Timeline of Sydney

People arrive on the continent. Aboriginal occupation of Australia is dated to around 65,000 years, making it the oldest continuous human culture on earth.

Occupation of the Sydney basin. The earliest firmly dated evidence of people around Sydney Harbour, at sites including Parramatta and the Blue Mountains fringe.

The harbour reaches its present shape. Post-glacial sea level rise drowns a river valley, creating Port Jackson. Coastal middens from this period onwards record the diet of the Eora.

Cook passes the heads. The Endeavour lands at Botany Bay in April and Cook names Port Jackson from offshore without entering it. He claims the east coast for Britain.

The First Fleet lands at Sydney Cove. Eleven ships and around 1,400 people, roughly half of them convicts, under Governor Arthur Phillip. The date is now Australia Day and is also marked as Invasion Day.

Smallpox. An epidemic sweeps the harbour, killing by contemporary estimate around half the Aboriginal population of the region within months.

Bennelong, and the spearing at Manly. Phillip is speared in the shoulder at Manly Cove in what historians read as a ritual payback. He orders no reprisal. Bennelong later travels to England.

Pemulwuy’s resistance. The Bidjigal warrior leads armed resistance against the colony for over a decade until he is shot in 1802 and his head sent to England.

The Rum Rebellion. The New South Wales Corps deposes Governor William Bligh — the only successful armed takeover of government in Australian history, and Bligh’s second mutiny.

Macquarie arrives. The new governor builds the town, employs the convict architect Francis Greenway, and treats emancipated convicts as citizens, to the fury of the free settlers.

The Botanic Garden is founded. Australia’s oldest scientific institution is established on the site of the colony’s failed first farm at Farm Cove.

Hyde Park Barracks. Greenway’s convict dormitory opens, housing up to 600 men. It later becomes an immigration depot for single women and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Transportation to New South Wales ends. Around 80,000 convicts had been sent. Most served their time and stayed.

Gold. Discoveries near Bathurst begin a rush that triples the colony’s population in a decade and brings Chinese miners in numbers, meeting a hostility that hardens into the White Australia policy.

The Royal National Park. Gazetted south of Sydney, the second national park declared anywhere in the world after Yellowstone.

Centennial Park opens. Laid out for the centenary of the colony and dedicated to the people of New South Wales.

The Queen Victoria Building. Built as a market hall in the depression of the 1890s, deliberately over-finished to give work to unemployed craftsmen.

Plague, and the demolitions. Bubonic plague at the waterfront gives the government grounds to resume and demolish much of The Rocks.

Federation. The Commonwealth of Australia is inaugurated at Centennial Park before a crowd of around 100,000.

Surf lifesaving begins. The Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club is formed, claiming to be the first in the world. Daylight sea bathing had been illegal until 1903.

The Harbour Bridge opens. Eight years of construction, six million rivets, sixteen deaths — and a man on a horse who slashes the ribbon with a sword before the Premier can cut it.

Japanese submarines in the harbour. Three midget submarines enter Port Jackson; one torpedo sinks the converted ferry HMAS Kuttabul with the loss of 21 lives.

Postwar migration. Assisted passage brings Italians, Greeks, Maltese and Eastern Europeans in large numbers, beginning the transformation of Sydney’s food, suburbs and population.

Utzon wins the competition. An unknown Danish architect’s drawing is pulled from the rejected pile, by one account, by Eero Saarinen.

Utzon resigns. After a change of government and withheld payments, he leaves Australia and never returns. The interiors are completed by others.

The referendum. Australians vote by over 90 per cent to allow Aboriginal people to be counted in the census and the Commonwealth to legislate for them.

The Opera House opens, and The Block is bought. Sixteen years and ten times its budget later, Elizabeth II opens the House. In Redfern, the Aboriginal Housing Company buys the first Aboriginal-owned urban land in Australia.

The Green Bans. The Builders Labourers Federation refuses to work on developments residents oppose, saving The Rocks, Centennial Park and much else. Several unionists are jailed.

The first Mardi Gras. A march on Oxford Street is broken up by police and 53 people are arrested. The state parliament formally apologises in 2016.

Mabo. The High Court recognises native title and overturns terra nullius after 204 years.

The Olympics. Widely reckoned the best-run of the modern era. Cathy Freeman lights the cauldron and wins the 400 metres.

World Heritage. The Opera House is inscribed by UNESCO, one of very few buildings listed while its architect was still alive. Utzon dies the following year.

The lockout laws. Entry restrictions and early last drinks are imposed across the inner city after alcohol-related deaths. They gut Kings Cross and Oxford Street, and are repealed in stages.

Barangaroo Reserve. A container terminal is removed and the sandstone headland rebuilt from 10,000 blocks quarried on site, named for a Cammeraygal woman.

The Voice referendum. A proposal to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the constitution is defeated, with around 60 per cent voting no.

The Metro reaches the city. Sydney’s driverless metro opens through the CBD to Sydenham, with stations at Barangaroo, Martin Place, Gadigal and Central.