1803 in Australia

The following events happened in Australia in the year 1803.

Decades:

Incumbents

14 January â Lieut-Col David Collins is commissioned in England to found a new settlement on Bass Strait, preferably at Port Phillip.
5 March â George Howe publishes the first issue of the weekly The Sydney Gazette and The New South Wales Advertiser, Australia's first newspaper.
19 April - Governor King proclaims toleration for Catholics and allows Fr James Dixon to say mass for Irish convicts.^[1]^[2]
14 May - Illegal Masonic meeting held in Sydney and all participants arrested.^[2]
25 November - William James Hobart Thorne is the first white child born in Victoria^[3] when he was born at Port Phillip, in what was then part of New South Wales but later became Victoria.^[4] He dies on 2 July 1872.
27 December â Convict William Buckley escapes from Sullivan Bay, Victoria. He lives with the Wautharong Aboriginal people for 32 years.
26 June â John Macarthur writes the Statement of Improvement and Progression of Fine Woolled Sheep in New South Wales.

JanuaryâFebruary â Acting Lieutenant Charles Robbins and NSW Surveyor General Charles Grimes survey Port Phillip in HMS Cumberland
2 February â Charles Grimes discovered the Yarra River.
9 June â Investigator arrives in Port Jackson after circumnavigating Australia. On the voyage Matthew Flinders charted the coast and Robert Brown made an extensive collection of the flora of Australia.
11 September â John Bowen with a party of forty-eight found the first settlement in Van Diemen's Land near the Derwent River.
9 October â David Collins, on HMS Calcutta and Ocean, establishes the short-lived settlement at Sullivan Bay on Port Phillip