Australia’s Indigenous population may have been 2.22 million in 1788 before falling 93% by 1861

A new modelling study puts the Indigenous population of Australia at a median of 2.22 million people in 1788 and estimates that it had fallen by 93% by 1861. The team, led by Alan Williams and including Flinders University ecologist Corey Bradshaw, says the pre-colonial figure is up to seven times larger than some earlier estimates. The work appeared in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, with co-authors from Flinders, Monash, James Cook and other universities.

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For roughly a century the accepted number was far smaller. Earlier estimates ran from 250,000 to 1 million, and the figure most often repeated came from the anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s, who worked from observations made after disease and dispossession had already begun to thin communities across the continent. The new paper argues that anchoring on those post-contact observations understated the scale of what came before.

Three independent estimates behind the 2.22 million

Colonial headcounts were never going to settle the question, since the first comprehensive census of Indigenous Australians was not taken until 1971 and earlier records were incomplete, often leaving out people of mixed ancestry, as Gizmodo’s report on the study notes. So the researchers built the estimate from evidence that does not depend on settlers’ tallies at all.

According to the authors’ own account republished by UNSW, they combined three lines of evidence: population change reconstructed from more than 5,000 archaeological radiocarbon dates, effective population size inferred from genetic data, and a model of how many non-agricultural people different Australian environments could support given their productivity. Each method has weaknesses, but they fail in different ways, and the study treats their agreement as the signal.

The median that emerged was 2.22 million people, or about 0.29 people per square kilometre, with a likely range of roughly 1 million to 4 million. Flinders University’s summary of the work notes that this sits well above the 250,000 to 1 million range produced by earlier historical estimates, and the authors are explicit that the median is a modelled estimate rather than a count.

Excess deaths between 1788 and 1861

To measure the decline, the team worked backward from colonial records that become usable later in the century. Early census figures put the Indigenous population in 1861 at between 177,000 and 193,000, which the study treats as about 7% of the 1788 median, hence the 93% fall. A demographic model that accounts for age structure then asked how many deaths beyond those expected in a stable population were needed to get from the first number to the second.

The answer was about 2.06 million excess deaths between 1788 and 1861, roughly 28,200 a year, with a modelled range of about 700,000 to 4.2 million. A related model cited by the authors estimated that the 1789 smallpox epidemic alone killed up to 220,000 Indigenous people in south-eastern Australia.

The model cannot say which forces did the killing. In the authors’ words it “cannot reliably divide” the toll among the overlapping effects of disease, frontier violence and structural violence, and they describe even the lowest plausible estimate as implying catastrophic loss of life on a continental scale. Bradshaw has also pointed out that colonists were unlikely to record how many people they killed, which is one reason the paper avoids relying on their numbers.

The research was funded through two Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence, one focused on Indigenous and environmental histories and futures and the other on Australian biodiversity and heritage. Bradshaw, Williams and Russell were joined by co-authors including Sean Ulm, Raymond Tobler and Billy Griffiths, a long author list that fits a paper drawing on radiocarbon archaeology, genetics and environmental modelling at once. The paper leans on the overlap among those methods rather than on any single one of them.

The 2021 census and the terra nullius question

The 2021 census counted 812,728 people who identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. That is about 37% of the study’s 1788 median, and the authors project that if current growth continues the population would not return to its pre-colonial level until around 2047. The comparison turns a historical argument into a present-day one: the recovery has been real, but it is far from complete.

The researchers frame the figure as relevant to public debate as well as demography. Bradshaw said that understanding the size of Indigenous populations before 1788 is essential to truth-telling and reconciliation. Larissa Behrendt, who chairs the advisory committee of the research centre involved, called the decline “a demographic catastrophe at the heart of the Australian story.” Monash University’s Lynette Russell, a co-author, said it is also time to recognise intergenerational privilege.

The numbers also bear on terra nullius, the British claim that the land belonged to no one, which a population in the millions further undermines. Williams, the lead author, paired the loss with what followed, pointing to the “remarkable survival, resilience and recovery over the past century” of Indigenous communities. The peer-reviewed paper and the ScienceDaily release set out the full ranges behind each figure.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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