Who ruled Sydney?

Sydney spreads around Port Jackson, a deep, branching harbour on the south-east coast of Australia, and across the sandstone plateaus and river plain behind it. The sheltered water and a reliable freshwater stream drew the British to the site in 1788, when they established a penal colony here, the first European settlement in Australia. Its history is the meeting of two worlds: tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal life around the harbour, and a convict outpost that grew into the largest city on the continent.

Aboriginal Australians have occupied the Sydney area for at least 30,000 years, and rock engravings, shell middens and shelters survive across the area. At the time of British arrival the land around the harbour was home to clans of the Eora, including the Gadigal of the southern shore, with Darug and Dharawal peoples further inland and to the south. They fished from bark canoes, gathered shellfish and managed the land with fire. The British navigator James Cook landed at Botany Bay, just to the south, in April 1770, and his report led the British government to choose the area for a convict colony after it lost its American colonies.

The First Fleet under Captain Arthur Phillip reached Botany Bay in January 1788, found it unsuitable and moved north to Port Jackson, raising the British flag at Sydney Cove on 26 January. Of the more than 1,000 people on board, over 700 were convicts. The settlement, named after the British home secretary Lord Sydney, nearly starved in its first years. For Aboriginal people the arrival was catastrophic: a smallpox epidemic in 1789 killed perhaps half the local population, and land seizures along the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers led to years of violent conflict. The Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy led armed resistance until he was killed in 1802.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie, from 1810 to 1821, turned the camp into a town, commissioning roads and public buildings, many of them designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway, and treating freed convicts as citizens. Free settlers arrived in growing numbers from the 1820s, transportation of convicts to New South Wales ended in 1840, and Sydney was incorporated as a city in 1842. The gold rushes of the 1850s brought a wave of immigrants, although Melbourne, enriched by the Victorian goldfields, was the larger city for much of the later nineteenth century. Sydney remained capital of the self-governing colony of New South Wales within the British Empire until federation.

When the colonies united as the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne led to a new capital being built at Canberra. Sydney reached a million people in the 1920s, and the Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932, linked the northern and southern shores. During the Second World War, in 1942, Japanese midget submarines raided the harbour. Large-scale immigration after the Second World War, first from Britain and southern Europe and later from Asia and the Middle East, made Sydney one of the most diverse cities in the world. The Opera House opened in 1973, and the city hosted the Olympic Games in 2000. Greater Sydney now has about 5.5 million people and is Australia's largest city and main financial centre.