British Arrival in Australia

Captain James Cook turned up in 1770 and charted the east coast in his ship H.M.S. Endeavour. He claimed the land for Britain and named it New South Wales, probably as a favor to Thomas Pennant, a Welsh patriot and botanist. Cook landed at Botany Bay, which he named after the discovery of scores of plants hitherto unknown to science. Turning northward, Cook passed an entrance to a possible harbor, which appeared to offer safe anchorage, and named it Port Jackson after the secretary to the admiralty, George Jackson. Back in Britain, King George III viewed Australia as a potential colony and repository of Britain’s overflowing prison population, which could no longer be transported to the United States of America following the War of Independence. The First Fleet left England in May 1787, made up of 11 store and transport ships (none of them bigger than the passenger ferries that ply modern-day Sydney Harbour) led by Arthur Phillip. Aboard were 1,480 people, including 759 convicts. Phillip’s flagship, The Supply, reached Botany Bay in January 1788, but Phillip decided the soil was poor and the surroundings too swampy. On January 26, now celebrated as Australia Day, he settled on Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) instead. The convicts were immediately put to work clearing land, planting crops, and constructing buildings. The early food harvests were failures, and by early 1790, the fledgling colony was facing starvation. Phillip decided to give some convicts pardons for good behavior and service, and grant small land parcels to those who were industrious. In 1795, coal was discovered; in 1810, Governor Macquarie began city building projects; and, in 1813, the explorers Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson forged a passage over the Blue Mountains to the fertile plains beyond.
When gold was discovered in Victoria in 1852, and in Western Australia 12 years later, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Europe, America, and China flooded into the country. By 1860, over a million non-Aboriginal people were living in Australia. The last 10,000 convicts were transported to Western Australia between 1850 and 1868, bringing the total shipped to Australia to 168,000.