Perth, Australia

Perth was founded on June 12, 1829 by Captain James Stirling as a political center and has continued to serve as the seat of Government for Western Australia to the present day. Perth became known worldwide as the "City of Light," as residents lit their houselights and streetlights as American astronaut John Glenn passed overhead while orbiting the earth in 1962. The city repeated this extraordinary tribute again in 1998 as Glenn passed overhead in the Space Shuttle. The first documented European sighting of the region made by the Dutch Captain Willem de Vlamingh in 1697 determined that the area was inhospitable and unsuitable for the agriculture needed to sustain a settlement. Perth became the first full scale settlement by Europeans in the western third of Australia. The British colony was officially designated Western Australia in 1832, but was known informally as the Swan River Colony after the area's major watercourse named after its native black swans. Captain Stirling selected the name Perth for the capital to honor Sir George Murray, Secretary of State for the Colonies, born in Perth, Scotland. Hostile encounters between the British settlers and Aborigines increased as the colony grew, culminating in the execution of the Whadjuk tribal chief, the death of his son Yagan, and the Battle of Pinjarra in 1834. In 1850, convicts, who provided cheap labor, were allowed to work in Western Australia and in 1856 Queen Victoria announced the city status of Perth. Perth is one of the most isolated metropolitan areas in the world and is actually closer to East Timor, Singapore and Jakarta, Indonesia, than it is to Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Perth was founded in 1829 as the Swan River Settlement, but it grew very slowly until 1850, when convicts were brought in to alleviate the labor shortage. Many of Perth’s fine buildings, such as Government House and its Town Hall, were built using convict labor. Even then, Perth’s development lagged behind that of the eastern cities, until the discovery of gold in the 1890s increased the population four-fold in a decade and initiated a building boom. The region was already inhabited for 40.000 years by the Whadjuk Noongar aboriginals. The name aboriginal is derived from the Latin words ab origin, from the beginning, which indicates them as the true native people of Australia.