1788 CE
First Fleet and the beginning of Australia’s penal colony
British Empire · Colonization & sovereignty · Slavery & coerced labor · Indigenous peoples & dispossession · Migration & diaspora
The First Fleet established a penal colony at Sydney Cove on Gadigal land after Britain lost North American convict destinations. Settlement began an expansion bringing disease, frontier violence, and dispossession, met by continuing Indigenous resistance
Precision, calendar, and review
- Start
- year · no uncertainty qualifier in this record
- Calendar and convention
- Historical-era years; the source calendar is not identified. No conversion of days is assumed.
- Year zero
- The scale goes from 1 BCE to 1 CE without year zero. Changing era names changes labels only.
- Documentary review
- Date not recorded
Reading the date: point event.
Sources
- www.nma.gov.au (opens in a new tab)
Source provenance and scope
- Publication date
- Pending verification: the source could not be accessed
- Bibliographic date checked
- 2026-09-23
The correspondence between this reference and individual claims has not yet been itemized.
This record is an editorial synthesis. Consult the sources to check claims and their limits. Chronological relationships alone do not establish causation.