From a handwritten response in 1911 to the largest single census category today, “no religion” charts a profound shift in Australian identity – shaped by secularisation, migration and changing social attitudes.

When I sat down to fill in my first Australian census in 2026, one question was a familiar one. Back home in India, “What is your religion?” was never really a question – although it is asked in the census.

But religion looks different in Australia. The first option for religious affiliation on the census is ’no religion’, before Catholic, Anglican, Islam, Hinduism, other options, and a free-text field.

It is a small design choice with a surprisingly long and, at times, politically loaded history.

The slow start – and a rapid shift

Australia has asked about religion in every census since 1911.

In that first census there was no ’no religion’ box at all. If you did not have a religion, you had to write it in yourself, in the margin.

Only about 0.4 per cent of Australians, roughly 10,000 people in a young, overwhelmingly Christian society, recorded ’no religion’, alongside another 14,000 who were recorded as ‘indefinite’ – including agnostics and freethinkers – and 86,000 who refused to answer the question.

We do not know a great deal about who those 10,000 people were, apart from the fact they dared to write........

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