Weeks after the First Fleet's eleven ships anchored in Sydney Harbour, Governor Arthur Phillip formally proclaimed British authority over the colony, reading his commission before assembled marines and convicts. The ceremony marked the practical beginning of continuous European settlement in Australia, launching a penal colony that would eventually grow into a nation while devastating the Aboriginal peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years.
Under a hot Southern Hemisphere sun, marines fired volleys and the assembled convicts and officers raised a toast as Phillip's commission, granting him near-absolute authority over the fledgling colony, was read aloud. It was a strange, makeshift ceremony for what would become a nation—performed on a continent the British had explored only cursorily, following Captain Cook's landing eighteen years earlier.
Phillip had arrived with roughly 1,000 people, more than 700 of them convicts, after an eight-month voyage from Portsmouth. The site at Sydney Cove was chosen for its fresh water and deep harbor, a marked improvement over Botany Bay, which Phillip had scouted first and found unsuitable.
For the Eora people who had fished and lived along that harbor for millennia, the ceremony marked catastrophe rather than founding. Within months, smallpox and other introduced diseases would devastate Aboriginal communities around Sydney, a grim pattern that would repeat as the colony expanded across the continent over the following century.