AD 1606: Willem Jansz, captain of the Dutch ship Duyfken, sets foot on
Australian soil
AD 1642-44: Abel Tasman charts the coasts of Australia and New Zealand
(Tasmania is named after this Dutch navigator)
1770: Captain James Cook claims Australia for England
1776: American Revolution closes the North American colonies to
transportation of prisoners from England
1788: First Fleet, nine convict transport ships and two gunships, arrives in
Sydney (Botany Bay); first settlement is 750 convicts, 210 marines, 40 women and
children--encroaching on a continent containing approximately 300,000
Aborigines
1840-41: Edward John Eyre, a sheep farmer, crosses Nullarbor Plain to reach
Western Australia from Adelaide
1851: Gold rush in New South Wales and Victoria
1860: Burke and Wills die attempting to reach the north of the continent from
Melbourne
1862: First south-to-north crossing of the continent by John McDouall
Stuart
1872: telegraph completed from Adelaide through Alice Springs to Darwin
April 25, 1915: Australian and New Zealand troops fight unsuccessfully at
Gallipoli (Turkey), commemorated as Anzac Day
1918: Aboriginals Ordinance permits the government to remove children from
their mothers if it suspects that the father was non-Aboriginal (this policy
continues through the 1960s)
1923: Vegemite
1927: parliament moves to Canberra
1932: Sydney Harbour Bridge opens
1933: Royal Flying Doctor Service founded
World War II: 1 million Australians fight with the Allies; 180,000 are
wounded and 34,000 killed
1956: Olympic games in Melbourne
1967: Aborigines included in national census
1973: Sydney Opera House opens
1986: legislative ties with Britain severed
1992: In Mabo v. Queensland, High Court of Australia rules that
Aborigines title to the land survived the English colonization
1993: Native Title Act attempts to implement the Mabo
decision
