Unsettling the Past: Revisiting Australia's Indigenous Population Numbers A recent study published in Nature Human Behaviour has sparked a long overdue reckoning with Australia's colonial past.
The discovery that pre European indigenous populations numbered over 2 million people, not the previously estimated 300,000, is a damning indictment of the systematic destruction of Indigenous cultures and communities.
The flaws in previous estimates are evident when examining the records from which they were derived. Colonial records often relied on simplistic headcounts, ignoring the complexities of pre colonial societies.