James Squire – English Romanichal (Romany) – First Fleet convict and Australia's first brewer and cultivator of hops. Joseph Sullivan – sentenced to fourteen years transportation for stealing, then killed for murdering his master and the other convicts in the area.
The settlement at Botany Bay was intended to be a penal colony. The convicts of the First Fleet included both men and women. Most were British, but a few were American, French, and even African.
Story. It was on 26th January 1788, that my great, great, great, great grandfather, Henry Cabell, became the first migrant (or convict) to step foot on Australian soil.
The first settlement, at Sydney, consisted of about 850 convicts and their Marine guards and officers, led by Governor Arthur Phillip. They arrived at Botany Bay in the "First Fleet" of 9 transport ships accompanied by 2 small warships, in January, 1788.
South Australia was an experimental British colony and the only Australian colony which did not officially take convicts.
Until 1782, English convicts were transported to America. However, in 1783 the American War of Independence ended. America refused to accept any more convicts so England had to find somewhere else to send their prisoners. Transportation to New South Wales was the solution.
Ivan Milat, (1944–2019) convicted of the murder of seven young men and women between 1989 and 1993; known as Australia's most prolific serial killer. His crimes are collectively referred to as the "Backpacker murders".
Samuel Terry (c. 1776 – 22 February 1838) was transported to Australia as a criminal, where he became a wealthy landowner, merchant and philanthropist. His extreme wealth made him by far the richest man in the colony with wealth comparable to the richer in England.
Mary Wade (17 December 1775 – 17 December 1859) was a British teenager and convict who was transported to Australia when she was 13 years old.
The Last Convict is an historical novel based on the life of Samuel Speed, who believed himself to be – and is widely accepted as – the last transported convict to survive in Australia. He died in November 1938, on the eve of the Second World War and within the lifetime of many people still living.
A coastal town located on the east bank of the mouth of the Tamar River, George Town is Australia's third oldest European settlement and Australia's oldest town.
Samuel Speed, who died 150 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, is believed to have been the last surviving transported convict.
It was once a point of shame that Australia was settled by convicts, but today, locals are embracing their crime-ridden past. New South Wales, a state in southeast Australia, was founded by the British as a penal colony in 1788.
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.
The first recorded African-diaspora settlers were black convicts, eleven in number, transported by the British, on the First Fleet of 1788. On their release, many bought land and brought up families in the area of Pennant Hills in western Sydney.
Hundreds of thousands of convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia between 1787 and 1868. Today, it's estimated that 20% of the Australian population are descended from people originally transported as convicts, while around 2 million Britons have transported convict ancestry.
On 9 January 1868 the convict ship Hougoumont arrived at the port of Fremantle in Western Australia. On board were 269 convicts. They were the last convicts to be sent to Australia. The ship's arrival marked the end of 80 years of penal transportation to Australia.
Kathleen Folbigg, now 55, was dubbed "Australia's worst serial killer" after being convicted in 2003 of murdering three of her children, and convicted of manslaughter in the death of the fourth.
No other tragedy has had such a transformative impact on Australian public policy than the Port Arthur Massacre. On 28 April 1996, 28-year old Martin Bryant went on a shooting spree near the Port Arthur historic site in Tasmania, killing 35 people and wounding several others.
A spree shooting by Martin Bryant. The deadliest mass shooting in Australia. Led to the National Firearms Agreement between Australia's states, territories and federal government, mandating licenses and registration for gun owners and users, and banning semi-automatic long guns in most cases. See Gun laws in Australia.
The women would be employed in 'factories' (equivalent of the English workhouse) but often had to find their own accommodation, and would be under great pressure to pay for it with sexual services. In this way, all the women convicts tended to be regarded as prostitutes.
It was usually 450 grams of salted meat (either mutton or beef), cooked again into a stew, and some bread. By 1826, the government also had a more established cattle stock available and so the meat served to convicts was fresher and taken from better-quality cuts than before.