55. Aboriginal History

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about the government’s lack of understanding of Aboriginal history. In the last week the PM has been rightly lambasted for his comment that living in remote communities was a “lifestyle choice”.

And of course before that there was his infamous comment about Sydney that it was “hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush”. Indeed, it is hard to think that!

But what caught my attention was a comment from Joe Hockey in launching the government’s Intergenerational Report that Australia’s population had been growing since 1788. Well, actually, no.

When the British Navy set up camp with their conscripted colonisers in 1788, the population of what is now Australia was probably about 750,000. Estimates are difficult because obviously there was no census of the several hundred Aboriginal nations across the continent.

Early European estimates of an Aboriginal population of around 300,000 were based on observations of communities which had already been devastated by deadly diseases which travelled faster than the colonial push into country. More recent estimates go as high as over 1m Aboriginal people at the time of initial colonisation.

Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of disease, dispossession, and the other intentional and unintentional colonisation processes, there were only about 100-150,000 Aboriginal people.

Again, estimates are difficult, but this massive depopulation is extraordinary. If we took the mid-point estimate of an original 750,000, then the equivalent of about 6 in 7 Aboriginal people disappeared over the course of the century. [See note below]

In relation to Joe Hockey’s comment, if we assume that much of that population loss was in the first half of that period, then it was probably not until the gold rushes of the 1850s that Australia’s population reached the heights of the pre-colonial period. So, no Mr Hockey, the population has not been growing since 1788.

And it is not good enough to ignore the Aboriginal population simply because they weren’t counted in the original statistics – to do so simply imports nineteenth century racism into the present.

To be fair to the Treasurer though, numbers have never been the strong point of Intergenerational Reports and it was only a throw-away line. But as with the PM’s mis-statements, such one-liners are important because they reveal underlying assumptions and arguably a more real version of government thinking than heavily manicured policy statements.

But what is more interesting was that Joe Hockey’s population comments did not cause an outcry – hardly even a stir.

It is perhaps a marker of the distance we still need to travel before we fully appreciate and come to terms with our colonial history.

And about that, moreso than the silly statements of our alleged leaders, I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 17 March 2015



Endnote: To put the figures of Aboriginal population loss in perspective, the catastrophic global influenza epidemic of 1918-20 killed more people than World War 1. It was probably the biggest single demographic event of the last century and in Australia cost the lives of over 2% of the population – yet the Australian population continued to grow in those years – in marked contrast to the massive loss of Aboriginal population after 1788 which has only relatively recently recovered to pre-colonial levels.