# Australia's population before 1788 was 2.2 million

> New modelling says nine in ten Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were wiped out after the first fleet.
- Title: Australia's population before 1788 was 2.2 million | Shortify
- Summary: New modelling says nine in ten Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were wiped out after the first fleet. The old figure of 250,000 was never…
- Keywords: indigenous australians, colonialism, history, demography, research, news, world, Australia's, population, 1788, million, the Guardian
- Source: the Guardian — https://theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/15/australia-indigenous-population-before-colonisation-underestimated-ntwnfb
- Published: 2026-09-15T09:00:31+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: indigenous australians, colonialism, history, demography, research, news, world
## A number nobody expected
New modelling puts Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population before the 1788 first fleet at 2.2 million. The long-standing estimate was 250,000.
## Who ran the numbers
The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures published the work in Nature Human Behaviour, with a warning that the content is distressing.

> invaluable to truth-telling and reconciliation
## Millions of excess deaths
Co-author Prof Corey Bradshaw says the model forces millions of excess deaths from smallpox and other epidemics, massacres, dispossession and malnutrition.
## Disease did enormous damage
Bradshaw's earlier work found the 1789 smallpox outbreak alone killed as many as 220,000 people. Further smallpox waves followed, plus measles, influenza, tuberculosis and typhoid.
## Massacres went unrecorded
Bradshaw would bet his career that massacre databases undercount by a factor of ten. Settlers clearing people off land they claimed had every reason not to write it down.

> you're not going to write extensively about how many people you killed
## Terra nullius needed a small number
Australia was colonised on the claim that the land belonged to no one. Bradshaw links the undercount to that: fewer people meant a better justification for taking the continent.

> If there's a systematic desire to take land [fewer people means a] better justification for imperialism.
## Counting started shamefully late
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not properly counted until the 1971 census, after the 1967 referendum. That first count recorded 115,953 people.
## How the estimate was built
The team modelled three ways: archaeological finds, reconstructed climate and land productivity to gauge carrying capacity, and genetic data run backwards using DNA mutation rates.
## Reduced to seven percent
With 2.06 million excess deaths between 1788 and 1861, the population fell to about 7% of its original size. The 2021 census counted 983,257 after recounts.

> We are not talking about a marginal consequence of colonisation but a demographic catastrophe at the heart of the Australian story.
## Key takeaway

The old figure of 250,000 was never neutral. A smaller pre-colonial population made terra nullius, and the land grab it justified, easier to defend.