The British First Fleet of convict ships arrived at Sydney in 1788 and New South Wales became a Crown Colony, with King George III of England as its King. The British set up other colonies all around Australia with powerful colonial governors chosen by Britain. From the 1820s, these colonies began to get more and more self-government and from the 1850s they began to become parliamentary democracies, which kept the Kings and Queens of the United Kingdom as their Heads of State, with royal duties done by Colonial Governors who had less and less real power.