Dutch and French explorers were the first Europeans to sight the Perth area following Dirk Hartog's west-coast sightings in 1616. In 1696, Willem de Vlamingh encountered and named the “Swaene rivier”, the name being suggested to him by the abundance of black swans he saw. But he was by and large unimpressed by what he described as “an arid, barren, and wild land”. French interest in 1801 resulted in François Heirisson's exploration and charting of the River Swan but a later (1807) expedition rejected the site as unsuitable for settlement. British interest was motivated by the immoderate and, to some extent, deluded passion of Captain Sir James Stirling who, encouraged by the favourable opinions of his botanist, Charles Frazer, declared the area to be the equal of the plains of Lombardy. Such was the enthusiasm generated that the phrase “Swan River mania” was coined to describe the atmosphere in which the new settlement was born.
Settlers landed in 1829 and a town site was surveyed by John Septimus Roe. Disastrous confrontations occurred almost immediately between the whites and local Aboriginal tribes though, at the same time, many of the explorers were accompanied and crucially aided by individual Aborigines. Agricultural development was much slower than expected because Stirling had been misled by atypical weather conditions (an unusually cool, wet summer) into thinking the coastal plains would be fertile and productive. In fact, rapid exhaustion of available land engendered expeditions to seek for more. At the same time, labour shortages worsened and this led to the introduction of convict labour (1850). When transportation to the western colony ceased (1868), Perth had grown substantially but it was the discovery of gold in the Kimberley and Pilbara districts and in Kalgoorlie in the 1890s that began Perth's long ascent to mineral-based affluence. After World War ll, the flow-on effects of rich deposits of iron ore (for example, that discovered by Lang Hancock in the 1950s in the Hamersley Range) and other minerals discovered at various West Australian sites, together with massive immigration, underwrote the transformation of Perth physically, economically, and socially.
Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Perth Information info
|
