Say yes to question 60 on census night!

August 7th, 2006

Tomorrow night is census night in Australia. We will again be asked, at question 60, whether we are happy for our name identified data to be kept by the National Archives of Australia for release in 2105 (99 years). Say yes!

I am surprised that little more than half of the people surveyed at the last census (52.7%) did say yes, for what is there to fear? I’m fairly sure that in 2105 I’ll have been dead for a good sixty years and, being dust, won’t care who knows what about me.

The questions are fairly innocuous (with the glaring exception of the invidious and invasive question about live births per female in a household). What purpose then will keeping the census data for posterity serve?

‘People who may be interested in accessing this kind of information in the distant future’, so the Census guide tells us, ‘include genealogists who study family trees, historians, academics, social analysts, journalists, and fiction and non-fiction writers’. (That’s me, me, me!)

Recensement

Faced with scant information about a key but elusive figure in the story of the ‘Post Office Mauritius’ stamps, Madame Borchard – women are rarely written into the pages of history – France’s 1866 census provided insight into her situation and gave me a vital piece of information: her full name.

The local Bordeaux almanachs gave me the address and occupation of her husband, Adolphe Borchard, who, in 1866, resided at the Cours du Pavé-des-Chartrons. Armed with this information I next consulted the census and there were Adolphe and all his family listed, his domestic life laid bare, including Jeanne Heritzen, sa femme, and no less than six children! The men who preceded me in the telling of the ‘Post Office’ story have chided Madame for her carelessness in disposing of all her ‘Post Office’ stamps when her husband died in 1869, but here, to me, in the census, is a compelling reason why stamps were not at this time her highest priority.

There was mild discussion in the archival community in Australia last time this issue of keeping census data arose (paraphrased here and sources unidentified, because the community became a little upset recently when it realised that, shock, horror, the archives of their email list could be read by anybody on the internet!). One person believed we shouldn’t be given the choice at all (the data should automatically be kept) and expressed disappointment at the limited foresight of the Australian population in declining to say yes. Another preferred to see the glass as half full, applauding the 52.7% yes vote and putting the no vote down to ‘a certain Australian reticence to submit to officialdom’. In Britain this data is kept as a matter of course and the public aren’t consulted. Consider how much personal information we are required to provide to rent a property, belong to Medicare, join a library or rent a video asks another. There is already much personal information out there in the public domain about you, so what does it matter that in 99 years someone discovers you moved house between one census and the next or that you were one of the 71,000 witty persons who put Jedi as their religion in 2001?

I’m with historian Anne-Marie Conde, from the Australian War Memorial, who says, ‘I have an intense curiosity about other people’s lives and I think it is one of the things that makes us human. I think it teaches us to care about one another and to learn from each other, and when this happens across time it is especially enriching.’

So I shall tick yes.

Posted in personal, research