Most likely the first visitor to the Swan River area was Frederick de Houtman on 19 July 1619, travelling on the ships Dordrecht and Amsterdam.

[6] On 28 April 1656, Vergulde Draeck en route to Batavia (now Jakarta) was shipwrecked 107 km (66 mi) north of the Swan River near Ledge Point.

Later in March 1803, Géographe, with another ship Casuarina, passed by Rottnest on their way eventually back to France, but did not stop longer than a day or two.

[6] The founding father of Western Australia was Captain James Stirling who, in 1827, explored the Swan River area in HMS Success which first anchored off Rottnest, and later in Cockburn Sound.

His lobbying was for the establishment of a free settlement – unlike penal colonies at New South Wales, Port Arthur and Norfolk Island – in the Swan River area with himself as its governor.

In December 1828, a Secretary of State for Colonies despatch reserved land for the Crown, as well as for the clergy, and for education, and specified that water frontage was to be rationed.

Negotiations for a privately run settlement were also started with a consortium of four gentlemen headed by Potter McQueen, a member of Parliament who had already acquired a large tract of land in New South Wales.

The consortium withdrew after the Colonial Office refused to give it preference over independent settlers in selecting land, but one member, Thomas Peel, accepted the terms and proceeded alone.

Parmelia however, under Stirling's "over confident pilotage",[This quote needs a citation] also ran aground, lost her rudder and damaged her keel, which necessitated extensive repairs.

Bad weather and the required repairs meant that Stirling did not manage to reach the mainland until 18 June, and the remaining settlers on Parmelia finally arrived in early August.

They described the poor conditions and the starving state of the colonists, deemed the land totally unfit for agriculture, and reported (incorrectly) that the settlers had abandoned the colony.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield used the Swan River Colony to illustrate the importance of combined labour and the danger of a dispersed population.

Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, used Wakefield's ideas and the Swan River Colony to illustrate a point about the necessity of a dependent workforce for capitalist production and colonisation.