Origins of ‘the gap’: perspectives on the historical demography of aboriginal victorians

Australia enjoys ninth place out of 190 countries on the United Nations Life Expectancy Index. Aboriginal Australians—as a fourth-world people within a first-world society—rank in the bottom half of the Index, just below Guatemala and Bangladesh. Progress on closing ‘the gap’ in health and wellbeing has been slow, despite initial rapid gains in infant mortality. The barriers are inter-generational trauma, inherited disadvantage, poverty and systemic racism. This paper reports on the Koori Health Research Database, a cradle-to-grave dataset of Aboriginal Victorians from the 1840s. It finds that population recovery after the nadir reached at the end of the nineteenth century, was hindered by high acquired secondary infertility among women vulnerable to sexual abuse, violence and sexually transmitted infections. Improvements in survival and the health transition were ‘blocked’ by barriers to land acquisition and full citizenship, as has happened in New Zealand. The dramatic recovery of the population of people now identifying as Aboriginal in Victoria has come from out-marriage.Funding for this project was provided by the Australian Research Council (McCalman; Land and Life: Aborigines, Convicts and Immigrants in Victoria, 1835–1985; DP110102368), the Swedish Research Council (Axelsson, Kukutai, Kippen; Indigenous Health in Transition: a Longitudinal Study of Colonisation, State and the Health of Indigenous Peoples in Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, 1850– 2000; 2012–5490) and the Australian National Data Service (Kippen, McCalman, Silcot; Founders and Survivors: Genealogical Connections; AP20