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.
Colony of Tasmania
The Anglican See of Tasmania was created in 1843, and shortly after Francis Russell Nixon, the first Bishop of Tasmania arrived. Nixon was highly successful in promoting a form of High Anglicanism, and linking his denomination with a patriotic sense of national identity under the banner of 'God, King, and Country'. Not to be outdone, the first Catholic Bishop of Tasmania, Robert Wilson arrived the following year, preaching a form of pious asceticism. An unintended consequence of the Irish potato famine was a huge influx of Irish Catholic settlers in the 1850s, reestablishing Catholicism in the colony. In 1866 St Mary's Catholic Cathedral was opened, but without the originally designed tower.The magnificent St David's Anglican Cathedral, seat of the Bishop of Tasmania, and administrative centre of the Anglican Diocese of Tasmania, was designed by George Frederick Bodley, in high Gothic style and completed in 1868.