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.