[3] The links between Scotland and Australia stretch back to the first British expedition of the Endeavour under command of Lieutenant James Cook who was himself the son of a Scottish ploughman.

Cook navigated and charted the east coast of Australia, making first landfall at Botany Bay on 29 April 1770.

The Scottish courts were unwilling to punish crimes deemed to be lesser offences in Scots Law by deportation to Australia.

Scottish law was considered more humane for lesser offences than the English and Irish legal systems.

Their plight as victims of oppression was widely reported and the subsequent escape of one of them, Thomas Muir, in 1796 caused a sensation and inspired the poetry of Robert Burns.

[citation needed] Engineers like Andrew McDougall and John Bowman arrived with experience in building corn mills, while others were drawn to Australia by the prospects of trade.

Three of the Deputy Commissaries-General (the highest rank in the colony) from 1813 to 1835 were Scots: David Allan, William Lithgow, Stewart.

The Australian Gold Rush of the 1850s provided a further impetus for Scottish migration: in the 1850s 90,000 Scots immigrated, far higher than other British or Irish populations at the time.

Their preponderance in pastoral industries on the Australian frontier and in various colonial administrative roles, meant that some Scottish migrants were involved in the injustices against Indigenous Australians throughout the colonial period, including: the dispossession of the indigenous from their lands, the creation of discriminatory administration regimes, and in killings and massacres.

Before the 1893 Australian financial crisis, Scotland was the main source of private British loans to Australia.

[15] Today, a strong cultural Scottish presence is evident in the Highland games, dance, Tartan day celebrations, Clan and Gaelic-speaking societies found throughout modern Australia.