A history of manufacturing in Sydney, 1788-1850

Abstract

Sydney was founded as a penal settlement on 26 January 1788. Captain Arthur Phillip with his eleven ships had arrived in Botany Bay some days earlier, but finding its shores generally unsuitable for a settlement decided to examine Port Jackson a few miles to the north. Here, on the southern shore of one of the finest natural harbours in the world, at the head of a small cove "near the run of fresh water", a thousand officers, marines, convicts, women and children disembarked, encamped, and began the painful struggle to subsist where previously only stone-age aboriginals lived. The new settlers had abundant supplies of fresh water, fish, game, timber, clay, and building-stone and these together with certain supplies and raw materials brought from England constituted the basic resources of the infant economy. Show more