The Northern Territory has the highest proportion of Indigenous residents among its population – an estimated 32% (79,000 people) in 2022 (Figure 2).
Of any single region in Australia, western Sydney has the highest concentration of Aboriginal people. According to the census, around 2 million people were living in greater western Sydney in 2006.
By sheer numbers, it is Mexico City and Peru's capital, Lima, that are the cities with the highest aboriginal populations. About 45% Peru's 31 million people identify as belonging to one of the country's 51 indigenous communities.
The largest populations live in the western suburbs and the NSW Central Coast. Among Sydney's local council areas, Penrith has the biggest Indigenous population, with 9500 people, or 4.8 per cent of the total identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander.
Aboriginal peoples have lived in Australia for at least 50,000 years and probably longer; they currently represent around 3 per cent of the population. The largest population concentrations are in urban areas, but Aboriginal peoples achieve numerical dominance in the more remote northern and central areas of Australia.
New South Wales had the highest count of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (216,200) or 33% of the national total, followed by Queensland (186,500 or 29%) and Western Australia (76,000 or 12%).
Between 2014–15 and 2018–19, after adjusting for inflation, the median gross weekly personal income for Indigenous Australians aged 18 and over fell by 5.6%, from $518 to $489 (Figure 1).
New South Wales and Victoria have been found to be Australia's two most culturally diverse states according to the study by EdgeRed, with Tasmania determined to be the least so.
Top 20 culturally diverse areas in Greater Melbourne Area
While exploring the same topic using the latest Census data, an article from ABC News considered Point Cook in VIC to be the country's most multicultural suburb based on the fact that the residents are from 86 different countries.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' rights and interests in land are formally recognised over around 50 per cent of Australia's land mass. Connection to land is of central importance to First Nations Australians.
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.
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.
Key statistics
As at 30 June 2021 there were 984,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, representing 3.8% of the total Australian population.
There are 468000 Aboriginals in total in Australia in which 99 percent of them are mixed blooded and 1 percent of them are full blooded.
China is the country with the biggest indigenous population in absolute terms. More than 125 million indigenous people – Tibetans, Uyghurs, Zhuang and 52 other recognized groups – still make up only 8.9 percent of the Chinese population.
India has 104 million indigenous people (8.6 percent of the population), while around 15 million live in the Philippines (15 percent), 14 million in Vietnam (15 percent), 13 million in Kenya (25 percent) and almost 12 million in Mexico (10 percent).
There are 476 million Indigenous people around the world and spread across more than 90 countries. They belong to more than 5,000 different Indigenous peoples and speak more than 4,000 languages. Indigenous people represent about 5% of the world's population. The vast majority of them – 70% – live in Asia.
In the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were: English (33%) Australian (29.9%) Irish (9.5%)
When it comes to the number of different nationalities, the Melbourne suburb of Point Cook tops the list as the most multicultural, recording people born in 146 different countries. It is followed by the inner city suburb of Melbourne (137 countries), and the Sydney suburbs of Blacktown and Maroubra (133 countries).
English 25.9%, Australian 25.4%, Irish 7.5%, Scottish 6.4%, Italian 3.3%, German 3.2%, Chinese 3.1%, Indian 1.4%, Greek 1.4%, Dutch 1.2%, other 15.8% (includes Australian aboriginal .
See the list of payments and services available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians at Indigenous Australians through Services Australia. It includes: Parenting Payment. JobSeeker Payment.
At the end of the June quarter of 2016, around 45% of Indigenous Australians aged 15 and over (220,800 people) were receiving some form of Centrelink income support payment, compared with 26% of non-Indigenous Australians of this age (4.9 million people).
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and Indigenous holding entities don't need to pay income tax or capital gains tax on native title payments or benefits.
Indigenous Australians live in all parts of the nation, from cities to remote tropical and desert areas. Indigenous Australians are more likely to live in urban and regional areas than remote areas, though the proportion of the total population who are Indigenous is generally higher in more remote areas.