Sydney is Australia’s largest and oldest city and was previously home to Aboriginal tribes who had lived in the area for more than 40,000 years. Captain Cook claimed the land around Sydney for England in 1770 after he and Joseph Banks sailed the Endeavour as part of their search for the great southern land. Joseph Banks was a botanist, and he found the plant life around the bay amazing, hence they named it Botany Bay.
Captain Arthur Phillip, landed in the Sydney area in the HMS Sirius in 1788 as part of the first fleet, they first landed at nearby Botany Bay. Captain Arthur Phillip didn’t think that Botany Bay was a suitable place for their first settlement, so he sailed up to nearby Port Jackson, where he found a cove that had a good supply of fresh water and would be simple to set up a dock for ships to unload. He named it Sydney Cove, after the British Secretary of State, Viscount Sydney.
The city began its life as a penal colony, they were hard times for the convicts and solders as the new city on the other side of the world for its new inhabitants was very primitive.
Times were also hard for the Aboriginal community as well, thousands were shot for either resisting the new inhabitants or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many who weren’t shot soon caught some of the European diseases that they had no immunity to and died. Around 1793 the first free settlers arrived in the city that was being built by convict labour.
The country was heavily reliant on the military who also controlled the importation of alcohol, so much so that rum was soon to be used as a currency, but this caused so many problems that later a Spanish dollar was introduced with the centre stamped out to produce a second coin, it became known as the holey dollar.
