To be or not to be Indigenous? Understanding the rise of Australia’s Indigenous population since 1971

In the past half century, the Indigenous Australian population has grown at a far faster rate than can be explained by births alone, and has come to include more western-educated people living in the south-east of the country. Demographers attribute much of this growth to people identifying as Indigenous later in life. Social research has examined the phenomenon of “New Identifiers” in the United States and Canada, where similar shifts in indigenous populations have been observed. This paper is the first to examine the issue in an Australian context. We analyse 33 interviews with people who have come to believe they have Indigenous Australian ancestry later in life, and identify factors that encourage members of this group to subsequently identify as Indigenous, or discourage them from doing so.