Sovereignty of Australia belongs to us all

Ancestry

The earliest accepted timeline for the first arrivals of indigenous Australians to the continent of Australia places this human migration to at least 65,000 years ago,^[9] most probably from the islands of Indonesia and New Guinea.^[10]

Captain James Cook claimed the east coast for Great Britain in 1770; the west coast was later settled by Britain also. At that time, the indigenous population was estimated to have been between 315,000 and 750,000,^[11] divided into as many as 500 tribes speaking many different languages.

Between 1788 and the Second World War, the vast majority of settlers and immigrants came from the British Isles (principally England, Ireland and Scotland), although there was significant immigration from China and Germany during the 19th century. In the decades immediately following the Second World War, Australia received a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe than in previous decades. Since the end of the White Australia policy in 1973, Australia has pursued an official policy of multiculturalism,^[12] and there has been a large and continuing wave of immigration from across the world, with Asia being the largest source of immigrants in the 21st century.^[13]

The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not collect data on race, but asks each Australian resident to nominate up to two ancestries each census.^[14] These ancestry responses are classified into broad standardised ancesty groups.^[15] At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses within each standardised group as a proportion of the total population was as follows:^[16] 57.2% European (including 46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European), 33.8% Oceanian^{[N 1]}, 17.4% Asian (including 6.5% Southern and Central Asian, 6.4% North-East Asian, and 4.5% South-East Asian), 3.2% North African and Middle Eastern, 1.4% Peoples of the Americas, and 1.3% Sub-Saharan African. At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were:^[18]

English (33%)
Australian (29.9%)^{[N 2]}
Irish (9.5%)
Scottish (8.6%)
Chinese (5.5%)
Italian (4.4%)
German (4%)
Indian (3.1%)
Aboriginal (2.9%)^{[N 3]}
Greek (1.7%)
Filipino (1.6%)
Dutch (1.5%)
Vietnamese (1.3%)
Lebanese (1%)

At the 2021 census, 3.2% of the Australian population identified as being Indigenous — Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.^{[N 4]}^[19] In 2020, 7.5% of births were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons up from 5.7% in 2010; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fertility rates have stayed above replacement levels even as the nation’s has declined rapidly.^[20]

Immigration and country of birth

In 2019, 30% of the Australian resident population, or 7,529,570 people, were born overseas.^[21]

Australia’s population has quadrupled since the end of World War I,^[22] much of this increase from immigration. Australia has the world’s eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 30% of the population, a higher proportion than in any other nation with a population of over 10 million.^[21]^[23] Most immigrants are skilled,^[24] but the immigration quota includes categories for family members and refugees.^[24]

The following table shows Australia’s population by country of birth as estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2021. It shows only countries or regions or birth with a population of over 100,000 residing in Australia.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021)^[25]
Place of birth	Estimated resident population^[A]
Total Australian-born	18,235,690
Total foreign-born	7,502,450
England^[B]	967,390
India	710,380
China^[C]	595,630
New Zealand	559,980
Philippines	310,620
Vietnam	268,170
South Africa	201,930
Malaysia	172,250
Italy	171,520
Sri Lanka	145,790
Scotland^[B]	130,060
Nepal	129,870
United States	109,450
Germany	107,940
South Korea	106,560
Hong Kong^[C]	104,990
Greece	100,650