Beyond the pale: Measures of mobility in post-colonial Australia

Abstract

Australian postcolonial demography, or �Indigenous demography� as it has become colloquially labelled (Taylor 2009a), has emerged as a form of applied demography in support of attempts by the state to quantify and respond to the social and economic needs of Indigenous Australians as a separately identified homogenous group. In this way it forms part of a social justice agenda that gained impetus by the late 1960s by the calibration of Indigenous socioeconomic change relative to non-Indigenous outcomes as a device for policy formation (Rowse and Smith 2010: 100). This is presently articulated as a �Closing the Gaps� strategy, with the aim being to bring about convergence in outcomes by shifting Indigenous indicators closer to those observed for the wider majority population.