stylistic:tone, information:extraction
Establishment of further colonies

In 1826, the governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, sent a military garrison to King George Sound to deter the French from establishing a settlement in Western Australia. In 1827, the head of the expedition, Major Edmund Lockyer, formally annexed the western third of the continent as a British colony. In 1829, the Swan River colony was established at the sites of modern Fremantle and Perth, becoming the first convict-free and privatised colony in Australia. However, by 1850 there were a little more than 5,000 settlers. The colony accepted convicts from that year because of the acute shortage of labour.