kind I had ever witnessed". On 12 August that year, Helen Dance, wife of the captain of the second ship, Sulphur, cut down a tree to mark the founding of the town. Beginning in 1831, hostile encounters between the British settlers and the Noongar people – both large-scale land users, with conflicting land-value systems – increased considerably as the colony grew. The hostile encounters between the two groups of people resulted in multiple events, including the murder of settlers (such as Thomas Peel's servant Hugh Nesbitt), the execution of the Whadjuk elder Midgegooroo, the death of his son Yagan in 1833, and the Pinjarra massacre in 1834. The relations between the Noongar people and the Europeans became strained due to these events. The increasing use of the land for agricultural purposes restricted the hunter-gatherer practices of the native Whadjuk Noongar. They were forced to camp around prescribed areas, including the swamps and lakes north of the European settlement area. Third Swamp, known to them as Boodjamooling, continued to be a main campsite for the remaining Noongar people in the Perth region and was also used by travellers, itinerants, and homeless people. By the gold-rush days of the 1890s, they were joined by miners who were en route to the goldfields. Convict era and gold rushes In 1850, at a time when penal transportation to Australia's eastern colonies had ceased, Western Australia was opened to convicts at the request of farming and business people due to a shortage of labour. Over the next eighteen years, 9,721 convicts arrived in Western Australia aboard 43 ships. Queen Victoria announced the city status of Perth in 1856. Despite this proclamation, Perth was still a quiet town, described in 1870 by a Melbourne journalist as:"...a quiet little town of some 3000 inhabitants spread out in straggling allotments down to the water's edge, intermingled with gardens and shrubberies and half rural in its aspect ... The main streets are macadamised, but the outlying ones and most of the footpaths retain their native state from the loose sand — the all pervading element of Western Australia — productive of intense glare or much dust in the summer and dissolving into slush during the rainy season." With the discovery of gold at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie in the late 19th century, Western Australia experienced a mining boom, and Perth's population grew from approximately 8,500 in 1881 to 61,000 in