Arabic version: بحث يعيد تقدير حجم أثر الاستعمار في السكان الأصليين

According to ABC News, new research estimates Australia’s median pre-colonial Indigenous population was 2.22 million people, far above earlier estimates of 250,000 to 1 million.

The researchers, from across Australia, said diseases, massacres, displacement and other colonial-related disruptions likely caused an estimated 2.06 million First Nations Australians to die during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Just over 70 years after the First Fleet arrived in 1788, they estimated that seven per cent of the pre-colonial population had survived.

The study used computer modelling alongside ethnographic observations and archaeological and genetic reconstructions. It updated estimates that had been calculated using anthropological information gathered in the 1930s.

University of Technology Sydney professor Larissa Behrendt, an Eualayai/Gamillaroi woman, said the findings required Australians to reconsider the scale of events after 1788. Flinders University global ecology professor Corey Bradshaw said previous research had underestimated the effects of lethal disease, frontier violence and structural violence. He said smallpox alone could have killed up to 220,000 First Nations people on the east coast in the first 10 years of colonisation.

Latest census data put the First Nations population in 2021 at about 37 per cent of the estimated median pre-colonial size. Based on current growth trends, researchers estimated population parity with the 1788 level would be reached in 2047, describing the calculation as important to truth-telling and reconciliation.