The number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia before colonization 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, has been published in the peer-reviewed Nature Human Behavior.
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.
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