Views of early settlers in the Illawarra

With no signs of land ownership, such as fences, crops, stock animals, or buildings, the Europeans who arrived on the First Fleet believed the land was free to claim because the Aboriginal people living here did not have farms or buildings. 

The first thing they did was clear land for farming and to build towns around the east coast.  Not only did this destroy much of the rainforest in the Illawarra, but it also drove the Aboriginal people off the land. 

The rainforests and forests of the Illawarra were unfamiliar places for European farmers and they did not know how to live off the land. They only knew how to grow crops and farm cows and sheep.  It is unlikely that the first European farmers cared that they were destroying so much of the Illawarra's rainforests.

• Scroll through the pictures beside to see the amount of land clearing that had already happened 50 years after Europeans Arrived in Australia.  The places in these pictures would once have been forests and rainforests.