Being Counted: Family Planning and Aboriginal Population, 1967–75

Abstract

When the results of the 1966 census came out shortly after the 1967 referendum, they revealed something new: Australia’s Aboriginal population was growing, rapidly. This article examines white fears of an Aboriginal ‘population explosion’ and technocratic attempts to slow Aboriginal population growth during the twilight of assimilation policies and the beginnings of ‘self-determination’. It turns to two projects: one conducted by various government departments in remote communities and another through the Family Planning Association of South Australia and Council of Aboriginal Women. As government intervention in Aboriginal lives shifted from top-down institutional approaches to funding Aboriginal organisations themselves to implement government policies, Aboriginal motherhood nonetheless remained a focus for state interventions. These interventions deployed discourses of liberal individualism, development, cultural restoration, and modernity that ‘cloaked’ objectives of population control.