Several years ago, I forget how many, I made a calculation based on the increase in Aboriginals from one census to the next. Assuming a geometric progression, it turned out that by the end of this century, every one in Australia would be an Aboriginal.

Your comment "Those of us who have been expecting continued rapid Indigenous population growth may be badly disappointed." is somewhat puzzling.

David

Whether or not there are wider benefits to identifying as Aboriginal, there is no benefit whatsoever from identifying oneself as Aboriginal in the census. So the increase in self-identification is much more likely to be due to diminishing racism and embracing of Aboriginal identity; a trend to be welcomed.

Joe raises some interesting and relevant points, though, about the policy challenges posed if the Aboriginal population growth figures do not actually reflect additional people. As I recall there are also serious concerns about the quality of data on aboriginal death rates, too, which could also affect the accuracy of Joe’s method.

//Yes, one of my distant cousins did it.... He married the skinniest, drunkest ugly little Aboriginal woman you ever saw. An absolute sensation in the Townsville Mall. He then identified as an Aboriginal.//

Really? Marrying somebody confers their ethnicity on you? Awesome... I'm off to find a Scotswoman to marry. But before I leave, could you explain how ethnicity is contagious rather than hereditary? Because I always though ethnicity was something you got from your parents rather than your spouse.

JB: He then identified as an Aboriginal.//

TL: could you explain how ethnicity is contagious rather than hereditary?

Apparently you only have to identify with Aboriginal people & their culture & you can claim it is so. Don't ask me why. I don't know, but apparently it's true. You just have to get someone to vouch for you.

It worked for him. He is also a cousin of Shady Lane too. (ex Qld Poli) ;-)

Hi Jayb,

I've never been called 'Shady lane'; an PE teacher at Wagga called me Melody, and at Darwin High I was called Strawberry; I didn't understand why for a year or so, but then I lived a sheltered life.

And yes, I've come across non-Indigenous people married to Indigenous people who, in good faith, assumed it meant that they had become Indigenous. There's nowt so queer as folk.

Hi David,

In answer to your puzzlement, how to explain the non-rapid growth in numbers: if you check out the second Table, not the First, it makes sense. I certainly, and rather smugly, assumed rapid population growth into the distant future, when everybody would have Indigenous ancestry, so this re-assessment of the figures is very shattering really. As well as the composition of that 'underlying population'.

Hi Rhian,

Yes, I'm sceptical about the mortality figures: 2300-2,500 per year seems a bit low to me. When we lived up on one community on the Murray, I roughly calculated from funerals that about a quarter of the population would be gone by forty. Forty, Christ, there's nobody left now who was my age. Entire families gone. Half a dozen people who were little kids then are gone now, my son's best mate included, I haven't told him yet.

Anyway, we'll see at the next Census.

As for identity, there was (maybe still is) an intellectual (ha ha) movement ten or twenty years ago, in which some whites, immersed deep in the 'culture', considered they were actually more Indigenous than Indigenous people. Seriously. I hope that some of them even got subincised.

Thanks to all comments: I was hoping for more viciously hostile ones, but you take what you can get.

Joe

Indigenous population growth.
My best man used to say he was big and dark skinned as his great grandfather was Spanish.Curious because he was from the Mallee.
A man in Darwin was a life long friend who suddenly brought a big home.I asked if he had won the lottery.No he had obtained a low interest loan as he was Aboriginal.He used to hang out with the white kids at school.
Both these stories represent a time in Australia's history when Aboriginals became European because of the lightness of their skin.
It is pleasing to see people of Aboriginality being proud of their ancestry.
The problem today is that there are recent arrivals from India who are claiming benefits as indigenous Australians and therefore distorting the indigenous population.