Gday...

1829  -     Today is Foundation Day for Western Australia.

The first recorded sighting of Australia's western coastline came in 1611, when Dutch mariner Hendrik Brouwer experimented with a different route to the Dutch East Indies. As the route became more popular, the Dutch began to refer to the land as "New Holland".

Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh named the Swan River in 1697 because of the black swans he saw in abundance there. In 1826, Edmund Lockyer was sent to claim the western half of the Australian continent for Britain. He arrived at King George Sound on Christmas Day in 1826, and established a military base which he named Frederick's Town (now Albany). However, this is not regarded as Western Australia's Foundation Day.

In 1829, Captain Charles Fremantle was sent to take formal possession of the remainder of New Holland which had not already been claimed for Britain under the territory of New South Wales. On 2 May 1829, Captain Fremantle raised the Union Jack on the south head of the Swan River, thus claiming the territory for Britain.

Western Australia's Foundation Day is considered to be 1 June as, on 1 June 1829, Western Australia's first non-military settlers arrived in the Swan River Colony aboard the Parmelia. The colony of Western Australia was then proclaimed on 8 June 1829, and two months later, Perth was also founded.

1850  -     The first convicts arrive in Fremantle, Western Australia, to help populate the waning Swan River colony. 

The Swan River colony, established on Australia's western coast in 1829, was begun as a free settlement. Captain Charles Fremantle declared the Swan River Colony for Britain on 2 May 1829. The first ships with free settlers to arrive were the Parmelia on June 1 and HMS Sulphur on June 8. Three merchant ships arrived 4-6 weeks later: the Calista on August 5, the St Leonard on August 6 and the Marquis of Anglesey on August 23. Although the population spread out in search of good land, mainly settling around the southwestern coastline at Bunbury, Augusta and Albany, the two original separate townsites of the colony developed slowly into the port city of Fremantle and the Western Australian capital city of Perth.

For the first fifteen years, the people of the colony were generally opposed to accepting convicts, although the idea was occasionally debated, especially by those who sought to employ convict labour for building projects. Serious lobbying for Western Australia to become a penal colony began in 1845 when the York Agricultural Society petitioned the Legislative Council to bring convicts out from England on the grounds that the colony's economy was on the brink of collapse due to an extreme shortage of labour. Whilst later examination of the circumstances proves that there was no such shortage of labour in the colony, the petition found its way to the British Colonial Office, which in turn agreed to send out a small number of convicts to Swan River.

The first group of convicts to populate Fremantle arrived on 1 June 1850. Between 1850 and 1868, ultimately 9721 convicts were transported to Western Australia. The last convict ship to Western Australia, the Hougoumont, left Britain in 1867 and arrived in Western Australia on 10 January 1868.

1968  -     Helen Keller, blind and deaf author and lecturer, dies.

Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on 27 June 1880. She was deprived of her senses of sight and hearing when she contracted scarlet fever before she was two years old. The breakthrough for Helen Keller came when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, persisted with the difficult child to make her understand that touching shapes and letters were her means to communication. Helen Keller was the first deaf and blind person to graduate with a college degree, and ultimately published 14 books. She met every President of the United States from Calvin Coolidge to John F Kennedy, and wrote to eight Presidents of the United States, from Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, receiving letters from all of them. Helen Keller died on 1 June 1968.

Cheers - John