On Tuesday, Flinders University published findings suggesting Australia's Indigenous population before European colonisation was seven times bigger than previously believed.
The study estimates the population was around 2.22 million people, compared to previous suggestions of 250,000 to 1 million.
Researcher Professor Corey Bradshaw told TDA he hopes "the right information... fuels better conversation and helps us heal some of these historical travesties."
Here's what you need to know.
Background
Historically, Australia's pre-European Indigenous population has been estimated at between 250,000 and one million.
An early estimate by anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown was that no more than 300,000 people lived in Australia before colonisation.
Flinders University and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures (CIEHF) have worked with Indigenous scholars and communities to investigate deadly smallpox outbreaks and their impacts on population numbers.
New research
Professor Corey Bradshaw led a study, published this week, which found previous First Nations population estimates were "systematically biased."
"Much of the damage caused by colonialism had happened when these observations took place, thereby missing lots of people that should have been there otherwise," he said.
The researchers estimate that the population was more likely to be around 2.22 million people, seven times larger than early figures.
According to these estimates, by 1861, around 93% of the pre-European population had died.
Your contribution ensures The Daily Aus can continue doing the work you love.
I want to give $10 monthly to help TDA keep doing the news.
Your details:
This is equivalent to around 2 million people.
Professor Bradshaw said smallpox killed a large proportion of First Nations people, as well as frontier violence, including widespread massacres against Indigenous people.
Bradshaw noted that much of this data was not recorded.
Method
Researchers used a combination of technologies to inform their estimates and compare them to earlier data.
This includes satellite-based and global circulation modelling, which looks at landscape productivity (how much life a piece of land can sustain).
Another technique was through genomic tools, analysing genetic diversity and mutation rates to help reconstruct population rates.
Finally, archaeological data, looking at things like stone tools, helped to indicate the number of people.
What's next?
Bradshaw told TDA he hopes the research will "help to understand the degree to which the gap [between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians] has persisted to today".
"We're hoping that this helps bring the conversation into the light," he said.
Researchers will now focus on disease outbreaks and massacre data "to see if we can start correcting for some of the biases there and get a better handle on where these happened and the magnitude of them," Bradshaw added.
