Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string while inserting datetime

I was trying to create a table as follows,

create table table1(date1 datetime,date2 datetime);

First I tried inserting values as below,

insert into table1 values('21-02-2012 6:10:00 PM','01-01-2001 12:00:00 AM');

It has given error saying,

Cannot convert varchar to datetime

Then I tried below format as one of the post suggested by our stackoverflow,

insert into table1 values(convert(datetime,'21-02-2012 6:10:00 PM',5)
                          ,convert(datetime,'01-01-2001 12:00:00 AM',5));

But am still getting the error saying,

Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string

Any suggestions?