British Home Secretary Lord Sydney issued the order establishing a penal colony at Botany Bay in New South Wales, addressing an overcrowded prison system after the American Revolution closed off transportation to the colonies. The decision launched the First Fleet's eight-month voyage in 1787 and the beginning of continuous European settlement in Australia.
For decades Britain had solved its overflowing prison problem by shipping convicts to North America, tens of thousands of them, to work as indentured laborers. The American Revolution slammed that door shut, and by the mid-1780s British prisons and prison hulks moored in the Thames were dangerously overcrowded with convicted felons—many guilty of nothing more than petty theft.
Lord Sydney's order of September 9, 1786 formally set in motion a scheme, championed by figures including botanist Joseph Banks who had visited the area with Captain Cook in 1770, to found a colony on the other side of the world at Botany Bay in New South Wales. It was an audacious gamble: an unsupported settlement 15,000 miles from home, built by convicts and their guards on a coastline barely explored by Europeans.
The First Fleet—eleven ships carrying about 1,000 convicts, marines, and officials—departed Portsmouth in May 1787 and arrived in January 1788, founding what became Sydney. The settlement struggled desperately in its early years against famine and isolation, but it marked the beginning of permanent British colonization of Australia, with catastrophic and lasting consequences for the continent's Aboriginal peoples, who had lived there for over 60,000 years.