Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project.
The total number of deaths following British settlement in 1788 has long been debated, but many historians estimate it numbered tens of thousands.
It is estimated that massacres by white settlers resulted in the death of approximately 11% of the Aboriginal population between 1836 and 1851.
Official records state at least 40 men, women and children were killed, but other historians suggest hundreds of Aboriginal people died that day. Today, the site of the killings bears no obvious evidence of the murders.
On 26 January 1838 Nunn and his men massacred up to 50 Aboriginal people camped at Waterloo Creek.
Spanish colonization of the Americas
It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas up to eight million indigenous people died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasian diseases, in a series of events that have been described as the first large-scale act of genocide of the modern era.
Starting in 1794, mass killings were first carried out by British soldiers, then by police and settlers – often acting together – and later by native police, working under the command of white officers, in militia-style forces supported by colonial governments.
Attempts at the mass killing of Aboriginal people were still being made as recently as 1981, according to a historian who has spent the past four years researching colonial violence in the Northern Territory.
The Bringing Them Home report (produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families in 1987), says that "at least 100,000" children were removed from their parents.
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody presents its report to the Commonwealth Government. It finds that of the 99 deaths it investigated, 43 were of people who were separated from their families as children.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
It's estimated that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, affecting most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.
The Coniston Massacre was the last documented massacre of First Nations people in Australia. Over 60 First Nations people were killed throughout the Central Desert region, leaving a traumatic mark on the lives of many.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
There were between 300,000 to 950,000 Aboriginal people living in Australia when the British arrived in 1788.3 At that time there were approximately 260 distinct language groups and 500 dialects.
Prior to British settlement, more than 500 First Nations groups inhabited the continent we now call Australia, approximately 750,000 people in total. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures developed over 60,000 years, making First Nations Peoples the custodians of the world's oldest living culture.
Why were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children taken from their families? The forcible removal of First Nations children from their families was based on assimilation policies, which claimed that the lives of First Nations people would be improved if they became part of white society.
In 2019/20, 952 Aboriginal children across NSW were removed from their families, a 2.6% increase on the year prior. In total, there were 6,688 Aboriginal children in what is known as “out-of-home-care” – about 41% of the total number of kids in the system.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600.
The claim that a “Licence To Shoot Aborigines” was distributed in Australia as part of a 1965 pest control law is false. The supposed licence is a fake and can be traced back to a racist propaganda leaflet distributed in the 1990s. Indigenous history experts confirmed no such licence ever existed.
The British settlement in Australia was not peaceful. Aboriginal people were moved off their traditional land and killed in battles or by hunting parties. European diseases such as measles and tuberculosis also killed many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
For more than 50,000 years before European arrival, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples lived as hunter-gatherers. With no signs of land ownership, such as fences, crops, stock animals, or buildings, the Europeans who arrived on the First Fleet believed the land was free to claim.
In his new book, The Story of Australia's People, Geoffrey Blainey writes that one of the reasons aboriginal tribes didn't effectively resist European settlement was that they were militarily weak. Indigenous tribes often fought with each other rather than launch coordinated attacks against settlers.
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.