The number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia before colonisation was dramatically underestimated, according to new research that suggests many more of them were killed. Modelling by a national research group puts the population levels before the 1788 first fleet arrived at 2.2 million, compared with early estimates of 250,000 people. The research, by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures (CIEHF), has been published in the peer-reviewed Nature Human Behaviour.
The authors wrote that, historically, population estimates have been poor “due to lethal diseases, frontier and structural violence, and absence of systematic censuses” and that it’s “invaluable to truth-telling and reconciliation” to try to rectify that. They warn readers that the content of the study is confronting and possibly distressing. The modelling showed there had to be millions of excess deaths from smallpox and other diseases, massacres, and the other results of colonisation such as dispossession and malnutrition, according to co-author Prof Corey Bradshaw, a global ecology professor at Flinders University.
His previous research found that an 1789 smallpox outbreak alone killed as many as 220,000 Aboriginal people. There were also other smallpox epidemics, as well as outbreaks of measles, influenza, tuberculosis, typhoid and other diseases. Bradshaw said he would bet his career that massacre databases were underestimated by an “order of magnitude”.
If there’s a systematic desire to take land [fewer people means a] better justification for imperialism.” Australia was colonised on the basis of terra nullius, that it belonged to no one. That concept was overthrown with the high court’s Mabo decision, when it was recognised that First Nations people had been here for tens of thousands of years. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not properly counted in the census until 1971, after the 1967 referendum.
A that point, 115,953 people identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. In 2021, 812,728 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were counted in the census, a figure revised upwards to 983,257 with post-census recounts. The 2.2 million figure, as well as a new estimate of 2.06 million excess deaths between 1788 and 1861, means the population was reduced to about 7% of its original size.
A Euahleyai/Gamillaroi woman, she is also the chair of the CIEHF’s advisory committee. Early on after colonisation, various people estimated how many Aboriginal people were in their region. For example, governor Arthur Phillip estimated Gadigal people of the Eora nation came to about 1,500.
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