Eleven ships of the First Fleet, carrying roughly 1,000 convicts, marines, and officials, anchored at Sydney Cove after an eight-month voyage from England. Captain Arthur Phillip formally took possession of the land for Britain, launching a penal colony that would grow into a nation. The date is now commemorated as Australia Day, though for Aboriginal Australians it marks the beginning of dispossession and is often called Invasion Day.
The First Fleet had originally tried to settle at Botany Cove, the site Captain James Cook had recommended nearly two decades earlier, but found it exposed and lacking fresh water. Arthur Phillip sailed a few miles north and discovered what he called 'the finest harbour in the world,' where a thousand ships might ride in safety. On January 26, 1788, he stepped ashore, raised the Union Jack, and drank a toast to the King's health with his officers.
The colonists who followed him ashore were mostly convicts sentenced to transportation for crimes as minor as stealing a handkerchief, guarded by marines who were themselves reluctant settlers at the edge of the known world. Within weeks, disease, hunger, and isolation tested the colony's survival; the local Eora people watched the strange ships and stranger settlers with a mixture of curiosity and alarm that would soon turn to resistance and grief.
Today the date is a national holiday, but it is also the focus of 'Invasion Day' protests by Indigenous Australians, who see it as the start of two centuries of displacement, violence, and cultural loss. The tension between celebration and mourning on January 26 remains one of Australia's most contested cultural fault lines.