Culture and History

There are many historic buildings and sites in Sydney, for as far as most Australians are concerned, Australia's history only began back on April 29th, 1770, when Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy set foot in Botany Bay (where Sydney Airport is located today) and claimed the island continent for Great Britain.

The actual town of Sydney started a year later, on January 26th, 1788, when the First Fleet of settlers arrived under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, and the first crude buildings began to be erected in the area of Sydney that we now call The Rocks. The area soon filled with taverns and brothels and sailors haunts, while the convicts slaved to construct more permanent stone buildings for the new British colony and to try to plant and grow crops for the group's very survival.

Many of those original stone buildings, hewn by convicts, are still standing in The Rocks today. Several have been turned into shopping malls, restaurants and hotels, and are a 'must-see' for any visitor to modern-day Sydney.

There is evidence that non-British explorers also set foot in Australia before Captain Cook. These include Dutch explorer, Willem Janszoon (aka . Willem Jansz) landed on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula, (the remote northernmost tip of Australia).

Actually, the Chinese are probably the first to discover and map Australia, and you can read about it in the book "1421 The year China discovered the world", by Gavin Menzies, a retired British submarine commander, whose hobby is ancient maps. His website is 1421.tv. Mr Menzies' theory is that all the famous European explorers really did their 'exploring' with the help of maps that came from the Chinese!   

However, the Australian Aborigines have a history that goes back 40,000 years. They have many cave paintings and some stone carvings, but they never developed a written language to record their peoples' histories.