To assist a reader with an enquiry the following site is on assisted Immigrants arriving in:

* Sydney
- In 1770, British sea Captain Lieutenant James Cook landed in Botany Bay on the Kurnell Peninsula. It is here that Cook made first contact with an Aboriginal community known as the Gweagal.
Under instruction from the British government, a convict settlement was founded by Arthur Phillip, who arrived at Botany Bay with a fleet of 11 ships on 18 January 1788. This site was soon determined to be unsuitable for habitation, owing to poor soil and a lack of reliable fresh water. Phillip subsequently founded the colony one inlet further up the coast, at Sydney Cove on Port Jackson on 26 January 1788. He named it after the British Home Secretary, Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney, in recognition of Sydney's role in issuing the charter authorising Phillip to establish a colony. The original name was intended to be Albion until Phillip decided upon Sydney

* Newcastle
- The first European to explore the area was Lieutenant John Shortland in September 1797. His discovery of the area was largely accidental; as he had been sent in search of a number of convicts who had seized the HMS Cumberland as she was sailing from Sydney Cove.

While returning, Lt. Shortland entered what he later described as "a very fine river", which he named after New South Wales' Governor, John Hunter. He returned with reports of the deep-water port and the area's abundant coal. Over the next two years, coal mined from the area was the New South Wales colony's first export.

Newcastle gained a reputation as a "hellhole" as it was a place where the most dangerous convicts were sent to dig in the coal mines as harsh punishment for their crimes.

By the turn of the century the mouth of the Hunter River was being visited by diverse groups of men, including coal diggers, timber-cutters, and more escaped convicts. Philip Gidley King, the Governor of New South Wales from 1800, decided on a more positive approach to exploit the now obvious natural resources of the Hunter Valley.

In 1801, a convict camp called King's Town (named after Governor King) was established to mine coal and cut timber. In the same year, the first shipment of coal was dispatched to Sydney.
This settlement closed less than a year later.

A settlement was again attempted in 1804, as a place of secondary punishment for unruly convicts. The settlement was named Coal River, also Kingstown and then re-named Newcastle, after England's famous coal port. The name first appeared by the commission issued by Governor King on 15 March 1804 to Lieutenant Charles Menzies of the marine detachment on HMS Calcutta, then at Port Jackson, appointing him superintendent of the new settlement.

The new settlement, comprising convicts and a military guard, arrived at the Hunter River on 27 March 1804 in three ships: HMS Lady Nelson, the Resource and the James.
The convicts were rebels from the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion.

The link with Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, its namesake and also from whence many of the 19th century coal miners came, is still obvious in some of the place-names ? such as Jesmond, Hexham, Wickham, Wallsend and Gateshead. Morpeth, New South Wales is a similar distance north of Newcastle as Morpeth, Northumberland is north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.


* Moreton Bay
- (Aboriginal name - Quandamooka) and its islands were inhabited by Aboriginal tribes. The name Morton's Bay was given by Captain Cook when he passed the area on 15 May 1770, honouring Lord Morton, president of the Royal Society. The spelling Moreton was an error in the first published account of Cook's voyage (Hawkesworth's Voyages.
Cook gave the name only to the bight formed by the northern end of Stradbroke Island (in 1770, there was only one island) and the eastern side of Moreton Island. He was unaware of the South Passage (as it's now called) between the two islands, and did not sail into what is the present Moreton Bay.


* Port Phillip
- Lieutenant James Grant was the first known European to pass through Bass Strait from west to east, in the Lady Nelson. He was also the first to see and chart the south coast of Victoria from Cape Nelson to Western Port. Grant also discovered Port Phillip and named it Governor King?s Bay 8/12/1800. The first Europeans to enter Port Phillip, were the crew of the Lady Nelson, commanded by John Murray, which entered the bay on 15 February 1802. Murray called the bay Port King after the Governor of New South Wales, Philip Gidley King, but King later renamed it Port Phillip, in honour of his predecessor Arthur Phillip.

About ten weeks after Murray, Matthew Flinders in the Investigator also found and entered the port, unaware Murray had been there.
The official history of Nicholas Baudin's explorations in Le G?ographe claimed they too had sighted the entrance at that time (30 March 1802) but this is almost certainly a later embellishment or error, being absent from the ship's logs and Baudin's own accounts.
As a result of Murray's and Flinders' reports, King sent Lieutenant Charles Robbins in the Cumberland to explore Port Phillip fully. One of his party, Charles Grimes, became the first European to walk right round the bay, and thus to discover the mouth of the Yarra, on 2 February 1803


The term 'assisted immigrant' refers to those people whose passage was subsidised or paid for through one of the several assisted immigration schemes which operated to New South Wales from the United Kingdom and other countries

... [url=http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-archives/indexes-online/indexes-to-immigration-and-shipping-records/indexes-to-assisted-immigrants]Indexes

- The Index covers all of the ports below but you can also search them separately:
* Port Phillip, 1839-51
* Sydney and Newcastle, 1844-59
* Moreton Bay (Brisbane), 1848-59
* Sydney, 1860-79
* Sydney, 1880-96
They hold records of assisted immigrants from 1828-1896 to NSW which can provide valuable information such as native place and parents' names.
- Their family history page on Immigration includes examples of various shipping records, useful tips and 'how to' worksheets to help you search for arrivals to New South Wales and includes:
* Asylum records
* BDMs
* Convicts
* Convict Settlement - Norfolk Island
* Immigration
* Land records
* Railway employee records (+ General Strike of 1917)
* Women in the records
- they also have an index to vessels arriving in Sydney, 1837-1925

that site is also mentioned in the journal CONVICTS of AUSTRALIA