Indigenous Australians
British colonisation of Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay, New South Wales, in 1788. Settlements were subsequently established in Tasmania (1803), Victoria (1803), Queensland (1824), the Northern Territory (1824), Western Australia (1826), and South Australia (1836). Australia was the exception to British imperial colonization practices, in that no treaty was drawn up setting out terms of agreement between the settlers and native proprietors, as was the case in North America, and New Zealand. Many of the men on the First Fleet had had military experience among Indian tribes in North America, and tended to attribute to the aborigines alien and misleading systems or concepts like chieftainship and tribe with which they had become acquainted in the northern hemisphere.
History of Indigenous Australians
Humans reached Tasmania approximately 40,000 years ago by migrating across a land bridge from the mainland that existed during the last glacial maximum. After the seas rose about 12,000 years ago and covered the land bridge, the inhabitants there were isolated from the mainland until the arrival of European settlers.