More than 2 million Indigenous people lived in Australia in 1788: new research

A gathering on the Murray River depicted in 1858.

Gerard Krefft, Corroboree on the Murray River, 1858.

Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales Content warning: This article discusses mass death, epidemics, frontier violence, and the structural violence experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

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.

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.

Our work is published in Nature Human Behaviour .

The new figure also implies that over 90% of the Indigenous population died in the 70 years after the invasion.

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.

Timeline of population estimates of Indigenous (Aboriginal) Australians from 1788 up to 2021 in blue.

Three major smallpox outbreaks are shown in pink.

The non-Indigenous population of Australia is in red.