Southeast (Sydney-Melbourne core)

The corner of the continent where the modern country was built, and where most of it still lives. The First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove in January 1788 with around a thousand people, more than half of them convicts, founding a penal colony on land belonging to the Eora, whose population was devastated by smallpox within two years. New South Wales grew into a pastoral economy once the Blue Mountains were crossed in 1813, and wool made the colony solvent. Port Phillip was settled from Tasmania in 1835 and separated as Victoria in 1851, and the gold rushes that began there the same year transformed everything: Victoria's population tripled in a decade, Melbourne became for a time one of the richest cities in the world, and the diggers' revolt at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 entered the national story as a founding democratic moment. The two cities have been rivals ever since, which is why the federal capital was built from nothing at Canberra between them after 1913. This region produced the Australian labour movement, the eight-hour day and the world's first labour party to form a government. It also produced the White Australia policy, written into the first act of the new federal parliament in 1901. Aboriginal dispossession here was earliest and most complete, and the Myall Creek trial of 1838 remains the rare case where settlers were hanged for killing Aboriginal people. Sydney and Melbourne together hold about two-fifths of the national population. Canberra's name comes from a Ngunnawal word. The Snowy Mountains scheme, built between 1949 and 1974, employed a hundred thousand people, most of them postwar migrants. Sydney's harbour bridge opened in 1932 and the opera house in 1973.

• Existed: 1788 CE – present
• Type: Entity