Australia, once known as New South Wales, was originally planned as a penal colony. In October 1786, the British government appointed Arthur Phillip captain of the HMS Sirius, and commissioned him to establish an agricultural work camp there for British convicts.
The British colony of New South Wales was established in 1788 as a penal colony.
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.
Initial invasion and colonisation (1788 to 1890) The arrival of Lieutenant James Cook, and then Arthur Phillip in 1788, marked the beginning of 'white settlement'. From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest.
The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines. In the eighteenth century, the aboriginal population was about 300,000.
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.
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
After British colonisation, the name New Holland was retained for several decades and the south polar continent continued to be called Terra Australis, sometimes shortened to Australia.
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project. “We are always using conservative estimates,” Pascoe said.
Federation. The First Fleet of British ships had arrived at Sydney Harbour in 1788, founding the first of what would evolve into six self-governed British colonies: New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland. The last British garrisons had left Australia in 1870.
The researchers found that Aboriginal Australians diverged from Papuans some 37,000 years ago, before the Australian land mass separated from New Guinea roughly 10,000 years ago. The groups traveled into Australia from mainland Asia, becoming the ancestors to a large population of modern-day Australians.
Australia is colloquially known as "the Land Down Under" (or just "Down Under"), which derives from the country's position in the Southern Hemisphere, at the antipodes of the United Kingdom.
Prehistory. It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
The colony of New South Wales was formally proclaimed by Governor Phillip on 7 February 1788.
The Occupants of the Land
For thousands of years prior to the arrival of Europeans, northern Sydney was occupied by different Aboriginal clans. Living primarily along the foreshores of the harbour, they fished and hunted in the waters and hinterlands of the area, and harvested food from the surrounding bush.
Summary. On January 1, 1901, six colonies were joined together to create the Commonwealth of Australia, a self-governing Dominion in the British Empire. While the new nation was sovereign when it came to its domestic affairs, the United Kingdom maintained control over its relations with the wider world.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
The Waterloo Creek massacre, also known as the Australia Day massacre.
It's estimated that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, affecting most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.
The first, that of the HMS Endeavour, left England in August 1768 and had its climax on April 20, 1770, when a crewman sighted southeastern Australia. Cook landed several times, most notably at Botany Bay and at Possession Island in the north, where on August 23 he claimed the land, naming it New South Wales.
Australia Day is the official national day of Australia. Observed annually on 26 January, it marks the 1788 landing of the First Fleet, and raising of the Union Flag by Arthur Phillip, at Sydney Cove in New South Wales.
The colonisation of this land we now call Australia had a devastating impact on First Nations people, who have lived on this continent for thousands of years. Prior to British settlement, more than 500 First Nations groups inhabited the continent we now call Australia, approximately 750,000 people in total.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
On January 26, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip guides a fleet of 11 British ships carrying convicts to the colony of New South Wales, effectively founding Australia.