Perth is the capital city of Western Australia. It was established by Britain as the Swan River Colony in 1829. The area had been explored by Europeans as early as 1697, and occupied by the Indigenous Whadjuk Noongar people for millennia.
Perth was established by Captain James Stirling in 1829 as the administrative centre of the Swan River Colony. It gained city status (currently vested in the smaller City of Perth) in 1856 and was promoted to the status of a Lord Mayorality in 1929. The city inherited its name due to the influence of Sir George Murray, then Member of Parliament for Perthshire and Secretary of State for War and the Colonies.
Perth has been shaped by successive periods of mineral resource-led economic expansion and population growth commencing with the gold rush of the 1890s. Since at least 1966 Perth's growth rate has been continuously higher than the national average.
Aboriginal history
Before the founding of the Swan River Colony, the indigenous Noongar people were well established in the southwest corner of Western Australia, hunting and gathering. They called the area on which Perth now stands Boorloo. Boorloo formed part of Mooro, the tribal lands of Yellagonga, whose group was one of several based around the Swan River, known collectively as the Whadjuk. Like elsewhere in Australia, Aboriginal occupation of the coastal plain created conditions attractive to European settlement. In many cases colonial settlements and homesteads were located on grounds which Aboriginal people had cultivated with native vegetation cropping and cleared with fire whilst road alignments often followed Aboriginal tracks through the bush.
The lakes on the coastal plain were particularly important to the Aboriginal people, providing them with both spiritual and physical sustenance. The swamps to the north of the river provided food, meeting places, shelter, and familiar hunting grounds. Fish, turtles, oysters, crabs, birds and their eggs, frogs, edible roots, fungi, kangaroos and possums abounded. The waters were fringed with tea-tree, grass trees and paper bark, the last providing shelter. The large flat spaces of the swamp flood plains created natural amphitheatres for ceremonies and camping.
From 1831, there were hostile encounters between settlers and Noongars that culminated in several executions and massacres that lead to the disintegration of the tribes and their retreat to the swamps and lakes north of the river. These were known to them as Boodjamooling, and became their main campsites and gathering places following dispossession from traditional lands.
Early European exploration
Early European exploration of the area commenced in 1697 with the discovery of the Swan River by Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh. A sloop was dragged over the limestone bar and sandy shoals that blocked the river mouth, and an expedition made up the river. Surveying the area from "high ground" (Mount Eliza), Vlamingh was not impressed. Similar explorations by the French in 1801, and the British in 1822 left equally unfavourable impressions regarding any potential settlement of the area.
The first explorer to gain a favourable opinion of the Swan River was Captain James Stirling, who explored the area in March 1827. With relatives in the powerful British East India Company, Stirling was predisposed to the idea of a West Australian colony with potential for Indian Ocean trade.
With Frederick Garling and the botanist Charles Fraser, Stirling spent 12 days exploring the river, travelling as far upstream as the Ellen Brook junction. The party did not go far enough ashore to see that sandy soil characterised much of the land around the river. As a result, their favourable impressions of the quality of the soil was highly inaccurate, but became instrumental in the decision to establish the Swan River Colony.
In his reports to the Home Office, Stirling acknowledged that previous explorations had found the area "sterile, forbidding and inhospitable" but argued that he had found it superior to New South Wales even, and promoted in glowing terms the agricultural potential of the area. His lobbying was for the establishment of a free settlement, unlike the other penal settlements at New South Wales, Port Arthur and Norfolk Island. Persuaded that the proposed colony would incur no significant cost on the part of the British Government, and perhaps fuelled by rumours that the French were about to establish a penal colony in the western part of Australia, the Colonial Office assented to the proposal in mid-October 1828.
Founding of the Swan River Colony (1829)