Estimating the Aboriginal population in pre-contact and early colonial Australia

What is it about?

It is most often assumed that smallpox was the major disease that killed many Aboriginal people after contact with Europeans and Macassan traders in the 1780s. This paper estimates the Indigenous population in Australia between 1780 and 1850 using several scenarios about disease mortality, transmission and indirect measures of the effect of frontier conflict using demographic methods pioneered by Noel Butlin. While smallpox did kill many Indigenous people in this period, the authors argue that chicken pox is more consistent with the historical record and the apparently fast rate of transmission of disease across the continent.

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Why is it important?

Until very recently, most written academic accounts only paid passing attention to the Indigenous economic history. There was a blindspot to the enormous contribution of Indigenous peoples to the Australian economy during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Not only is this paper is one of the first to estimate the role of chicken pox in the mass Indigenous mortality that occurred after contact with the outside world. It uses abjunctive reasoning (as opposed to deductive or inductive reasoning) to identify the plausibility of a range of senarios in spite of residual issues with the quality of historical data and intercultural uncertainty. Such reasoning is important for the construction of plausible hypotheses that could be tested if suitable data were identified. Even if no new data is found, abjunctive reasoning allows analysts to give low weight to hypotheses that are based on assumptions that are arguably inconsistent or flawed.

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