In the late 1870s the colonies began to consider working together to provide for the defence of the Australian continent when two British engineer officers, Major General William Jervois and Lieutenant Colonel Peter Scratchley arrived to serve as defence advisors to the colonial governments. The following decade a number of inter-colonial conferences were undertaken and this set the scene for further co-operation later, when Queensland and the other colonies worked together to annex parts of New Guinea due to concerns about German imperial interests in the Pacific in 1883. This continued when the six colonies worked together to fund and establish coastal defences on Thursday Island and at King George's Sound, near Albany in Western Australia in the mid-1890s, due to the recognised strategic importance of these points which "commanded important trade routes" to all the colonies. Further co-operation came when, in July 1899, the permanent artillery forces of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria were grouped together to form the Royal Australian Artillery Regiment.