Introduction: The Australian Census, Religious Diversity and the Religious ‘Nones’ among Indigenous Australians

The motivation for this book originated from data reported in the 2011 Australian National Census, in which the number of Aboriginal Australians or Torres Strait Islanders who claimed to have no religion or who did not state a religion was more than 130,000, approximately 24 per cent of the total Indigenous population. Between the prior census, in 2006, and the 2011 Census, there was a close to 41 per cent increase in the number of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders in the ‘No Religion’ category, whereas for the whole Australian population the increase was notably less (29.41 per cent). Close to 99 per cent of Indigenous people who declared that they had ‘no religion’ did not provide any further specification. The remaining 1 per cent reported a variety of affiliations, including agnostic, atheist, humanist and rationalist (Onnudottir et al. 2013: 95).