when did australia get colonised

Australia was colonised by Britain in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived and established a penal settlement at Sydney Cove (in what became the colony of New South Wales).

Quick Scoop

• The formal beginning of British colonisation is usually dated to 26 January 1788, when Captain Arthur Phillip founded the settlement at Sydney Cove after the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay earlier that month.

• British claims to the land go back to 1770, when James Cook charted and claimed the east coast of Australia for Great Britain, but no permanent colony was founded until 1788.

• Before colonisation, the continent was home to an estimated hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in many distinct nations and language groups, whose occupation stretches back tens of thousands of years.

A bit more context

• From 1788, Britain treated Australia as a colony of settlement, seizing land under the legal fiction of terra nullius (the idea that the land belonged to no one in European law), despite existing Indigenous ownership and law.

• Over the following century, British control expanded across the continent through new colonies (like Western Australia and South Australia), frontier conflict, and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

In many modern discussions and protests, debates about “Australia Day” on 26 January turn on whether this date marks national beginnings or the start of invasion and dispossession for First Nations peoples.

TL;DR: Australia was colonised by Britain in 1788, with the key date often given as 26 January, when the first lasting British settlement was founded at Sydney Cove.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.