Indigenous fertility in Australia: updating Alan Gray

Although he was not the first scholar to investigate it, there is little question that the Ph.D. research of Alan Gray, completed in 1983, represented a landmark in the study of Indigenous fertility in Australia. Convinced that ‘Aboriginal’ fertility had fallen rapidly through the 1970s, Gray set out to document and explain the decline. Weaving through a maze of sub-optimal census data he produced a series of age-specific and total fertility rates, refined by three broad geographic location categories, for 5-year periods from 1956–1961 to 1976–1981. These he subsequently updated to also include 1981–1986 and the 10-year period 1986–1996 as new census children-ever-borne data became available. He would doubtless have extended his series further had he lived to do so. For years his fertility estimates were graphed in the annual ABS publication Births Australia as the Bureau began publishing registration-based Indigenous fertility estimates from the late 1990s, but Indigenous birth registration data and fertility estimates based thereon remain to this day problematic in several respects. This paper summarises Alan Gray’s work, extends his Indigenous fertility estimates to the 2011–2016 intercensal period, and examines the results against registration-based estimates that have been subjected to (a) regular retrospective revision (in light of data processing flaws and substantial errors of closure in intercensal Indigenous population increments), and (b) the vagaries of significant late registration, and periodic registry efforts to clear backlogs of unregistered Indigenous births.

New Estimates of Aboriginal Fertility, 1966-1971 to 1996-2001

Using census data on children in families, this paper estimates various fertility measures for the total aboriginal population and four specific groups, North American Indians, Registered Indians, Metis, and Inuit. The “own-children” procedure is used for deriving the number of births by the age of the mother during specific years preceding the census. The major focus of the paper is on the trends of total fertility rate and the convergence of age patterns between various subgroups over the past 30 years. Strengths and limitations of the method are also discussed.