The original settlement
The area where Sydney is today has been inhabited for over 40,000 years by Australia’s indigenous population; Aborigines. They came with boats from present Indonesia to northern Australia. From here they migrated and settled all over the Australian land area.

Around Sydney, several tribes lived and, with some of the world’s finest rock carvings in the local sandstone, left clear traces to the present.

European arrival
The European interest in the area began with the arrival of British explorer James Cook to Botany Bay in 1770. He directed his ship to the site south of Sydney, where fellow traveling botanist, Joseph Banks, was so overwhelmed by the species of nature that the name became Botany Bay.

Cook sailed further north and proclaimed possession of the Australian East Coast in the name of King George III. It happened on Possession Island, and with that deed an actual colonization could take place.

The British Government decided to establish a new colony on the site, and in 1788 a penitentiary colony was established by Captain Arthur Phillip. Phillip arrived in January 1788 with the so-called first fleet, which consisted of 11 ships with settlers and prisoners. In total there were more than 1,000 people on the ships, and they constituted a volume on which a colony could be established. The fleet had sailed to Botany Bay, but after a few days they settled in Port Jackson at the location of the present city.

Arthur Phillip named the city after British Minister Thomas Townshend, who was titled Lord Sydney. Townshend had initiated the new colony following the loss of part of Britain’s North American territories to the new country, the United States.

Arthur Phillip hoisted the flag of Britain and within a few years three large fleets of colonists arrived. Their labor could only to a limited extent help on the very hard life of the colony, where there was food shortages and only very rare supplies.

In 1792 there were already 4,000 people living in Sydney, and during the first years of the colony, prisoners were in the majority. They were sent here so a larger city that could survive the harsh conditions could be built as soon as possible.

Early Growth
The city extended to the areas around the Parramatta River, which provided better food production than at Sydney Cove, which developed as the central port as well as the administrative and economic center.

Development was strong in the young colony, and politically the governor was the controlling force. It came to an uprising; best known is the Rum Rebellion, where the Army’s New South Wales Corps ousted Governor William Bligh in 1808. After Bligh came a time with military rule before the last autocratic governor was inducted in 1810 in person by Lachlan Macquarie, who came to make a great mark on city development.

Lachlan Macquarie was governor in the years 1810-1821, and London saw his rule as controversial. He had great ambitions about Sydney’s development and the size of the city’s public buildings, and in many cases he compared prisoners with newcomers. It also came to some hiring of prisoners; among the most well-known are the colonial architect Francis Greenway, who conducted to building of many of the city’s works.

Within the first 25 years, for example, banks, markets, port facilities and some new housing were established. The population also grew strongly, with many ships coming on a regular basis with settlers from primarily the UK and Ireland. In 1847, almost 40,000 people lived in Sydney, and the number of prisoners was down to about 3%.

New governance and new boom
With the cessation of the self-ruling governors, several political institutions were established in the 1820s. In 1825, a council was appointed as advisers to the governor, whose powers had changed. In 1829, the colony’s parliament was housed in the Rum Hospital, the largest building in the city at the time.

Eleven years later, Sydney’s City Council was established. It was not democratic in our opinion of today, as only wealthy people could stand for power and landowners were granted up to four votes.

In the 1850s an elected parliament was introduced in accordance with British system, and from 1857 all male Britons could vote here, which over the years stabilized political development.

Time was not only characterized by political development, but also by economic and population growth. The big boom started in connection with the gold discovery in Bathurst in New South Wales in 1851. Immigrants came in colossal numbers and many of them traveled to the area where the gold fever ravaged. However, Sydney’s population also more than quadrupled in just twenty years, and about 200,000 inhabitants lived here in 1870.

The state made a lot of money in issuing temporary licenses to dig gold, and it helped to develop Sydney even more than before the valuable raw materials were dug up from the underground.

With the improved economy, the city’s industrialization also began rapidly to develop in the 1850s. The first railway was inaugurated in 1855 and it connected Sydney with the nearby town of Parramatta.

The end of the 19th century
Several major buildings and projects were completed to complement the already existing Sydney in the last decades before 1900. Saint Mary’s Cathedral was already planned as a large construction during the Lachlan Macquarie rule, and the foundation stone for the present and second cathedral was laid in 1868. The city’s art museum and the distinguished market building, the Queen Victoria Building, are other examples.

Thus, it was a modern Sydney that held the British Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870, and already nine years after that the city was once again the center of a worldwide event, the Great Sydney International Exhibition, which was the pinnacle of the work of many years of unbroken growth and development.

In the 1890s, the Australian colony experienced an economic decline after years of prosperity through, not least, natural deposits and new migrants’ initiative and activity.

The decades were also the time for the development of Sydney’s network of trams, which at its peak became the largest in the Commonwealth outside London. From the first horse-drawn carriage in 1861, expansion and technological development went hand in hand. In 1879 steam-powered trams started, and from 1898 an electrification of the routes occurred, eventually linking most neighborhoods and suburbs with central Sydney.

Australia is formed
In 1901, the new state, the Commonwealth of Australia, was established, and Sydney and New South Wales were part of it. Among other things, it was celebrated with fireworks at the town hall.

From a colony capital status, Sydney now became the capital of the state of New South Wales. The two big cities, Sydney and Melbourne, were rivals in the fight to become the country’s capital; a status none of them gained with the agreement to establish Canberra as a federal territory and the nation’s capital.

Despite independence, however, ties to Britain remained strong, not least during World War I, when more than 60,000 Australian soldiers died during the fighting in Europe.

Depression and a new war
In the first decades of the 20th century, Australia’s economy flourished again. Large public institutions were established and new rich natural deposits were found in the great land. Growth was high until the depression in the late 1920s.

However, the economic downturn did not last long, and already in 1932 there were good times again, not least due to an increase in the prices of wool, which was one of the country’s major export products. That same year, Sydney Harbor Bridge was completed. It was a great engineering feature and one of the things that established new jobs in a time of unemployment. Today, the bridge is one of the city’s most distinctive constructions and stands as the center of the city’s New Year’s celebration, which is shown worldwide.

In World War II Australia again joined the British side, but with Japan’s expansion into the Pacific region, the country also increased its own defense, including a fortification of Sydney’s port. In 1942, battles took place in the city as Japanese submarines entered the harbor, but despite a few bombardments, Sydney escaped the war time relatively unscathed.

The post-war era and today
After the end of the war, a new wave of immigration started in Sydney and Australia. The many new inhabitants brought growth and renewed prosperity to the country. Sydney grew once again sharply in a short time, and primarily the western suburbs were developed in the following decades.

After World War II, Australia formed closer ties with the United States, which until then had mainly been with Britain. Australian participation in the Vietnam War of the United States established the city as a recreation site for American soldiers from the mid-1960s, and it left its natural mark on the street scene. In 1972, the Australian troops were drawn home again.

One of the world’s best-known buildings, Sydney’s Opera House, was completed in 1973 by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s designs. Since the inauguration, the building has been the city’s landmark and stands as one of the world’s most iconic buildings.

The 1980s became a decade of investment in many new skyscrapers. It was during this time that the current skyline of the city was established, and at the top the Sydney Tower was built; it is still widely seen with its location centrally in the business district.

Growth in the city continued through major events; first in connection with the city’s 200th anniversary in 1988 and later in 2000 when Sydney hosted the Olympic Games. It emphasized the city’s capacity, and the many fine offers for tourists were displayed around the world. Sydney’s near-constant growth has so far given way to the now nearly five million inhabitants, and every year tourists arrive in great number to the Australian metropolis, which has emerged from nothing since just 1788.