Before 1788
Aboriginal people have lived around Sydney Harbour for at least 30,000 years, and on the continent for around 65,000 — the oldest continuous culture on earth. The harbour clans are the Gadigal, Wangal, Cammeraygal, Bidjigal, Gayemagal and others, together the Eora.
The record is in the middens, the thousands of rock engravings across the Sydney sandstone, and the language, which is being revived.
The First Fleet
26 January 1788 — eleven ships under Governor Arthur Phillip land at Sydney Cove with around 1,400 people, roughly half of them convicts. Britain had lost America as a destination for transportation and needed another.
The colony nearly starved in its first two years; the soil at Farm Cove was poor and the convicts were not farmers.
In April 1789 a smallpox epidemic killed perhaps half the Aboriginal population of the region.
The convict colony
Around 80,000 convicts were transported to New South Wales before it ended in 1840. Most served their sentence and stayed.
Governor Macquarie (1810–1821) built the town — the Hyde Park Barracks, St James’ Church, the Rum Hospital — using the convict architect Francis Greenway, and treated emancipated convicts as citizens, which infuriated the free settlers.
Gold and growth
The 1851 gold rushes transformed the colony: the population of New South Wales tripled in a decade, and Chinese miners arrived in numbers, meeting a hostility that hardened into the White Australia policy at Federation.
Sydney built itself in sandstone through the second half of the century — the university, the Town Hall, the QVB, the terraces of Paddington and Surry Hills.
Federation
1 January 1901 — the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated at Centennial Park before a crowd of 100,000. Melbourne was the seat of government until Canberra opened in 1927.
Bubonic plague in 1900 gave the government grounds to demolish much of The Rocks.
Bridge and Depression
The Harbour Bridge was built through the Depression and opened in March 1932, the ribbon slashed by a man on a horse before the Premier could cut it.
The war and after
Japanese midget submarines entered the harbour in May 1942, sinking a converted ferry with the loss of 21 lives.
Postwar migration changed everything: Italians and Greeks from the late 1940s, then a much wider intake after the White Australia policy was dismantled between 1966 and 1973 — Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian.
The Opera House and the modern city
1957 — Utzon wins the competition. 1973 — the Opera House opens, sixteen years and ten times its budget later, its architect long gone.
1971 onwards — the Green Bans save The Rocks, Centennial Park and much else.
1978 — the first Mardi Gras march is broken up by police and 53 people are arrested. It is now one of the largest LGBTQ+ events in the world.
1992 — the Mabo decision overturns terra nullius.
2000 — the Olympics, widely reckoned the best-run of the modern era.
2023 — the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is defeated.