Word: census
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...stretched a continent as vast and varied as the United States, its interior a "ghastly blank" of alkaline deserts, its outer rim a sun-bleached jawbone of barrier reefs and ragged mountains. Last week, as computers in Sydney and Canberra digested the raw data of Australia's 13th census in 178 years, it was clear that the ghastly blank was far from filled-and that for many a ruggedly individualistic cobber the ghastliest blank of all is a government census form...
Wallabies & Fossickers. In conducting the continent's most accurate head count since Phillip's day, Prime Minister Harold Holt sent 18,500 census enumerators into the cities, suburbs and outback to track down some 11.5 million inhabitants. Some traveled by plane, some by Land Rover, others on horseback, foot and even skis. Each carried a 33-question census form and a language guide in eight tongues as disparate as Serbo-Croatian and Maltese. When they dealt with the "abos" -Australia's bug-eating, boomerang-throwing aborigines-census takers had to use sign language after they had finally...
...Census men seeking out the "gold fossickers" in the Bathurst district of New South Wales-site of Australia's booming gold rush just a century ago -had to pick up directions at remote bush stations, then push into the hills and gullies. At the Turon River Valley they found a pocket of prospectors living in ancient humpies-huts whose name derives from the aboriginal oompi plus a cockney h-and one old recluse dwelling in the straight-up-and-down cliffs of the Macquarie River. In the southern snow fields of the Crackenback Range around Thredbo, Smiggin Holes...
Rabbiters & Corpses. In South and Western Australia, census takers from Humbug Scrub to Boologooroo prowled the inner edge of the Great Australian Bight in search of opal gougers, oil drillers, boundary riders and randomly wandering rabbiters. One truck driver from Adelaide was asked to deliver and collect questionnaires on the lonely "No Tree" Plain when he went out to pick up rabbits from the wandering hunters. He got five tons of rabbits and 200 questionnaires...
Motor launches took questionnaires to lonely lighthouses at Neptune and Thistle Islands and along the Great Barrier Reef, while on the equatorial Australian-trust island of New Ireland, Census Taker Douglas Fyfe, normally a schoolteacher, set up shop beside a flooded river to interview rubber-plantation workers. Four men drowned in a swamped boat as they tried to reach Fyfe, but he counted them anyway, since they had been alive 30 hours earlier on the census deadline...