http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/travel/02sydney.html?hpw

On Feb. 6, 1788, a fortnight after the male prisoners arrived, the
first female convicts were delivered from their ship, triggering pandemonium. As
the women — gussied up for the occasion — began mingling with the male convicts,
they were joined by lonely British sailors who rowed ashore with their rum
supplies.

While the military guards stayed nervously in their camps, the new settlement
descended into an uninhibited pageant of “debauchery and riot,” in the words of
a horrified ship’s surgeon, Arthur Bowes Smith. The frenzy only increased after
dark, when the crowd was lashed by a tropical thunderstorm and convicts began
cavorting in the bush. The wild scene “beggars every description,” railed Bowes
Smith in his journal. “Some (were) swearing, others quarrelling, others singing
...” The settlement of Sydney, wrote the novelist Tom Keneally in “A Confederacy
of Thieves,” was “celebrated in lunges and caresses,” and there is little
question that the first white Australians were conceived that night beneath the
rolling clouds.