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.
RSPCA Tasmania
The earliest piece of colonial legislation that carried penalties for some forms of cruelty toward animals was passed in Tasmania (then called Van Diemen's Land) in 1837. This piece of legislation, however, lacked the proper infrastructure needed for its enforcement and it was replaced by the "Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1877" and amended in 1879. In the 1860s Tasmanian newspapers occasionally published articles concerning animal cruelty issues that were from British newspapers. Sentiments about the necessity of passing substantial anti-cruelty laws and creating an organisation similar to England's RSPCA were published in the 1870s.