Around 1606 European mariners first sailed into Australian waters. They called it Terra Australis Incognita, which means unknown southern land. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast, and to meet with the Aborignal people was the Duyfken, captained by th Dutchman Willem Janszoon
Between 1606 and 1770, an estimated 54 European ships from a range of nations made contact. Many of these were merchant ships from the Dutch East Indies Company, including the shops of Abel Tasman. Abel charted parts of the north, west and south coasts of Australia. Back then it was known as New Holland
The Australian east coast was charted by Englishman Lieutenant James Cook. He claimed the east coast under instruction from King George III of England on 22 August 1770. He named eastern Australia ‘New South Wales’.
Governor Arthur Phillip was under orders to establish the first British Colony in Australia. The First Fleet comprised of 11 ships and around 1350 people. They arrived at Botany Bay in 1788. However, this area turned out to be unsuitable for settlement and thus they moved north to Port Jackson. The First Fleet was not adequately equipped, nor prepared for the task and the soil around their settlement was poor. The colony relied upon the development of farms and trading food with local Aboriginal clans.
The second fleet arrived in 1790, and they provided badly needed food and supplies. The newly arrived convicts however, weren’t useful to the colony at all. Many were too ill and nearly dead. The Second Fleet became known as the Death Fleet. Nearly 300 convicts and crew died during the voyage as opposed to only 48 on the First Fleet.
One of the other difficulties the colony experienced, was the ratio of men to women. There were about four men for every woman. This caused problems in the settlement for years.
From 1788 until 1823, the Colony of New South Wales was a penal colony. This means that there were mainly convicts, marines and the wives of marines present. Free settlers started to arrive in 1793.
Despite its problems, the colony of New South Wales grew, and the Port Jackson settlement is now the site of Australia's largest city - Sydney.
Australia’s first colonists, whether convicts or soldiers, were unwilling migrants , sent either to serve their sentence or their King. No matter how many free immigrants were to come later, the cultural source of New South Wales, and the subsequently settled Van Diemen’s Land, lay in the social problems of British industrialisation and Irish disaffection.
When it became clear that the American colonies had wrenched themselves free of the Empire, Britain was faced with the problem of finding a new place to dispose of the convicts which they had previously dumped in North America. The prisons were full, and the convicts were herded on the Thames. Various possible settlements were considered, including a proposal to dump convicts on an island in the Gambia River in West Africa, where they would have been left, virtually ungoverned, to fend for themselves. This idea was abandoned because of humanitarian concerns about the tropical climate. Australia seemed ideal because the costs were acceptable and the distance almost became an advantage, for the further from Britain the convict rabble was deposited, the less likely it was for the convicts to1 return after their sentence was served.
162000 convicts were sent to Australia over an eighty-year period. Three quarters of this total were sentenced in Britain, though this included about 6000 Irish who had crossed the Channel in search of work. The majority of these British convicts were products of a growing urban criminal sub-culture. It has been estimated that the criminal element (street people, thieves, beggars and prostitutes) constituted at least 5 per cent of London’s population. London provided a disproportionate percentage of convicts others came from the new urban conglomerations of the north. Possibly two-thirds already had a previous conviction against them. Most had committed some form of theft, ranging from burglary to shoplifting or pickpocketing. Sometimes the offences appear trivial, but the courts often took into account the offender’s reputation and other crimes of which he or she was suspected. Of the rural convicts probably no more than 300 were convicted of poaching, and these were more likely to have been members of organised poaching gangs than hungry labourers.
In a category of their own were some 1000 political prisoners. overall it must be remembered that three out of five convicts were transported after 1830, when the penal laws were being reformed; they tended to be more serious offenders than those despatched earlier. Relatively few convicts came from Scotland, where the rate of transportation was much lower than in England. Correspondingly, the Scottish convicts were usually guilty of more serious offences. The Irish however, were different. About a quarter of the convicts were transported direct from Ireland, thus forming a significant and distinctive ethnic minority. The typical Irish male convict was older than the British counterpart, and he was more likely to be married; he was also more likely to have had some contact with religion.
Convict society was predominantly male, yet women were always there. The First Fleet included 191 female convicts and the Lady Juliana which followed the Fleet in 1789 was specifically hired to transport women. Only one-sixth of the of the British convicts were women, in contrast to a quarter of the Irish. Three out of eight female convicts were Irish. These women contemptuously disregarded middle-class notions of femininity.
Few people felt the need to immigrate to Australia. After all, why should any European emigrant consider a six-month journey around the world, when North America was so tempting, cheap and close? Moreover the seedy reputation of the settlement, peopled by Britain’s social rejects, was almost designed to discourage free immigrants.
Australian historians are sensitive about the question of their origins. For several generations the convict inheritance was an embarrassment while it’s an extraordinary beginning for a nation, and more cause for astonishment than shame.
Abel Janszoon Tasman was a Dutch explorer born in Groningen in 1603. He was employed by the Dutch East India Company and was sent on several voyages during the 17th century. He is most commonly known for his exploration of the South Pacific in the hopes of discovering a new shipping route from Australia to South America to enhance trade possibilities for the company. During this voyage, he became the first European to discover New Zealand and Tasmania; Tasmania was later named in his honour. Abel’s description of New Zealand is the first one in recorded history. They came ashore at Whariwharangi Bay and that’s where they made their initial contact with the Maori. A brutal encounter with the natives led to the deaths of four Dutch seamen. Tasman named the place Moordenaars Bay/Murderers Bay. On a later voyage, he travelled to Australia where he spent time mapping the northern coastline. Although his travels resulted in the discovery of several islands throughout the South Pacific waters, his expedition was viewed as incomplete by the Dutch East India Company. They were disappointed that Tasman failed to find any useful shipping routes for their trading purposes. They also felt he had failed to properly explore the islands he came across, resulting in little knowledge about those islands. Later on, Tasman met with further disgrace when he attempted to hang two of his sailors who were accused of insubordination. As a result, Tasman was suspended from his position with the company without salary. Eleven months later, he was reinstated and continued to work for the company until his retirement. Tasman died in 1659, apparently leaving 25 guilders to the poor of his village. His property was divided between his wife Jannetje and Claesgen, his daughter by his first marriage.