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In December 1696, three ships in the fleet commanded by de Valmingh - Nijptangh, Geelvinck and Het Weseltje - anchored off Rottnest Island. On 5 January 1697, a well-armed party landed near present-day Cottesloe Beach then marched eastwards to the Swan River near Freshwater Bay. They tried to contact some of the Nyoongar to enquire about the fate of survivors of the Ridderschap van Hollant, lost in 1694, but were unsuccessful. They sailed north, but not before de Vlamingh had bestowed the name Swan on the river.
Perth was founded in 1829 as the Swan River Settlement, but it grew very slowly until 1850, when convicts were brought in to alleviate the labour shortage. Many of Perth's fine buildings, such as Government House and Perth Town Hall, were built using convict labour. Even then, Perth's development lagged behind that of the eastern cities, until the discovery of gold in the 1890s increased the population four-fold in a decade and initiated a building boom.
Perth's penchant for rampant speculation has meant that many of the city's 19th-century buildings have since disappeared amid a deluge of concrete edifices of dubious architectural value. This growth has undoubtedly been fuelled by Western Australia's vast mineral wealth. In the 1980s, it was said that Perth had more millionaires per capita than any other city in Australia. Huge business empires burgeoned at a rate completely disproportionate to a city of Perth's size, and soon enough, with the high-profile fall from grace of the beer, yachting, media and art mogul Alan Bond in particular, Perth came to epitomise the consequences of 80s greed. Throughout the boom and bust, the local Nyungar population remained relentlessly disadvantaged.
The political and corporate scandals which rocked the city in the early 1990s added to its frontier, get-rich-quick image. In fact, they were a throwback to the bad old days of the 1980s, when the line between government collusion and government regulation was dangerously blurred by the presiding Labor government.
Richard Court's Liberal government presided over the greater part of the 1990s and oversaw a property boom in Perth similar to that which overtook most of Australia's major urban centres. That boom continued under the premiership of Dr Geoff Gallup, whose Labor government was elected in 2001.
The city may no longer be paved with gold, but it is still an affluent one - albeit with conspicuous exceptions - thanks to the state's enormous mineral wealth. That affluence is set to continue, with the signing in 2003 of a gas-supply contract with China worth 25000000000.00.
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