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In late February and early March 1606 Willem Janszoon, captain of the Dutch East India Company ship the Duyfken, became the first European to make recorded contact with and map part of the Australian continent.
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William Dampier set sail from England on Jan. 14, 1699, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached Shark Bay off western Australia on July 26. After exploring the coast northward to what was thereafter called Dampier Archipelago
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Captain James Cook reached the southern coast of New South Wales in 1770 and sailed north, charting Australia's eastern coastline and claiming the land for Great Britain on 22nd August 1770.
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On May the 13th 1787 Captain Arthur Phillip led a fleet of 11 ships on a 252-day journey halfway around the world from Portsmouth, England, to New South Wales. They were heading to the recently discovered land of Australia to create a new penal colony. The Fleet arrived in Botany Bay on January 18, 1788.
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In a voyage of discovery lasting from 1801 to 1803, Matthew Flinders was the first to circumnavigate the island continent known as New Holland. On the 18th of July 1801, Flinders sailed from Portsmouth in HMS Investigator to explore the continent's 'unknown coast', sighting Cape Leeuwin, Western Australia, on the 6th of December.
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English explorer Matthew Flinders who made the suggestion of the name we use today. He was the first to circumnavigate the continent in 1803, and used the name 'Australia' to describe the continent on a hand drawn map in 1804.
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King decided to establish a convict settlement at Port Phillip, mainly to stake a claim to southern Australia ahead of the French. The original settlement was established in 1803 at Sullivan Bay, very close to today's coastal township of Sorrento. It survived for just seven months, and was abandoned in 1804.
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The Rum Rebellion started on the 26th of January 1808 was a coup d'état in the then-British penal colony of New South Wales, staged by the New South Wales Corps in order to depose Governor William Bligh. It ended on the 1st of January 1810
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On the 12th of June 1829 the settlement Perth is founded on the southwest coast. When England lays claim to the entire continent of Australia.
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On 1 July 1841 the islands of New Zealand were separated from the Colony of New South Wales and made a colony in their own right. This ended more than 50 years of confusion over the relationship between the islands and the Australian colony.
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Victoria's first officially recognised gold discovery was in 1850 near Clunes, almost 40 kilometres north of Ballarat. In 1851, the Victorian Government offered a reward of $200 to anyone finding gold within 200 miles (320 kilometres) of Melbourne.
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The Eureka Rebellion was a rebellion in 1854, instigated by gold miners in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, who revolted against the colonial authority of the United Kingdom.
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The Rules for Australian Football are written down officially.
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The Hougoumont, the last ship to take convicts from the UK to Australia, docked in Fremantle, Western Australia, on January 9, 1868 – 150 years ago. It brought an end to a process which deposited about 168,000 convicted prisoners in Australia after it began in 1788.
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Ned Kelly the notorious bushranger and infamous Australian character was hanged for murder at the Melbourne Goal. Kelly and his gang were infamous through Australia in the 1870s for highway robbery, bank swindles and confrontations with local police.
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In 1883, the first regular train service between Sydney and Melbourne was established. However, since each colony built its own railway lines to its own standards, Sydney–Melbourne passengers had to change trains at Albury because of different train gauges. Uniform gauge would not be introduced until 1962
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"The Man from Snowy River" is a poem by Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson. It was first published in The Bulletin, an Australian news magazine, on 26 April 1890, and was published by Angus & Robertson in October 1895.
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On 18 December 1894 the South Australian Parliament passed the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act. The legislation was the result of a decade-long struggle to include women in the electoral process. It not only granted women in the colony the right to vote but allowed them to stand for parliament. This meant that South Australia was the first electorate in the world to give equal political rights to both men and women.
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On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. When Edmund Barton's Party on the 29th - 30th of March won the election for having the majority of the votes.
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The first federal elections for the new Australian Parliament were held on 29 and 30 March 1901. The Protectionist Party, who won 32 seats in the House of Representatives, formed a minority government with the support of other members in the House.
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On 12 March 1913 the Governor-General's wife, Lady Denman, announced that Canberra was the name of Australia's new national capital.
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When Great Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Australia found itself automatically at war too. Thousands of young Western Australian men volunteered for service in the Australian Imperial Force.
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On 25 April 1915, 16,000 Australian and New Zealand troops landed at what became known as Anzac Cove as part of a campaign to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula.
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On the 11th of the 11th 1918 World War 1 comes to an end. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919. Billy Hughes signed it on behalf of Australia as a member of the British Empire. Australia joins the League of Nations on the same day as signing the Treaty of Versailles.
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On the 16th of the 11th 1920 Qantas Airlines was Founded by Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinness and Fergus McMaster
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Chemist Cyril Callister created the Vitamin B spread from brewer's yeast in 1922 and it first hit Australian supermarket shelves the following year.
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Construction began in 1923 under John Bradfield's supervision. The deep waters of Sydney Harbour made temporary supports impractical, so the steel arch was assembled by building out from each bank. The two sides met in the middle in 1930, and the bridge was officially opened with an elaborate ceremony on March 19, 1932
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There were 112 politicians in the Federal Parliament when it moved to Canberra in 1927. Old Parliament House was once brand new. The Opening Day: 9 May 1927 marks the 90th anniversary of the opening of Parliament House.
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In the second half of the 1920s the Australian economy suffered from falling wheat and wool prices, and competition from other commodity-producing countries. The Australian economy collapsed and unemployment reached a peak of 32 per cent in 1932. It took Australia almost a decade to recover from the Great Depression.
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On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany, beginning World War II. On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Australia joins the side of the Allies against Hitler and the Axis Powers.
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The Japanese begin air raids on Australia. The Japanese invasion is stopped at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Australian forces defeat the Japanese at the Battle of Milne Bay.
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The war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. Australia is a founding member of the United Nations.
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Construction was expected to take four years. It took 14 years. Work commenced in 1959 and involved 10,000 construction workers. Construction of the Opera House was completed on the 20th of October 1973 Paul Robeson was the first person to perform at Sydney Opera House.
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Australia became officially autonomous in both internal and external affairs with the passage of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act on 9 October 1942. The Australia Act 1986 eliminated the last vestiges of British legal authority at the Federal level. Australia Become an Independent Nation on the 26th of January 1988
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The opening ceremonies celebrated the history of Australia, especially the unique cultures and contributions of the Aboriginal peoples of the continent. The high point of the opening ceremonies came when Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic flame. She later won the gold medal in the 400-metre event.
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At about 11pm on 12 October 2002 three bombs were detonated in Bali, two in busy nightspots — the Sari Club and Paddy's Bar — and one in front of the American consulate. The explosions killed 202 people, 88 of whom were Australian, and wounded hundreds more.
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The Lindt Cafe siege occurred on 15–16 December 2014 when a lone gunman, Man Haron Monis, held hostage ten customers and eight employees of a Lindt chocolate café in the APA Building in Martin Place in Sydney, Australia
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Australia has officially become the 26th country to legalise same-sex marriage after the law was passed on Thursday with the overwhelming backing of the Federal Parliament. Thirteen years after changing the Marriage Act to explicitly forbid same-sex unions, federal politicians voted to undo the last major piece of discrimination against gay and lesbian Australians.
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Australia has suffered its deadliest day from the coronavirus since the pandemic began, with authorities reporting ten fatalities Sunday and a rise in new infections despite an intensive lockdown effort. The country's COVID-19 death toll rose to 155 and the southeastern state of Victoria reported more than 450 new infections in the last 24 hours.
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Australia is no stranger to bush-fires. However, the 2019-2020 season proved to be unprecedented in many ways. The first major bush-fires began even before the official arrival of spring in June and then new out-of-control fires sprung up at the beginning of Sept. 2019. The fire situation worsened significantly at the beginning of November 2019 with increasing temperatures and a prolonged drought. In mid-January 2020, a wave of heavy rain finally brought relief in some areas hit by bush-fires.
