About a quarter of people in Western Australia who live outside of Perth reside in the South West and the population continues to expand rapidly.

The South West region was first populated by Aborigines more than 35,000 years ago and their descendants still inhabit and promote their culture in the area today.

There were at least 10 distinct Aboriginal groups whose population is thought to have totalled about 12,000 prior to the arrival of European settlers.

Initial European settlement in the South West began shortly after the establishment of the Swan River Colony, later to become Perth, in 1829.

Settlement was dictated by the search for arable land but there were several grandiose schemes which failed largely due to the ignorance of the new arrivals to the nature of the land they sought to farm and the variability of the seasons.

In 1830 Augusta was made the third WA settlement after Albany and Perth but more for its strategic location at the extreme south-west tip of Australia than for farming purposes.

The inadequate hinterland forced the settlers to virtually abandon Augusta and they travelled overland to establish Busselton.

Likewise, Australind, now a prime residential strip just north of the City Of Bunbury, was planned as a farming and trading centre for 10,000 new English settlers.

All of the several hundred who arrived quickly dispersed to better land.

By 1840 a labour shortage and the selection of poor farming land had created a rural and economic crisis. The pioneers petitioned the British Government to make Western Australia, which was until then a free settlement, a penal colony.

The first convicts arrived in June 1850 and their labour for the pastoralists, which also won them eventual freedom, dramatically expanded grazing lands.

Additionally much new grazing land had been opened up by the timber industry which was logging the South West's highly sought after jarrah and karri hardwood forests.

Jarrah was even in demand in London as street paving. At the turn of the century the discovery of the substantial coal deposits at Collie, gold at Donnybrook and tin at Greenbushes gave further economic impetus to the region. However, the South West was still largely reliant on the foresters and sheep pastoralists and was a long way from agricultural self sufficiency.

It was the construction of extensive road, rail and communication links during the timber boom of 1889 to 1918 that provided the basic infrastructure for renewed government settlement programs after World War 1.

Ex-soldiers and their families were allocated land throughout the South West between 1919 and 1940 and especially opened up the areas around Manjimup and Augusta.

Together with a group settlement scheme for British migrants the government-sponsored initiatives bought some 700,000 hectares of land into production and gave birth to many new towns and transport links.

Despite the huge capital expense the schemes did not achieve their goal of making the state self reliant in dairy produce. It was not until after World War 2 that the earlier momentum delivered a marked growth in dairying, orcharding and vegetable production, particularly inland, from Harvey in the north, through Donnybrook to Manjimup.

On the coast Busselton also grew from a timber port to fledgling coastal resort and an early centre of the South West's potato industry.

Just south at Margaret River, then still unknown for its world-famous surfing waves and beaches, growers were experimenting with the red wine grape varieties which would make the area equally renowned.