Western Australia Day
public holiday in Western Australiaation
Western Australia Day or simply WA Day (formerly known as Foundation Day) is a public holiday in Western Australia (WA), celebrated on the first Monday in June each year, to commemorate the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829. Because of the date of the Western Australia Day public holiday, Western Australia does not have the King's Official Birthday public holiday in June, as do most of the other Australian states; it is held in September or October instead.
A bill proposing to shift the date of Western Australia Day from June to the second Monday in November started proceeding through the Parliament of Western Australia in late 2025.
History
HMS Challenger, under Captain Charles Fremantle, anchored off Garden Island on 25 April 1829. On 2 May, Fremantle officially claimed for Britain the part of the continent then called New Holland that was not already "included within the territory of New South Wales" which at the time extended to 129th meridian east of Greenwich. The merchant vessel Parmelia – with the new colony's administrator Lieutenant Governor James Stirling, other officials, and civilian settlers on board – arrived on the night of 31 May and sighted the coast on 1 June. It arrived in Cockburn Sound on 2 June, and finally anchored there on 6 June. The warship HMS Sulphur arrived on 8 June, carrying a British Army garrison. The Swan River Colony was officially proclaimed by Stirling on 11 June.
Ships carrying more civilian settlers began arriving in August, and on King George IV's birthday, 12 August, the wife of the captain of Sulphur, Helena Dance, standing in for James Stirling's wife Ellen Stirling, cut down a tree to mark the founding of Perth.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Western Australia Day” is public holiday in Western Australiaation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Western, Australia and public, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Western Australia Day” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.