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.

Why the old estimate was too low

There was no comprehensive census of Indigenous Australians until 1971. Earlier colonial records counted only fragments of the population. They were based on things such as people attending blanket distributions and ration depots, living on missions and reserves, or working on pastoral stations.

Administrative practices also excluded many people of mixed ancestry. Later observers were measuring populations already severely disrupted by colonialism, using incomplete data. The 2021 Census was only the sixth national census to include all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Europeans began recording detailed observations of Indigenous people in the Sydney region at the very start of British invasion. But disruption began quickly. A major smallpox........

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