On This Day in Australia

Hope you weren't expecting something exciting. 1988 was the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia. Every community was expected to have a bicentennial project and there was a lot of money available to facilitate the event. Inevitably, some communities struggled to come up with a truly engaging proposal.

This memorial commemorates the first Governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, and his team pitching tents in the rain. The point of the memorial is that this humdrum event was very early (within the first few weeks) of the colony being established at Port Jackson (aka Sydney Harbour) and Phillip's second in command, John Hunter, would become the second Governor. One of the other ship's officers recorded this event in his diary of an exploratory voyage up the coast and rivers north of Sydney.