History of New South Wales

[10] On 19 April 1770, the Endeavour reached the east coast of New Holland and ten days later anchored at Botany Bay, so named because of the abundant flora discovered there by the ship's naturalists, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander.

[16] Following an interview with Secretary of State Lord Sydney in 1784, Matra amended his proposal to include convicts as settlers, considering that the move would benefit both "Economy to the Publick, & Humanity to the Individual".

They had no natural resistance to European diseases, and epidemics of measles and smallpox spread far ahead of the frontier of settlement, radically reducing population and fatally disrupting indigenous society.

Accounts of early encounters between Sydney's Aboriginal people and the British are provided by the author Watkin Tench, who was an officer on the First Fleet and the writer of one of the first works of literature about New South Wales.

For the first half of the 19th century New South Wales was essentially a sheep run, supported by the port of Sydney and a few subsidiary towns such as Newcastle (where a permanent settlement was established in 1804[26]) and Bathurst (1815).

[27] The State's third city, Wollongong, south of Sydney, was founded in 1829 as an outpost for a contingent of soldiers sent in response to conflict between local Aboriginal people and the unruly timber-getters who had established themselves in the area.

[31] His legacy lives on with Macquarie Street, Sydney bearing his name as the well as the New South Wales Parliament and various buildings designed during his tenure including the UNESCO listed Hyde Park Barracks.

It was proclaimed a town in 1815 and properties across the plains began to support cattle and grow wheat, vegetables and fruit and produce fine wool for export to the knitting mills of industrial Britain.

[35] Previously, the famous Bennelong and a companion had become the first people born in the area of New South Wales to sail for Europe, when, in 1792 they accompanied Governor Phillip to England and were presented to King George III.

They made many important discoveries including the Murray River (which they named the Hume), many of its tributaries, and good agricultural and grazing lands between Gunning, New South Wales and Corio Bay, Victoria.

[41] Despite some tension, the influx of migrants also brought fresh ideas from Europe and North America to New South Wales—Norwegians introduced Skiing in Australia to the hills above the Snowy Mountains gold rush town of Kiandra around 1861.

The separation and rapid growth of Victoria and Queensland mark the real beginning of New South Wales as a political and economic entity distinct from the other Australian colonies.

New South Wales, which was less radically affected demographically by the gold rushes, remained more conservative, still dominated politically by the squatter class and its allies in the Sydney business community.

Initially radical, nationalist, democratic and racist, it gained wide influence and became a celebrated entry-point to publication for Australian writers and cartoonists such as Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Miles Franklin, and the illustrator and novelist Norman Lindsay.

Australia's first parliamentary elections were conducted for the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, again with voting rights (for males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity.

[54] The end of transportation and the rapid growth of population following the gold rush led to a demand for "British institutions" in New South Wales, which meant an elected parliament and responsible self-government.

Fears of class conflict faded as the population bulge resulting from the gold rushes was accommodated on the newly available farmlands and in the rapidly growing towns.

So long as Victoria was larger and richer than New South Wales, the mother colony (as it liked to see itself) would never agree to surrender its free trade principles to a national or federal government which would be dominated by Victorians.

At the time of federation the New South Wales economy was still heavily based on agriculture, particularly wool growing, although mining—coal from the Hunter Valley and silver, lead and zinc from Broken Hill—was also important.

By the 1920s New South Wales was overtaking Victoria as the centre of Australian heavy industry, symbolised by the BHP Newcastle Steelworks, opened in 1915, and another steel mill at Port Kembla in 1928.

The defeat of the great shearers' and maritime strikes in the 1890s led the AWU to reject direct action and to take the lead in forming the Labor Party.

The Country Party used its reliable voting base to make demands on successive non-Labor governments, mainly to extract subsidies and other benefits for farmers, as well as public works in rural areas.

Lang's second government was elected in November 1930 on a policy of repudiating New South Wales' debt to British bondholders and using the money instead to help the unemployed through public works.

By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the differences between New South Wales and the other states that had emerged in the 19th century had faded as a result of federation and economic development behind a wall of protective tariffs.

This contributed to the defeat of the Chifley government at the 1949 elections and the beginning of the long rule at a Federal level of Robert Menzies, a politician from Victoria, of the newly founded Liberal Party of Australia.

Sydney, hitherto an almost entirely British and Irish city by origin (apart from a small Chinese community), became increasingly multi-cultural, with many immigrants from Italy, Greece, Malta and Eastern Europe (including many Jews), and later from Lebanon and Vietnam, permanently changing its character.

[59][60][61] Improved vehicular access to the High Country enabled ski-resort villages to be constructed at Thredbo and Guthega in the 1950s by ex-Snowy Scheme workers who realised the potential for expansion of Skiing in Australia.

Though there has been a decline in the dominance of Christianity through increased secularisation and the growing presence of an increasingly diverse migrant population, Sydney's two outspoken Archbishops, George Pell (Catholic) and Peter Jensen (Anglican) remain vocal in national debates and the hosting of Catholic World Youth Day 2008, led by Pope Benedict XVI, drew huge crowds of worshipers to the city.

The Australian Labor Party has had long periods of governance in New South Wales in recent decades, holding power under Neville Wran and Barrie Unsworth from 1976 to 1988.

A period of Liberal-National Coalition rule followed under Nick Greiner and John Fahey from 1988 to 1995, but the Labor Party was led back to power by Bob Carr in 1995 and remained in office until 2011.