1803 in Australia

The following events happened in Australia in the year 1803.

← 1802 1801 1800 1803 in Australia → 1804 1805 1806
Decades:	1780s 1790s 1800s 1810s 1820s
See also:	Other events of 1803 Timeline of Australian history

Incumbents

• Monarch - George III

Governors

Governors of the Australian colonies:

• Governor of New South Wales – Captain Philip King

Events

• 14 January – Lieut-Col David Collins is commissioned in England to found a new settlement on Bass Strait, preferably at Port Phillip.
• 5 March – 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 is 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 – Convict William Buckley escapes from Sullivan Bay, Victoria. He lives with the Wautharong Aboriginal people for 32 years.
• 26 June – John Macarthur writes the Statement of Improvement and Progression of Fine Woolled Sheep in New South Wales.

Exploration and settlement

• January–February – Acting Lieutenant Charles Robbins and NSW Surveyor General Charles Grimes survey Port Phillip in HMS Cumberland
• 2 February – Charles Grimes discovered the Yarra River.
• 9 June – 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 – John Bowen with a party of forty-eight found the first settlement in Van Diemen's Land near the Derwent River.
• 9 October – David Collins, on HMS Calcutta and Ocean, establishes the short-lived settlement at Sullivan Bay on Port Phillip

Births

• 1 January – Daniel Egan, politician (died 1870)

Deaths

• 26 August – Joseph Luker, police officer (born c. 1765)
• 16 September – Nicholas Baudin, French explorer (born 1754)
• 17 November – William Balmain, First Fleet surgeon (born 1762)