Abstract: In 2010 I began a two-year project in north east Arnhem Land. The project is a population study of the Yolngu people of the eastern (Miwatj) part of the Yolngu region who live at the settlements of Yirrkala, Gapuwiyak, Gunyangara, Birritjimi, and the associated homelands communities. As well as being a population count, this study will map residence and mobility patterns within the region and link these to the nature and structure of extended kin networks and patterns of land ownership. It will assess the importance of these factors in both the major settlements and in the outlying, smaller homelands.

In earlier work on the National Census in 2001 and 2006, I pointed to the inadequacy of the binary categorisation ‘resident’ versus ‘visitor’ as a framework for understanding Yolngu relationships to place, and the patterns of mobility and immobility that reflect these relationships. Yet the ‘household form’—or more accurately the ‘dwelling form’—seems an inescapable tool in the compilation of a regional population database.

In this seminar I will outline my attempts to address this contradiction in the design of the forms used to survey the Yolngu of the Miwatj region in the dry season of 2010. I will also discuss the absolute limitations of the survey methodology, both as means to capture the Yolngu regional ‘population’ and for reaching an understanding of the complex, processual, and possibly changing nature of Yolngu relationships to each other and to place. 

Frances Morphy is a Fellow at CAEPR, ANU. Her research interests include the anthropological demography of Australian Aboriginal populations, population structure and dynamics in remote Aboriginal Australia, and the representation of Aboriginal people in the national census; the anthropology and linguistics of the Yolngu-speaking peoples of north east Arnhem Land; and the social, cultural and economic aspects of the encapsulation of Aboriginal Australians within the Australian state, in particular the homelands movement, land rights and native title, the governance of Aboriginal community organisations, the impact of colonisation on Indigenous social systems and languages, and problems of cross-cultural 'translation'.