1803 in Australia

The following events happened in Australia in the year 1803.

Incumbents

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.
14 May - Illegal Masonic meeting held in Sydney and all participants arrested.
25 November - William James Hobart Thorne is the first white child born in Victoria when he was born at Port Phillip, in what was then part of New South Wales but later became Victoria. 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

January–February – Acting Lieutenant Charles Robbins and NSW Surveyor General Charles Grimes survey Port Phillip in
2 February – Charles Grimes discovered the Yarra River.
9 June – 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 and Ocean, establishes the short-lived settlement at Sullivan Bay on Port Phillip