From the Guardian · · 2m
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.
In brief
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 neutral. A smaller pre-colonial population made terra nullius, and the land grab it justified, easier to defend. Originally reported by the Guardian.
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.”
The one thing
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.
