Mary and Joseph had to travel ninety miles to the city of Joseph's ancestors, south along the flatlands of the Jordan River, then west over the hills surrounding Jerusalem, and on into Bethlehem, and all by donkey.
Today's Census Household Form was delivered by a nice man in a four-wheel drive, to be completed on Census night, Tuesday, 10 August 2021. But why wait until then as we're here every night anyway, and so we settled down to reach a con-sensus on some 65 questions.
Answering them should've been a breeze but Question 7: Is the person: ☐ Male, ☐ Female, ☐ Non-binary sex gave us pause for thought.
Question 10: What is the person's current marital status? ☐ Never Married, ☐ Widowed, ☐ Divorced, ☐ Separated but not divorced, ☐ Married had left out the box I was looking for: ☐ Precarious.
Question 20: Does the person use a language other than English at home? listed Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Italian, Greek, but to answer this question truthfully for Person 2 (which is Padma), they had left out ☐ Rubbish to match ☐ Precarious.
Question 23: What is the person's religion? For the first time, in this census, ☐ No religion sits right at the top of ten possible responses. In the 2011 census 64,390 Australians marked ☑ Other (please specify) Jedi as their religion, up from 58,053 in 2006. This put the number of Jedi just behind Sikhs and above Seventh Day Adventists.
The Jedi phenomenon began in 2001 when an email campaign mistakenly claimed the government would have to recognise it as an official religion if 8000 people selected it in the census.
Ms Sturgess, president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, is leading a campaign for people not to treat the census as a joke. This is because if people fill in the ☐ Other (please specify) box in the religion section of the census with an answer such as Jedi they are counted as "not defined" rather than "no religion". Ms Sturgess said this skews the census results by making Australia appear more religious than it is.
Against Question 55: In the last week did the person spend time doing unpaid domestic work for their household?, I proudly ticked ☑ No, did not do any unpaid domestic work in the last week.
And that's it for another Census day! Oh, and I did give them permission to make publicly available my answers after 99 years. I thought it was important that people in 2120 should know that a hundred years earlier a male chauvinist pig was still alive and well in this Big Brown Land.
P.S. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has confirmed that people in Sydney will be able to fill out both the 2021 and 2026 Census, given that it's pretty obvious where they will be in five years' time. "Just pop down your current home address on both forms," a spokesperson for the ABS said. She said there were additional questions to consider for the 2026 form, for people in both Melbourne and Sydney. "For Melbourne we've got an extra question asking you to rank your top 50 short, sharp lockdowns. This will be crucial in planning future lockdowns. If you’re in Sydney, please answer the most pressing question for 2026 which is whether BUNNINGS is an essential service or not." Western Australians have asked whether they can also fill out the 2026 form, pointing out that nobody will be leaving WA until at least 2035.
P.P.S. Back in the 60s it was the male as "head of the household" who had to fill out the Census form. In our house it still is!
And here's a clip which I've added just to remind myself of what Australians sounded (and looked) like back then:
For more video clips from the 1966 Census, click here.
