Melbourne, More than two million Indigenous people probably lived in Australia at the time of the British invasion in 1788, according to new research based on genetic, archaeological and environmental evidence.
Our work is published in Nature Human Behaviour. It is not simply a revision to a historical statistic. It changes the scale at which Australians must understand terra nullius, and subsequent invasion, survival and recovery. Why the old estimate was too low – Truth-telling begins with all Australians facing the scale of what happened. This is not to assign blame but to create shared understanding of our past. Truth-telling also means recognising the strength of Indigenous cultures and communities that endure. SKS SKS This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
This figure is much larger than the estimate of 300,000 which has shaped public understanding for the past century. The old estimate, published by anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown in 1930, was based largely on observations made after disease, dispossession and violence had already devastated Indigenous communities. Using three methods that do not depend on colonial-era headcounts, we calculated a median population of 2.22 million people in 1788, with a likely range roughly between 1 and 4 million. The new figure also implies that over 90 per cent of the Indigenous population died in the 70 years after the invasion.
Measles, influenza, tuberculosis and other introduced diseases also killed many. They were based on things such as people attending blanket distributions and ration depots, living on missions and reserves, or working on pastoral stations. Administrative practices also excluded many people of mixed ancestry. Later observers were measuring populations already severely disrupted by colonialism, using incomplete data. Europeans began recording detailed observations of Indigenous people in the Sydney region at the very start of the British invasion. But disruption began quickly. At the same time, colonial expansion brought direct frontier killings and structural violence. People were removed from Country, procuring food was prevented or criminalised, forced and exploitative labour was common, families were separated, and malnutrition and damaging assimilation policies took their toll. The historical record is known to be incomplete. Even so, the Colonial Frontier Massacres database, which documents only incidents meeting strict evidentiary criteria, shows hundreds of such events. Three independent ways of looking back To avoid relying on potentially biased colonial observations, we brought together independent estimates. A second used genetic data to infer effective population size. The third modelled how many non-agricultural people Australian environments could support based on environmental productivity. This includes work on Australia’s population history, Aboriginal mitogenomes, and the peopling of Sahul. Each method has different assumptions and uncertainties. But they produce broadly similar results. That density is modest and falls well within observed densities for Indigenous populations in productive parts of Australia and elsewhere. A larger population changes how we interpret Australia’s environmental history. Two or three million people managing Country would have sustained cultural burning, resource enhancement and knowledge networks at a scale that low population estimates obscure. Recent research has traced the emergence of human-managed fire regimes in Australia’s tropical savannahs and in south-eastern Australia extending millennia into the past. Indigenous people adapted under extraordinary pressure. They continued to keep and transmit culture, kinship, lore, language and knowledge as well as maintain responsibilities to Country. Reconciliation and policy must reckon with the depth of this loss. The current National Agreement on Closing the Gap recognises that Indigenous peoples must share decision-making and help design the policies affecting them. A longer demographic view strengthens that imperative.
There was no comprehensive census of Indigenous Australians until 1971. The 2021 Census was only the sixth national census to include all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. A major smallpox epidemic struck the region in 1789, within 15 months of the First Fleet’s arrival. Our related modelling estimated this epidemic killed up to 220,000 Indigenous people in south-eastern Australia. Other smallpox outbreaks occurred in 1826–1838 and 1860–1869. One reconstructed long-term population change from more than 5,000 archaeological radiocarbon dates. Our analyses produced a median estimate of 2.22 million people, or 0.29 people per square kilometre. In 2021, 812,728 people identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in the Census. These numbers are still well short of 2.22 million, showing the scale of the intergenerational trauma that many Indigenous people continue to experience.
Earlier colonial records counted only fragments of the population. The underlying archaeological database and modelling approaches have been published previously. This shared history forms an important part of Australian identity that Indigenous people share with us today.
A demographic catastrophe – The year with the most complete census information prior to 1971 was 1861. That year, the Indigenous population was estimated between 177,000 and 193,000. Using a demographic model that accounted for population age, we found an average of around 28,200 excess deaths each year for 73 years. That’s 2.06 million deaths in total, leaving only 7 per cent of the median estimated pre-invasion population by the mid-19th century. Nor is 2.06 million a precise body count. The modelled total deaths range from roughly 700,000 to 4.2 million.
Population loss meant not only lives and communities lost, but a severe disruption of land-management systems built over many thousands of years. How many people would have had to die for this figure to square with our updated pre-invasion population estimate? Understanding the true scale and sophistication of those practices will inform efforts to restore and support Indigenous-led land management. Our model cannot reliably divide them among the overlapping forces of disease, direct frontier violence, and structural violence. Even the lowest plausible estimate implies catastrophic loss of life on a continental scale. Survival, reconciliation and truth-telling – Amid all the death, this story is primarily one of survival.
“Excess deaths” means deaths beyond those expected in an otherwise stable population.
