Australia Population

Australia Population is about 22 million.

This is not much for a country of the size of the whole Europe, so in the outback there is plenty of empty space.


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At the time when the First Fleet came to Australia, there were roughly about one million indigenous people.

That number quickly dropped as Aboriginal people were killed in large numbers, many in conflicts but most by diseases brought from Europe.

The numbers of British and Irish convicts, and later free settlers, grew. In the mid to late 1800s, gold rushes brought lots of new settlers to Australia.

The population grew from about 40,000 to almost two million in only 20 years.

The next big wave was after the WWII, when Australian realised they needed more people to defent their country in wars.

The doors opened for Europeans, and the timing suited well as many European countries suffered from the war and people were happy to go and start a new life in a new country.

In the 1960s Australia started opening doors to non-European countries and there was a wave of Asian migration. Since 1945 more than six million people have migrated to Australia to add to our population which now is about 22 million.

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