First Fleet Arrives in Australia

In January 1788, a convoy of eleven British ships known as the First Fleet anchored in Botany Bay and then moved to Sydney Cove, where it founded a penal colony on the southeastern coast of Australia. The settlement became the starting point of British colonisation of the continent and, eventually, of the modern Australian nation. For the Aboriginal peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years, it marked the beginning of dispossession, disease and conflict whose effects are still debated and felt today.

The background lay in Britain's overcrowded jails and the loss of the American colonies. Since the early seventeenth century, Britain had sent convicts across the Atlantic, but that outlet closed after the American Revolution. Prisoners were held in decaying ships called hulks, and the government wanted a new destination. Captain James Cook had charted the east coast of Australia in 1770, and his naturalist Joseph Banks recommended Botany Bay as a site for settlement. Historians still argue over how much strategic and commercial motives, such as a naval base in the Pacific and access to timber and flax, mattered alongside the need to dispose of convicts.

The fleet left Portsmouth in May 1787 under Captain Arthur Phillip, who became the colony's first governor. It carried roughly 1,400 people, including about 750 convicts, along with marines, officials and some family members. After a voyage of about eight months, the ships reached Botany Bay in January 1788. Phillip found the site poorly suited, with limited fresh water and an exposed anchorage, and soon relocated to Port Jackson, choosing Sydney Cove. The British flag was raised there on 26 January, a date later observed as Australia Day.

The early years were harsh. Soil near the settlement was poor, supplies were short, and the colonists lacked farming experience suited to local conditions. Famine was a real threat until further fleets arrived, beginning with the Second Fleet in 1790, which suffered terrible death rates among its convicts. Phillip tried to maintain workable relations with the local Eora people, but smallpox and other introduced diseases devastated Aboriginal communities, and competition for land and resources led to violence.

Over the following decades, convict transportation to eastern Australia continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, and free settlers, pastoralists and gold seekers expanded the colonies across the continent. The colonies federated in 1901 to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Today the arrival of the First Fleet is remembered in different ways: some Australians see it as a founding moment, while many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people mark 26 January as a day of mourning or invasion, reflecting an ongoing national conversation about history and reconciliation.