Population and health

Abstract

The Aboriginal population. The history of colonial Australia’s population is one of stark contrasts: a largely opaque record of the decline of the Aboriginal people, and a conscientiously documented populating of the continent by the forced and voluntary immigration of external settlers. Estimates of the pre-colonial population have risen as archaeologists and anthropologists progressively have revealed the antiquity of Aboriginal societies, re-writing Europeans’ understanding of Aboriginal land management and food gathering. There is now an appreciation of the role of women in dispersed horticulture, seed harvesting and fishing, and of the significance of eel farming and men’s pasture management by fire for hunting. Working from this new understanding of the capacity of the land to support denser populations, it has been calculated that before 1788 this alleged terra nullius supported 1.6 billion people to survive until their first birthday. The population is estimated to have been around 1 million in 1788, but in April 1789 smallpox erupted at Port Jackson, killing entire communities of Aboriginal people within the sight of the Europeans. The economist Noel Butlin was the first to hold the British responsible for the introduction of this notorious agent of ecological imperialism, but more complex cases have since been made for the prior penetration of Aboriginal Australia by the smallpox variole from the Indonesian archipelago, through Macassan trepang fishermen. Those who doubt that a contagious disease could make its way along rivers through sparsely populated inland Australia, or around the coast, perhaps underestimate the complexity of Aboriginal trade and communication lines. Smallpox travelled inland twice again: in the late 1820s and in the early 1860s, each time ‘clearing’ the country for the advance of pastoralist pioneers, first into south-east Australia across the Murray River, and second into inland Queensland.