HISTORY

TIMELINE: 1791-1820

• escaped convicts, William and Mary Bryant, thought to have located Glenrock Lagoon

• Lt. John Shortland lands on the southern shore of the Hunter River

• the Hunter sails to Bengal with the first coal exports from Newcastle

• August: William Reid locates Lake Macquarie, sailing into the channel after mistaking it for the Hunter River
• November: the Norfolk wrecked on Stockton Beach

• Paterson, Grant and Barrallier explorer the lower Hunter River on the Lady Nelson, seeing "the fires of the natives and many individuals"
• June: first settlement formed at the mouth of the Hunter River under M. Mason; abandoned February 1802
• November: Superintendent Mason reports hostile encounters with Aborigines on the Hunter River, and the theft of two blankets by one man, thought to be under the influence of alcohol

• March: second settlement at `King's Town' (Newcastle) formed under Charles Menzies with 34 Irish convicts implicated in the Castle Hill uprising; thereafter a "place for the reception of desperate characters" and "choice rogues"
• May: six Aboriginal men from Newcastle taken to Sydney to meet Governor King

• January: Governor Lachlan Macquarie inspects the Newcastle settlement

• Benjamin Singleton marks a route a land route from Sydney to Newcastle
• Governor Lachlan Macquarie makes the second of three tours of Newcastle; meets "Burigan, King of the Newcastle native tribe" and 40 men, women and children, who entertain with a short "Carauberee"; "I ordered them to be treated with some grog and an allowance of maize".

• September 18: convict Henry Langton receives 75 lashes at Newcastle for "Cutting a black native with a knife"
• November: John Howe marks a route from Windsor to the Hunter River near Jerrys Plains

• January: Commissioner J.T. Bigge inspects the Newcastle penal settlement
• October: death of King Burrigan of the Newcastle tribe, from injuries sustained in the recapture of the convicts James Kirby and James Thompson
• October 28: three convicts, Robert Davis, Thomas Franklin and William Page flogged for `Inhumanely ill treating and cutting a black native and intimidating him against bringing in bushrangers'
• December: trial and execution in Sydney of James Kirby for the murder of King Burrigan