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The Colony of New South Wales was a colony of the British Empire from 1788 to 1901, when it became a State of the Commonwealth of Australia. At its greatest extent, the colony of New South Wales included the present-day Australian states of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia, the Northern Territory as well as ...
- Overview
- Early settlement
- Growth of the modern city
When the English admiral Arthur Phillip arrived off the coast of southeastern Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, he sailed first to Botany Bay, which had been discovered by Captain James Cook in 1770 and to which he had been directed by the British government. Finding the bay too exposed for safe anchorage and the surrounding country unsuitable for settlement, he looked farther north and soon discovered the entrance to Port Jackson only a few miles away. Phillip’s first impressions of Port Jackson, which had been named but not explored by Cook, are recorded in a famous dispatch to Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney, then the British home secretary, dated May 15, 1788.
We got into Port Jackson early in the afternoon, and had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security.
Phillip immediately decided to move the whole fleet to Port Jackson and to establish the first settlement on a cove, which had a good freshwater stream and in which his ships could anchor close to the shore in deep water. He called it Sydney Cove, for the home secretary. Present-day Sydney Cove is still the city’s heart, though it is now more commonly known as Circular Quay.
The early history of Sydney was grimly dominated by its existence as a British penal colony. Convicts, dumped on this alien shore, found the environment a harsh one. The soil was poor, and the land was rough and had to be cleared by hand. The little settlement was often short of food until the settlers were able to cross the Blue Mountains and find the richer land to the west of the Great Dividing Range. There were also constant troubles between the governors, the free settlers, and the convicts.
When the English admiral Arthur Phillip arrived off the coast of southeastern Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, he sailed first to Botany Bay, which had been discovered by Captain James Cook in 1770 and to which he had been directed by the British government. Finding the bay too exposed for safe anchorage and the surrounding country unsuitable for settlement, he looked farther north and soon discovered the entrance to Port Jackson only a few miles away. Phillip’s first impressions of Port Jackson, which had been named but not explored by Cook, are recorded in a famous dispatch to Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney, then the British home secretary, dated May 15, 1788.
We got into Port Jackson early in the afternoon, and had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security.
Phillip immediately decided to move the whole fleet to Port Jackson and to establish the first settlement on a cove, which had a good freshwater stream and in which his ships could anchor close to the shore in deep water. He called it Sydney Cove, for the home secretary. Present-day Sydney Cove is still the city’s heart, though it is now more commonly known as Circular Quay.
The early history of Sydney was grimly dominated by its existence as a British penal colony. Convicts, dumped on this alien shore, found the environment a harsh one. The soil was poor, and the land was rough and had to be cleared by hand. The little settlement was often short of food until the settlers were able to cross the Blue Mountains and find the richer land to the west of the Great Dividing Range. There were also constant troubles between the governors, the free settlers, and the convicts.
The most astoundingly rapid growth of Sydney—from 60,000 to 400,000 population—took place in the years between 1850 and 1890, as suburbs of tightly packed terrace houses were built. These houses, with their balconies and decorative cast-iron railings, are now Sydney’s most attractive heritage from the past. The first railway, from Sydney to Parramatta, began as early as 1855.
The financial collapse of the 1890s acted as a slight check to Sydney’s growth, but population doubled again by 1914 and reached the million mark soon after. Yet during this period Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, was growing still faster, partly as a result of the gold rush in that colony in the 1850s. Temporarily overtaking Sydney in both size and importance, Melbourne became the financial centre of Australia, and it was the capital of the Commonwealth of Australia until the Federal Capital of Canberra was built in 1927 halfway between the two cities. By 1911 Sydney had once again become Australia’s largest city, and after World War II it benefited from a shift in Australia’s trade toward North America and Asia and away from Britain. Sydney has remained slightly more populous than Melbourne and has equaled or surpassed the other city in importance as a centre of finance, commerce, and manufacturing. In its growth it has not escaped the ills that have afflicted so many other large cities of the world, including environmental pollution, traffic congestion, and crime. Nevertheless, Sydney has become the most international and most sophisticated of Australian cities. The most striking example of this was its role as host of the 2000 Summer Olympics.
From 1788 to 1900 Sydney was the capital of the British colony of New South Wales. The town of Sydney was declared a city in 1842, and a local government was established. In 1901, the Australian colonies federated to become the Commonwealth of Australia, and Sydney became the capital of the state of New South Wales. Sydney today is Australia's ...
4 days ago · New South Wales - British Colony, Indigenous People, Landmarks: Human remains discovered in 1968 and 1974 at Mungo in southwestern New South Wales are the oldest so far uncovered in Australia, dating from about 46,000 to 50,000 years ago. The land was managed by Aboriginal peoples or language groups for tens of thousands of years through a range of traditional practices, including the use of ...
A Convict Settlement in Sydney The British colony of New South Wales was established in 1788 as a penal colony. After the American War of Independence, Britain, in a time of social upheaval at the beginnings of massive agricultural, industrial and social change, was faced with overcrowded prisons and prison ships and no suitable destination to transport their convicts Lieutenant James Cook's ...
The Australian Colonies Government Act in 1850 was a landmark development which granted representative constitutions to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania and the colonies enthusiastically set about writing constitutions which produced democratically progressive parliaments—though the constitutions generally maintained the role of the colonial upper houses as ...
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Paterson administered the colony of New South Wales in the absence of a resident Governor on two occasions, the first was from 12th December 1794 to 11th September 1795, relieving Major Grose as administrator when he left Sydney in 1794 until the return of Captain John Hunter to take up the Governorship.
