Gday...

1824  -             The RSPCA is founded in England.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) is a charity in England and Wales that promotes animal welfare. Since its founding in 1824, it has inspired the creation of similar, but independent, organisations in other countries, including the Scottish SPCA, RSPCA Australia and the ASPCA in the USA.

The first anti-cruelty bill was introduced by Richard Martin MP, who would later earn the nickname of 'Humanity Dick', leader of a group of twenty-two reformers. Also leading the group were William Wilberforce MP, who was already famous for his efforts to abolish slavery in the British Empire, and the Reverend Arthur Broome. The Act was passed in Parliament on 22 July 1822 and was against cruelty to farm animals, particularly cattle. The group assembled at the "Old Slaughters" Coffee House in London to create a society with the will and authority to enforce the new law. The SPCA, the first animal welfare society in any country was thus founded on 16 June 1824, and was subsequently granted its royal status by Queen Victoria in 1840.

1840  -             New Zealand becomes a dependency of New South Wales.

The first Englishman to explore New Zealand was James Cook, who charted and circumnavigated the North and South Islands late in 1769. In November, Cook claimed New Zealand for Great Britain, raising the British flag at Mercury Bay, on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. This signalled the start of British occupation of the islands which had previously been occupied by the Maori.

On 15 June 1839, letters patent were issued in London extending the boundaries of New South Wales to include any territory which is or may be acquired in sovereignty by Her Majesty ... within that group of Islands in the Pacific Ocean, commonly called New Zealand. Also in 1839, the British government appointed William Hobson as consul to New Zealand. Prior to Hobson leaving Sydney for New Zealand, Sir George Gipps, then Governor of New South Wales, issued a proclamation declaring that the boundaries of New South Wales were extended to include "such territory in New Zealand as might be acquired in sovereignty".

New Zealand officially became a dependency of New South Wales when the Legislative Council passed an Act extending to New Zealand the laws of New South Wales, on 16 June 1840. The Council also established customs duties and courts of justice for New Zealand. This arrangement, intended as a temporary measure, lasted just a few months. In November 1840, New Zealand became a separate colony.

1845  -             Explorer Ludwig Leichhardt discovers and names the Mitchell River in north Queensland.

Ludwig Leichhardt was born in Prussia and studied in Germany. He was a passionate botanist who had an interest in exploration, although he lacked necessary bush survival skills. In October 1844, he left from Jimbour on the Darling Downs, Queensland, on an expedition to find a new route to Port Essington, near Darwin.

On his journey, Leichhardt discovered and named numerous rivers through the northern gulf country. Unlike other explorers of his time, however, he did not name his discoveries after politicians in the hopes of currying favour with them. Leichhardt chose to honour those whose work he admired, or who had offered practical financial support and sponsorship for his expedition. He named the Mitchell River on 16 June 1845 after the explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell, who had opened up so much of the Victorian pastureland.

1869  -             Captain Charles Sturt, one of Australia's great explorers, dies.

Captain Charles Sturt was born in India in 1795. He came to Australia in 1827, and soon after undertook to solve the mystery of where the inland rivers of New South Wales flowed. Because they appeared to flow towards the centre of the continent, the belief was held that they emptied into an inland sea. Drawing on the skills of experienced bushman and explorer Hamilton Hume, Sturt first traced the Macquarie River as far as the Darling, which he named after Governor Darling.

Pleased with Sturt's discoveries, Governor Darling sent Sturt to trace the course of the Murrumbidgee River, and to see whether it joined to the Darling. On this expedition, Sturt discovered that the Murrumbidgee River flowed into the Murray (previously named the Hume), as did the Darling. By following the Murray in a collapsible whaleboat, Sturt found that it flowed to the southern ocean, emptying out at Lake Alexandrina on the south coast. The expedition was valuable for opening up Australia's inland waterways to the transportation of people and goods.

Sturt led further expeditions into Australia's interior to determine conclusively whether there was an inland sea, but found only the desert and harsh conditions, completely unsuitable for settlement. In 1851, Sturt returned to England, where he died on 16 June 1869. He is commemorated by the City of Charles Sturt and suburb of Sturt in Adelaide, Charles Sturt University in regional New South Wales, and the Sturt Highway from Wagga Wagga to Adelaide.

1903  -             Henry Ford founds the Ford Motor Company.

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, was born on 30 July 1863 in Michigan, USA. In 1896, Ford invented the Quadricycle, the first "horseless carriage" that he produced. Its popularity helped fund and launch Ford's business, and the new Ford Motor Company was founded 7 years later, on 16 June 1903. The first Ford, the Model A, was sold in Detroit a few months later. It was Ford's first attempt to develop a reliable, inexpensive car for the average American market.

Ford's real success came with the introduction in 1908 of the Model T Ford, also known as the Tin Lizzie. Ford managed to retain the car as affordable for everyone by employing new and revolutionary mass production methods, with completely interchangeable parts. When first introduced, the Model T cost only $850 and it is commonly believed they were available only in black. In actuality, black was not an introductory colour. Early cars were available in green, red, blue and grey; later, after 1913, they were available only in black. Although only 11 cars were produced in the first month, by 1914 the assembly process had become so streamlined that it took only 93 minutes to assemble a car. Improved assembly line technique and volume brought the price of the Model T down to about $300 by the 1920s. This spelled the beginning of the Ford success story.

1963  -             The Soviets launch the first woman into space.

Post World War II, the Soviet Union embarked upon a massive programme, enshrouded in secrecy, to launch the first human beings into space. The programme grew out of the Soviet's perceived need to modernise its defence by building rockets, nuclear weapons, and instruments to resist attack of any potential enemy. Global delivery capabilities of developed rockets soon opened exploration of the space era.

The first man in space was Yuri Gagarin, launched in Vostok 3KA-2, or Vostok 1, on 12 April 1961. Soviet authorities did not expect him to survive the descent back through Earth's atmosphere, so in-flight, he was promoted from Senior Lieutenant to Major. Gagarin did survive, and he became an instant, worldwide celebrity, touring widely to promote the Soviet achievement.

Lieutenant Valentina Tereshkova, born 6 March 1937, became the first woman in space. She was the fifth Russian cosmonaut to go into the Earth's orbit when her spaceship Vostok VI was launched on 16 June 1963. She completed 49 orbits of the Earth in two days, 22 hours and fifty minutes. Even though there were plans for further female flights, it was 19 years before the second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, flew into space.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1703  -             John Wesley, founder of Methodism, is born.

John Wesley was born 17 June 1703, in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England. In 1720 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, and received his Master of Arts in 1727. However, it was through his readings of Thomas a Kempis and Jeremy Taylor that he began to truly apply his Christianity to his life, seeking holiness of heart and life. Through a seemingly legalistic approach to the teachings of the Bible, he was able to discover how to truly practise and apply his Christian faith.

Wesley spent two years in the American colonies as missionary, but felt that he failed in his mission to convert the Indians and deepen and regulate the religious life of the colonists. In his search for truth and meaning, Wesley did not conform to any established church, and a number of charges were brought against him in his interpretation of Scripture. He returned to Oxford depressed and beaten.

After his return, Wesley found solace in the Moravians, a Protestant denomination founded in Saxony in 1722. It was while attending a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, on 24 May 1738, that John Wesley's conversion moved beyond the purely practical and theoretical to a deeper understanding. Whilst listening to a reading of the preface to Luther's commentary on Romans, Wesley felt his heart "strangely warmed"; shortly after this, he preached several enlightened sermons on salvation by faith, and God's grace "free in all, and free for all." Soon after this, he took to preaching at open-air services, wherever he was invited. After the Moravians developed some practices and policies with which he disagreed, he took his followers and developed his own society, the Methodist Society in England.

A fluent, powerful and effective preacher, Wesley was a logical thinker who also expressed himself clearly, concisely and forcefully in writing. His sermons were characterised by spiritual earnestness and simplicity. Although Wesley died on 2 March 1791, many follow Wesley's teachings today. He continues to be the primary theological interpreter for Methodists the world over, the largest Wesleyan body being The United Methodist Church.

1867  -             Henry Lawson, one of Australia's best known writers, is born.

Henry Lawson was born on 17 June 1867, on the Grenfell goldfields in New South Wales. He became one of Australia's best-known fiction writers of the colonial period. Most of his works dwelt on the Australian bush, accurately depicting the difficult conditions of life on dry, dusty outback stations and in bush towns. Unlike his contemporary, A.B. "Banjo" Paterson, he did not romanticise life in the bush, and any humour he displayed tended to be dry and sardonic, rather than like Paterson's larrikin wit.

Lawson gained a loyal following when the Bulletin started to publish his stories and poems in 1888. However, he never really recovered from his childhood hardships and rejection from his peers, and in his later years became an alcoholic. He died at home alone on 2 September 1922. Thousands of citizens who had come to relate to his writing also paid their respects at his funeral.

1893  -             Gold is discovered at Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.

Kalgoorlie is a small city in the isolated goldfields of Western Australia. Also known as Kalgoorlie-Boulder since amalgamating with the nearby town of Boulder, it has a population of about 30 000. Located some 600 kilometres east of the state's capital, Perth, it owes its beginnings to a gold prospector named Paddy Hannan.

Paddy Hannan was born in Quin, Ireland, in 1840 and emigrated to Australia in 1863. He first landed in Melbourne, and then prospected in Terama in New South Wales and Teetulpa in South Australia. The possibility of a goldrush lured him to Southern Cross in Western Australia in 1889. Together with fellow prospectors Tom Flanagan and Daniel Shea, Hannan is credited with discovering gold on 17 June 1893, sparking off the goldrush that initiated the development of the town of Kalgoorlie. The discovery was made quite by accident, when the men were searching for a horse which had strayed. The location was Mount Charlotte, less than 40 kilometres from the Coolgardie Goldfields. Within three days of Hannan registering his claim on the site which is still known as "The Hannan Award", an estimated 700 men were prospecting in the area.

Hannan was granted an annual pension of £100 by the Government of Western Australia in 1904, soon after which he ceased prospecting. He moved to live with two nieces in Brunswick, Melbourne, where he died in 1925. The main street and a railway station in Kalgoorlie both bear Hannan's name and a well known statue of him is erected there. The spot where Hannan found gold was later marked by a pepper tree. Hannan's discovery, in leading to Kalgoorlie becoming a gold-rush town, also opened up the arid west for settlement. In 1903 a pipeline was opened to convey water 560 kilometres from a supply near Perth. Not only did it bring water to the goldfield towns, it also brought irrigation to the wheatbelt towns along its route.

1928  -             Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

Amelia Mary Earhart was born on 24 July 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, USA. She was the first woman to achieve the feat of flying across the Atlantic. Her first trip across the Atlantic in a Fokker F7 Friendship occurred on 17 June 1928 and took 20 hours and 40 minutes.

Earhart continued to set milestones as a pioneer of flying. She flew solo across the Atlantic in 1932. On 11 January 1935 Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to California. She had departed Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii, and after a journey of over 3,800km in 18 hours, she arrived at Oakland Airport in Oakland, California.

In 1937, together with her navigator Fred Noonan, she attempted a round-the-world flight in a Lockheed Electra. Approximately five weeks after she set off, her plane disappeared, last heard about 100 miles off Howland Island in the Pacific. Speculation has been rife over the years regarding what happened to Amelia Earhart. The usual conspiracy theories and alien abduction theories have abounded but no evidence has ever been found to substantiate them, and the circumstances surrounding Earhart's disappearance remain a mystery.

1961  -             Russian ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev breaks free from Russian guards and requests asylum in France.

Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev was born on 17 March 1938 in a train near Irkutsk, while his mother was travelling across Siberia to Vladivostok, where his father, a Red Army political commissar, was stationed. As a child, he was encouraged to dance in folk performances, where his talent was soon evident. After he enrolled in the Vaganova Choreographic Institute, attached to the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, he became one of the school's most gifted dancers. He was permitted the rare privilege of travel outside the Soviet Union, when he danced in Vienna at the International Youth Festival. Not long after, for disciplinary reasons, he was told he would not be allowed to go abroad again, and would be restricted to tours of the Russian provinces.

Nureyev's fortunes turned in 1961, when Kirov's leading male dancer, Konstantin Sergeyev, was injured, and Nureyev was selected to replace him in a performance in Paris. He was waiting with the rest of his troupe on 17 June 1961 to board a plane from Paris to London, when he was approached by Russian guards. They told him he was required to return to Moscow rather than continuing on to London, having broken the rules about not mingling with foreigners. Nureyev broke free from the guards and dashed through a security barrier at Le Bourget airport shouting, "I want to be free!" He was immediately granted temporary asylum in France. Nureyev did not see Russia again until 1989, when he visited at the special invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Nureyev died on 6 January 1993 of AIDS after contracting the HIV virus through his promiscuous homosexuality, sometime in the early 1980s.

1972  -             The Watergate scandal begins.

The Watergate scandal was an American political scandal and constitutional crisis that led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon. It began with a burglary at the Watergate Apartment complex. On 17 June 1972, five men were caught searching through confidential papers and bugging the office of President Nixon's political opponents, the Democratic National Committee. One of the men, James McCord, was officially employed as Chief of Security at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), indicating that the burglary was linked to US President Nixon's re-election campaign.

On 17 May 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities began televised proceedings on the escalating Watergate scandal. On 24 July 1973, it was revealed that Nixon had secretly taped all conversations in the Oval Office. With this information available, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to surrender the tape recordings. After prevaricating for three months, Nixon finally produced the tapes.

The break-in, resultant cover-up by Nixon and his aides, and the subsequent investigation ultimately led to the resignation of the President on 9 August 1974, preventing his impeachment by the Senate. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon a month later, this prevented any criminal charges from being filed against the former president.

1999  -             Removal of the entire Cape Hatteras lighthouse tower in the USA commences.

The Cape Hatteras lighthouse is a famous lighthouse on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, USA. It is the tallest lighthouse in use in the US. Completed in 1803, the original structure was eventually demolished following the construction of a new and improved lighthouse between 1868 and 1870. The new lighthouse became the tallest lighthouse tower in the US, with the light projecting from 191 feet, or 58 m, above the water. The tower stands 63 metres tall from the base of the foundation to the tip of the roof, and the structure contains 268 steps.

By 1935, erosion had so threatened the tower that the water was actually reaching its base. After attempts to hold back the erosion process through dikes and breakwaters proved futile, the tower was abandoned and a functional light placed on a steel tower further inland from the shore. After a few years, wooden revetments, a more effective method for erosion control, helped reclaim some of the shoreline, and the lighthouse was declared safe for use and recommissioned on 23 January 1950.

Further erosion of the shoreline necessitated the relocation of the entire tower in 1999. The granite underlying the foundation of the lighthouse was mined out and replaced with steel supports. Using hydraulic jacks, these steel supports then moved the entire tower along a system of track beams. The actual removal operation began on 17 June 1999 and was completed on 9 July 1999. On this date, the tower was then lowered onto a new concrete pad 2900 feet (883m) away, and its temporary steel foundation replaced with brick. The lighthouse survived the move and a ceremonial relighting was held on 13 November that year.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1815  -             Napoleon Bonaparte is defeated in the Battle of Waterloo.

Napoléon Bonaparte was born Napoleone Buonaparte in Ajaccio, Corsica, on 15 August 1769. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, was an attorney and Corsica's representative to the court of Louis XVI of France in 1778, so Napoleon later adopted a more French form of his name. He began his military career at the age of 16, and rapidly advanced through the ranks. Famed for being an excellent military strategist, he deposed the French Directory in 1799 and proclaimed himself First Consul of France. His military forays into Europe were highly successful, and by 1807 he ruled territory stretching from Portugal to Italy and north to the river Elbe. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France on 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Despite Napoleon's military successes, he failed in his aim to conquer the rest of Europe. He was defeated in Moscow in 1812 in a move which nearly destroyed his empire. In 1815, he led the French against Allied forces, commanded by the Duke of Wellington from Britain at Waterloo, suffering a severe loss on 18 June 1815. This resulted in his exile to the island of St Helena, where he died in 1821. However, his codification of laws, the Napoleonic Code, remains the foundation of French civil law.

1829  -             The colony of Western Australia is proclaimed.

The western coast of Terra Australis Incognito is believed to have first been sighted by Portuguese sailors. However, the first recorded sighting of Australia's western coastline came in 1611, when Dutch mariner Hendrik Brouwer experimented with a different route to the Dutch East Indies. Further Dutch sightings of Australia followed as the route became more popular: hence the early name of "New Holland".

Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh named the Swan River in 1697 because of the black swans he saw in abundance there. In 1826, Edmund Lockyer was sent to claim the western half of the Australian continent for Britain. He arrived at King George Sound on Christmas Day in 1826, and established a military base which he named Frederick's Town (now Albany).

In 1829, Captain Charles Fremantle was sent to take formal possession of the remainder of New Holland which had not already been claimed for Britain under the territory of New South Wales. On 2 May 1829, Captain Fremantle raised the Union Jack on the south head of the Swan River, thus claiming the territory of Swan River for Britain. The colony of Western Australia was proclaimed on 18 June 1829, with Captain James Stirling as the first Lieutenant Governor. The official proclamation was read aloud to the officials and colonists on Garden Island, a day after it was read on the mainland. Less than two months later, Perth was also founded.

1928  -             Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen disappears while on a rescue mission.

Roald Amundsen was born on 16 July 1872, near Oslo, Norway. At fifteen, he intended to study medicine but, inspired by Fridtjof Nansen's crossing of Greenland in 1888, altered his career intentions to eventually become one of the most successful polar explorers. He planned to be the first to the North Pole, but having been beaten by Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, he then altered his plans to make for the South Pole. He set out for Antarctica in 1910, and reached the Ross Ice Shelf in January 1911 at a point known as the Bay of Whales. After maintaining their base at the Bay of Whales during the winter months, Amundsen and four others departed for the South Pole in October 1911, reaching the Pole on 14 December 1911, a month before the famed Robert Scott reached it.

In his later life, Amundsen pioneered further scientific expeditions by air or boat through the Arctic, all with varying degrees of success. In 1926, Amundsen accompanied Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile when he piloted the airship "Norge", which was the first aircraft both to reach the North Pole and to cross the polar ice cap between Europe and America.

In 1928, Nobile's new airship "the Italia" had crashed while returning from the North Pole. In June, Amundsen set out with Norwegian pilot Leif Dietrichson, French pilot Rene Guilbaud, and three more Frenchmen, looking for missing members of Nobile's crew. Amundsen disappeared on 18 June 1928 while on this rescue mission. A pontoon from the French Latham 47 flying-boat he was in, improvised into a life raft, was later found near the Tromsø coast. It is believed that the plane crashed in fog in the Barents Sea, and that Amundsen was killed in the crash, or died shortly afterwards. His body was never found. A 2003 discovery suggests the plane went down northwest of Bjørnøya (Bear Island).

1972  -             118 people are killed in the UK's worst air disaster.

In one of Britain's worst ever air disasters, 118 people were killed on 18 June 1972 when a flight from London's Heathrow Airport to Brussels crashed minutes after take-off. The British European Airways (BEA) Trident-1C was less than 5km from the airport when witnesses said it "dropped out of the sky", coming down in a field in Staines and missing the town's centre by only several hundred metres. The plane broke into two pieces as it fell, and continued to burn for hours after it fell. Whilst two people were initially pulled alive from the wreckage, they both died shortly afterwards. There were no survivors at all.

51 year old pilot Stanley Key was an experienced aviator, but an autopsy on his body after the accident indicated he had a heart condition which was probably causing him some pain immediately before the crash. Subsequent impairment of his judgement may have caused him to make an error in determining the aircraft's speed, which was the main reason why the plane stalled in mid-air. Following the stall, the aircraft was not at a sufficient height for the crew to regain control. The incident remained the UK's worst aviation disaster until 1988, when a Pan Am jet exploded from a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland.

1983  -             America launches its first woman into space.

Whilst the United States was the first country to land man on the moon, the Soviet Union was the first to launch a man into space, doing so when it launched Yuri Gagarin in 1961. The Soviet Union also launched the first woman into space, sending Valentina Tereshkova into orbit around the earth in 1963. It was another nineteen years before the second Soviet female, Svetlana Savitskaya, flew into space, shortly before the USA launched the first female astronaut.

Sally Ride, born 26 May 1951, was America's first woman in space. Ride joined NASA in 1978 as part of the first astronaut class to accept women. On 18 June 1983 she became the first American woman in space as a crewmember on Space Shuttle Challenger for STS-7. As flight engineer for the space shuttle Challenger flight, Ride's main duties were to monitor the controls and ensure smooth ascent and descent. Ride also helped design a 50 foot retractable arm which was used to retrieve a satellite package from space - the first time such an event had been initiated. Ride successfully returned to Earth six days later, on 24 June.

2000  -             58 Chinese immigrants die from suffocation whilst trying to illegally enter Britain.

On 18 June 2000, 58 Chinese immigrants were found suffocated in a lorry in Dover, Britain, after they had tried to enter the country illegally. The air vent of the 18m container had been closed five hours earlier so the driver could evade detection by the authorities during the ferry journey from Zeebrugge, Belgium. The truck, registered in the Netherlands, had just crossed on the ferry from Zeebrugge when the driver was pulled over for a customs inspection. Officials opened the truck's doors to find that two men alone survived, whilst the bodies of fifty-four men and four women lay behind them.

On 5 April 2001, the 32-year-old Dutch driver, Perry Wacker, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was found guilty of 58 charges of manslaughter, as well as four counts of conspiracy to smuggle immigrants into the UK. A month later, the leader of the international ring behind smuggling the Chinese into Britain, Turkish-born Gursel Ozcan, was given a nine-year sentence by a Dutch court for negligence, but cleared of manslaughter charges.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1865  -             News that slavery has been abolished in all the states finally reaches Texas, two and a half years after the proclamation is officially announced.

The first African slaves arrived in North America in 1526, and though the practice of slavery took many years to become popular, it thrived under British colonialism. On 1 January 1808 American Congress voted to ban further importation of slaves, but children of slaves automatically became slaves themselves. There was no legislation against the internal US slave trade, or against the involvement in the international slave trade and the outfitting of ships for that trade by US citizens.

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, was not in favour of abolition of slavery, but he opposed its expansion into new territories and states in the American West. It was this issue that led to the secession of the southern states to form the Confederate States of America, and ultimately also led to the Civil War.

Slavery was officially abolished in 1863. However, the news of the slaves' freedom took two and a half years to reach some of the states. 19 June 1865 is the date when General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and announced that the state's 200,000 slaves were free.

1885  -             The Statue of Liberty, in 350 pieces, arrives in New York aboard a French freighter.

The Statue of Liberty stands on Liberty Island, formerly Bedloe's Island, in New York Harbor. Its full title is "Liberty Enlightening the World". Gustave Eiffel was the Structural Engineer of the Statue of Liberty and its Sculptor was Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. The Statue was completed in Paris in June 1884, and presented to America by France in recognition of the friendship established during the American Revolution.

The Statue was completed in Paris in June 1884 and presented to America by the people of France on 4 July 1884. It was then dismantled and shipped to the United States in 1885 for reassembling. Although France assumed responsibility for construction of the statue and assembling of the pieces in the USA, America was responsible for building the pedestal upon which the Statue of Liberty stands. On 19 June 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York aboard a French freighter as 350 individual pieces in 214 crates.

In response, the American community in Paris gave a return gift to the French of a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty, standing about 11 metres high, and sculpted to a quarter-size scale. This statue now stands approximately one and a half kilometres downstream from the Eiffel Tower on Ile des Cygnes, an island in the Seine River.

1889  -             The modern pizza is invented.

The word pizza has been in existence for many centuries longer than the modern pizza. The first time the word was noted was in the year 997, in Medieval Latin, in reference to a Neapolitan. Bakers in Naples used the flatbread as a tool to gauge the temperature of an oven, and it was not intended to be eaten.

The modern pizza is believed to have been invented on 19 June 1889. Raffaele Esposito was a chef in Naples who wished to honour Queen Margherita of Savoy. He used the pizza flatbread base and topped it with a combination of fresh tomato, mozzarella cheese, olive oil and basil. Naming it after the Queen, Esposito created the very first "Pizza Margherita", selecting the topping to represent the colours of the flag of Italy.

1944  -             The Battle of the Philippine Sea is won by the US against the Japanese.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1942, it made a tactical error by drawing the US into a fight that it had previously avoided. Numerous naval battles ensued, such as the Battle of Midway, with many of them spelling further defeat for the Japanese forces and an end to their Imperial campaign to conquer the Pacific.

The Battle of the Philippine Sea was an air-sea battle of the Pacific campaign of World War II fought between the US Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy off the Mariana Islands. After Japanese forces were sighted on 15 June by American submarines, the US forces prepared for a major battle. This came on 19 June 1944, beginning with four raids by Japanese aircraft, which were effectively shot down by US forces. Similar attacks by the Japanese navy were offset, and the battle ended the following day after Japanese forces were ordered to withdraw from the Philippine Sea.

During the battle, the Japanese forces lost almost all of their carrier-borne aircraft and a third of the carriers involved in the battle. The four Japanese attacks used 373 carrier aircraft, of which 130 returned to the carriers, and several more were destroyed onboard the two carriers which were destroyed on the first day. After the second day the total losses included three carriers and over 400 carrier aircraft and around 200 land based planes. Losses on the US side on the first day were only 23, and on the second 100, most due to night landings. After the battle the aircraft carrier force of the Imperial Japanese Navy was no longer militarily effective.

1978  -             Garfield, the sardonic comic strip cat, debuts in print.

Garfield is a comic strip created by Jim Davis, featuring the sardonic cat Garfield, Odie the dog, and their socially inept owner Jon Arbuckle. Garfield is named after creator Jim Davis's grandfather, James Garfield Davis, who was named after former US president James Garfield.

Garfield first appeared in print on 19 June 1978, initially making his debut in 41 US newspapers. He has since gone on to appear in dozens of books, TV cartoons and even his own film. The comic strip was turned into a television cartoon special in 1982 called "Here Comes Garfield", which was followed by twelve television specials and a television series, Garfield and Friends, which ran from 1988 to 1995. A live-action movie entitled "Garfield: The Movie" debuted in the United States in June 2004.

Garfield is well known for his love of lasagna and eating in general, his sarcasm, and how he torments Odie, the dog, in ways which sometimes backfire. As of 2006, the comic strip is syndicated in roughly 2,570 newspapers and journals and it currently holds the Guinness World Record for being the world's most widely syndicated comic strip.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1756  -             British prisoners are captured and imprisoned in the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta".

The "Black Hole of Calcutta" was a 4.3 by 5.5 metre detention cell found at Fort William in Calcutta. Fort William had been established to protect British East India Company trade in the city of Calcutta. Expecting skirmishes with French forces, the British military increased their defences at the Fort, a move which was perceived as a threat to the rule of the Nawab (provincial governor) of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah. When Siraj organised an army and laid siege to the fort, the British commander organised an escape, and left a token force in the fort under the command of John Zephaniah Holwell, an ex-military surgeon who was a top East India Company civil servant.

On 20 June 1756, Indian soldiers took the surviving 64 to 69 men of the British contingent prisoner, binding them for security. They also captured Anglo-Indian soldiers and other persons of mixed ancestry, imprisoning them all in the small guard room that came to be known as the "Black Hole of Calcutta". Original reports indicated that 146 prisoners were detained there, with all but 26 dying from heat stroke, suffocation, or trampling in the stifling summer heat. They were not released until the following morning.

Later accounts and analysis proved the number to be exaggerated. Investigations indicate the figure would have been closer to 70 prisoners, with modern historians believing that, at most, 43 men were dead or missing: an atrocity on a smaller scale, but a tragic atrocity nonetheless.

1802  -             French commander Nicolas Baudin arrives in Port Jackson with the intention to claim Van Diemen's Land, but with his crew ill and ships needing repair.

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, both France and England were seeking to expand their respective empires. Both countries claimed and colonised new lands around the world, and both countries explored lands in which the Dutch had shown little interest, such as Australia. Although James Cook formally claimed the east coast of Australia in 1770, this did not dissuade the French from charting the coastline, and even making a claim to the west in 1772.

Late in 1800, French explorer and naturalist Nicolas Baudin was commissioned to lead an expedition to complete a French survey of the Australian coastline, and make scientific observations, commanding two ships, 'Le Géographe' and 'Le Naturaliste'. Scientific investigations were carried out between May and July 1801, and again between January and May 1802. However, during this time, the ships were battered by bad weather, while the crew suffered debilitating sickness. Baudin opted to head for Sydney for provisions, ship repairs and medical attention for his crew. By the time he sailed into Port Jackson on 20 June 1802, only four of the crew of the Le Géographe were fit to serve.

After spending several months in Port Jackson, and with his crew fully recovered, Baudin continued south to finish surveying Van Diemen's Land, but not before revealing his intention to colonise Van Diemen's Land, in a moment of indiscretion. Governor King sent Charles Robbins to Van Diemen's land to successfully dissuade the impending French claim. Robbins met Baudin and successfully persuaded him to abandon his plans.

1836  -             Australian explorer Major Thomas Mitchell names Swan Hill.

Major Thomas Mitchell was born in Craigend, Scotland, in 1792. He came to Australia after serving in the Army during the Napoleonic Wars, and took up the position of Surveyor-General of New South Wales. In this capacity, he undertook numerous expeditions of exploration into the NSW interior.

A point of contention for Mitchell was the fact that Charles Sturt had followed the Murray River to the sea, and discovered that the Darling River flowed into the Murray. Mitchell was determined to disprove Sturt's theory that the Darling flowed into the Murray. The instructions for his third expedition were to follow the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee Rivers to the Murray, then on to the junction with the Darling River. He was then to follow the Darling upstream as far as Menindee to confirm that it was the same river he had initially followed south from northern New South Wales in his second journey.

Discouraged by the desolate country around the southern end of the Darling, Mitchell decided to return to the Murray to explore its more fertile surrounds. This led to the discovery of the rich farming country of western Victoria, which he named "Australia Felix", or "Happy Australia". Prior to reaching this district, Mitchell found significant grazing land south of the Murray, including the area around which the town of Swan Hill now stands. Mitchell named Swan Hill on 20 June 1836 after "the number of these birds whose beautiful notes were incessantly heard during the night".

1837  -             Queen Victoria ascends the British throne following the death of King William IV.

England's Queen Victoria was born on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace in London, the daughter of Edward, duke of Kent (fourth son of George III), and Princess Mary Louise Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Although christened Alexandrina Victoria, from birth she was formally styled Her Royal Highness Princess Victoria of Kent. Victoria's father died when she was less than a year old. Her grandfather, George III, died less than a week later. Princess Victoria's uncle, the Prince of Wales, inherited the Crown, becoming King George IV. When George IV died in 1830, he left the throne to his brother, the Duke of Clarence and St Andrews, who became King William IV.

Victoria was recognised as heiress-presumptive to the British throne, and on 20 June 1837 at the age of 18 she succeeded her uncle, William IV, to the throne to become the last monarch of the House of Hanover. Queen Victoria's formal titles included Queen of Great Britain and Ireland (18371901) and empress of India (18761901).

1988  -             The Australian $2 banknote is replaced by a $2 coin.

Decimal currency was first introduced in Australia on 14 February 1966. The new Australian dollar replaced the Australian pound, which was different to the Pound Sterling, and introduced a decimal system. Australian Prime Minister at the time and devout monarchist, Robert Menzies, wished to name the currency "the Royal", and other names such as "the Austral" were also proposed. Menzies's influence meant that the name "Royal" prevailed, and trial designs were prepared and printed by the printing works of the Reserve Bank of Australia. The name "Royal" proved unpopular, and it was later shelved in favour of "Dollar".

On 20 June 1988, the Australian $2 coin went into circulation, replacing the original Australian $2 banknote. The gold coin features an Aboriginal tribal elder set against a background of the Southern Cross and native grass trees.

2002  -             Australia agrees to ratify the International Criminal Court.

The International Criminal Court is an international court that meets in The Hague, Netherlands. It was established as a permanent court to preside over matters of crimes of serious concern to the international community such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.

The concept of an international tribunal was proposed by the Commission of Responsibilities during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, following World War 1. The idea of a permanent international court to deal with atrocities was raised again on various occasions, and gained further impetus after the United Nations was established. The Cold War hindered further development, despite two statutes being drafted by the International Law Commission (ILC) at the request of the UN General Assembly. However, the need for an international court became more pressing as stories of atrocities committed in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda emerged in the 1990s.

The founding treaty of the ICC is the Rome Statute. On 17 July 1998, 120 States representing all regions of the globe adopted the Rome Statute, and with this act, the International Criminal Court was established. At the 1998 conference, Australia's Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, was a strong advocate of the Rome Statute, and moved for an early ratification to the treaty. Legislation allowed for the Rome Statute to come into effect once 60 States had ratified it. Australia agreed to ratify the ICC on 20 June 2002.

Cheers - John

Gday...

01  -     Today is the Winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere.

The Winter solstice (southern hemisphere) or Summer solstice (northern hemisphere) occurs on June 21st of each year. The winter solstice occurs when the earth is at a point in its orbit where one hemisphere is most inclined away from the Sun. The day of the winter solstice is the shortest day and the longest night of the year.

'Solstice' is a Latin derivation meaning "sun stand still", referring to the appearance that the Sun's noontime elevation change stops its progress, either northerly or southerly. As well as the solstices, there are also the Spring and Autumn equinoxes which occur on September 21 and March 21. The equinoxes are the days on which the day and the night are both 12 hours long. In some parts of the world, March 21, June 21, September 21 and December 21 mark the beginning of the seasons. In Australia, the solstices and equinoxes do not signify the first day of each season: the seasons begin on the first day of March, June, September and December.

1869  -             The first telegram is sent in Western Australia.

Australia's first telegraph line, which ran from Melbourne to Williamstown, opened in 1854. Each of the other states followed suit within seven years, but Western Australia's relative isolation delayed the development of the technology.

Edmund Stirling was the proprietor of the Perth newspaper, and the one who stirred the colonial authorities into action. He offered to build a telegraph line extending from Perth to Fremantle if the government was prepared to supply and erect the poles. Stirling joined with ex-convict James Fleming who had been transported for swindling in 1864, and who was subsequently appointed Superintendent of Telegraphs on a conditional release.

The first telegraph pole was installed near the Perth jetty by Colonial Secretary, the Honorable Fred Barlee, in 1869, and a 12-mile wire extended to Fremantle. The first telegram was sent on 21 June 1869. The text of the first telegram read:

"To the chairman of the Fremantle Town Trust. His Excellency Colonel Bruce heartily congratulates the inhabitants of fremantle on the annihilation of distance between the Port and the Capital and he requests that this the first message may be publicly known.

Government House 21st June 1869."

1982  -             Prince William of Wales is born.

Prince William of Wales was born William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor at 9:03pm on 21 June 1982 in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London. On 4 August 1982, the 82nd birthday of his great-grandmother Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, he was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace. As the elder son of the Prince of Wales and his first wife, the late Diana Spencer, William is second in line to the British throne after his father, the Prince of Wales. As a grandchild of the British monarch and son of the Prince of Wales, he is styled His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales.

William attended Wetherby and Ludgrove schools, followed by Eton College and then St Andrew's University in Scotland. He graduated from St Andrews with an upper-second class honours degree on 22 June 2005. He undertook his first royal duties in July 2005, representing Queen Elizabeth at World War II commemorations in New Zealand. Prince William has chosen to serve in the Armed Forces, commencing his course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst to train as an Officer Cadet in January 2006. Following his education at Sandhurst, he has expressed a desire to be a 'proper officer', and go wherever his men go. Given his position, and the reluctance of previous British governments to allow the Heir to the Throne into dangerous situations, it remains to be seen if this wish will be fully realised.

1982  -             John Hinckley is found not guilty "by reason of insanity" for the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was the 40th President of the United States. He served from 1981 to 1989 after being elected to the Presidency in 1980 in an electoral college landslide, beating incumbent President Jimmy Carter and giving the Republican Party a majority in the US Senate for the first time in 26 years.

On 30 March 1981, as he was leaving the Hilton Hotel after addressing a union convention in Washington, DC, Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and MPDC officer Thomas Delehanty were shot during an assassination attempt. Five or six shots were fired; a bullet missed Reagan's heart by less than one inch. Brady was seriously wounded, and a Secret Service agent and a Washington policeman also were injured. The would-be assassin was John Hinckley Jr, the 25-year-old son of an affluent oil industry executive. Hinckley was motivated by an obsession with actress Jodie Foster and a desire to impress her.

On 21 June 1982, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity in a jury trial. He was placed in St. Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital in Washington DC, where he currently remains. Reagan fully recovered from the attack, as did the Secret Service agent and policeman, but Brady was left paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.

2015  -             World Giraffe Day is initiated.

World Giraffe Day is a world-wide recognition of the giraffe, the tallest terrestrial mammal in the world. Standing 4.3 to 5.8m high, the giraffes legs alone average 1.8m, taller than most humans. Even newborn giraffes stand higher than typical humans. Uniquely adapted to feed from the leaves of tall trees, the giraffe is native to the African continent, and found in the savannah areas of the sub-Saharan region.

World Giraffe Day was inaugurated on 21 June 2015. It is an initiative of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation (GCF), a non-government organisation dedicated to the conservation and management of giraffes in Africa. Many zoos around the world have become involved in World Giraffe Day, using this day to raise support for the giraffe and promote awareness of the issues that threaten the survival of this beautiful animal. As of 2015, there were estimated to be about only 80 000 giraffes remaining in the wild, as they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to trophy hunters and farmers who believe their crops are being damaged by giraffes.

Cheers - John

Hi All.

Found this giraffe in Stockholm standing on the bank of the bay. 

Just standing there he was. Have a good giraffe day.

Gday...

Incredible what living full-time on the road does to ya Doug. 

Cheers - John

Gday...

1930  -             Aviator Charles Lindbergh's young son, who is later kidnapped and murdered, is born.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr was born on 22 June 1930. His father was Charles Lindbergh, most famous for being the first pilot to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean. Because his father's flying exploits had earned him the nickname "The Lone Eagle", baby Charles was popularly dubbed the "eaglet".

On the evening of 1 March 1932, Lindbergh discovered his son was missing from his cot in their house in East Amwell, New Jersey, USA. A handwritten ransom note riddled with spelling errors and grammatical irregularities was left, demanding $50,000. The New Jersey police were called in, but the lack of organisation meant that a lot of valuable evidence was disturbed or destroyed. The Bureau of Investigations (not yet called the FBI) was authorised to investigate the case. Further ransom notes were received, and even leaders of organised crime rings were prepared to assist in the recovery of the child, in return for legal favours and protection. However, baby Charles was never returned alive: his body was found by a truck driver on 12 May 1932, in a wooded area just a few kilometres from the Lindbergh home.

1964  -             The Royal Flying Doctor Service's Cloncurry base is relocated to Mt Isa, Queensland.

Australia's Flying Doctor Service began with the vision of Reverend John Flynn, whose first posting as a Presbyterian minister was to Beltana, a tiny, remote settlement 500 kilometres north of Adelaide. After reporting to his church superiors on the difficulties of ministering to such a widely scattered population, he was appointed as the first Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, the bush department of the Presbyterian Church, in 1912. Flynn served in the AIM at a time when only two doctors served an area of 300,000 sq kms in Western Australia and 1,500,000 sq kms in the Northern Territory. Realising the need for better medical care for the people of the outback, he established numerous bush hospitals and hostels.

By 1917, Flynn envisaged that new technology such as radio and the aeroplane could assist in providing a more effective medical service. His speculations attracted the attention of an Australian pilot serving in World War I, Clifford Peel, who wrote to Flynn, outlining the capabilities and costs of then-available planes. Flynn turned his considerable fund-raising talents to the task of establishing a flying medical service. On 15 May 1928, the Aerial Medical Service was established at Cloncurry, in western Queensland.

Communication was vital for the service to operate, so Flynn collaborated with Alfred Traeger, who developed the pedal radio, a lighter, more compact radio for communication, readily available to more residents of the outback for its size and cost. Because the pedal radio eliminated the need for electricity, which was available in very few areas of the outback in the 1920s, it made communication more accessible to the people who needed it. Thus, Flynn took the advantages of both radio and aeroplanes to provide a "Mantle of Safety" for the outback. Initially conceived as a one-year experiment, Flynn's vision has continued successfully through the years, providing a valuable medical service to people in remote areas.

In 1942 the service was renamed the Flying Doctor Service. Queen Elizabeth II approved the prefix "Royal" in 1955 following her visit to Australia, and the service became the Royal Flying Doctor Service, or RFDS. The RFDS was relocated from its original Cloncurry base to Mt Isa, western Queensland, on 22 June 1964. Whilst some bases have been closed or relocated through the years, more new bases have been established through the years, and the Service continues to grow. As of 2016, the RFDS owns a fleet of 64 aircraft, operating from 25 bases across Australia.

1977  -             The Uniting Church in Australia is established.

The Uniting Church in Australia is the third largest Christian denomination in Australia, after Roman Catholic and Anglican, with a membership of around 234 000 in 2500 congregations across the country. It was formed on 22 June 1977 when the Congregational Union in Australia, the Methodist Church of Australasia and the Presbyterian Church of Australia merged. The document upon which the union was established is the Basis of Union, which outlines the affirmations of the Christian faith. The church follows the precepts of the Reformation Witness in the Scots Confession of Faith (1647), the Savoy Declaration (1658) and the preaching of John Wesley in his Forty Four Sermons (1793). The Uniting Church in Australia is represented by a circular emblem showing the cross of Jesus Christ positioned over a darkened world, with the Holy Spirit shown as a dove with wings of red flame. Beneath the cross and the dove is a wide "U" which is both a symbol of union, and a semicircle to indicate incompleteness of the renewing of the church and the world.

1987  -             Singer, dancer and actor Fred Astaire dies.

Fred Astaire was born Frederick Austerlitz in Nebraska on 10 May 1899. Astaire's mother took him to New York for professional dance training in 1906, with the intent to train him for a career in vaudeville. A Paramount Pictures screen test report on Astaire read simply: "Can't sing. Can't act. Slightly balding. Also dances." Astaire went on to become a film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor.

Astaire was awarded an honorary Oscar for his "unique artistry and his contributions to the techniques of musical pictures" in 1948. He won nine Emmys for a series of TV specials in the 1950s and 60s and in 1978, he was among the first recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement. He was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1981 by the American Film Institute. Physically active right into old age, Astaire died from pneumonia on 22 June 1987.

1992  -             Two skeletons excavated in Yekaterinburg are identified as Czar Nicholas II and his wife.

Czar Nicholas II was the last crowned Emperor of Russia. He ruled from 1894 until he was forced to abdicate in 1917 amidst civil war. A year later, on 17 July 1918, he and his wife, together with their five children, the family doctor and three attendants, were taken to the cellar of a house in Yekatarinburg. They were told to line up for a family portrait, but instead a detachment of Bolsheviks burst in and began firing, killing the family and servants.

Attempts were made to hide the evidence of the bodies, disposing of them down a mine-shaft. As rumours of what had happened began to surface, Bolshevik leader of the rebellion, Yurovsky, removed the bodies and buried most of them in a sealed and concealed pit. It was not until the 1970s that a local geologist and a filmmaker found some of the remains after obtaining an account of the burial cover-up written by the leader of the death squad. They found the site he identified, dug into the pit and retrieved three skulls. Later, however, they became apprehensive about what they had done and replaced them, keeping quiet until Mikhail Gorbachev's "glasnost", or policy of openness. In 1989, the filmmaker announced the discovery. In July 1991, the bodies were exhumed and the process of identification began. On 22 June 1992, two of the skeletons were officially identified as being that of Czar Nicholas II and his wife.

2001  -             It is announced that two boys imprisoned at age ten for the murder of toddler James Bulger will be released, after eight years.

Three-year-old James Bulger was on a shopping trip with his mother on 12 February 1993. That same day, two ten-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, had decided to skip school and spend the day in Bootle Strand Shopping Centre. James's mother was being served in a butcher's shop when the two older boys took James from where he waited outside, and led him away. During the next couple of hours they tortured the boy in an horrific manner, finally weighing him down across a railway track, where he was eventually hit by a goods train.

When James's body was found two days later, events surrounding his death were reconstructed, and at least 38 people reported having seen the two boys walking with him, alternating between hurting and distracting him. Some of the witnesses challenged their treatment of James, but were powerless to act when the boys claimed they were looking after their younger brother. Venables and Thompson were arrested within days. Their trial was conducted in the same format as an adult trial, with the accused sitting in the dock away from their parents and with the judge and court officials dressed in full legal regalia. They were found guilty and were sentenced to imprisonment at a young offenders institution until such time as they were deemed to no longer be a threat to the public.

On 22 June 2001, the British authorities announced that Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both then 18, would be released. They were given new homes and identities to protect them from a public that was still horrified at what two children had been capable of doing.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1626  -             A rare book is found inside the body of a codfish.

On 23 June 1626, a fish vendor in a Cambridge market was cleaning the catch that had been caught off the coast of King's Lynn and delivered to his market earlier that day. As he cut open a large cod, he detected a tiny book inside the fish, half-digested and covered with a type of jelly. It was a unique sextodecimo, a book composed of sheets, each of which is folded into sixteen leaves.

Theologian and scholar Dr Joseph Mede, who was also a fellow of Christ's College Cambridge, was passing by, and took the book for identification. By carefully separating the pages with a knife and blotting them, he discovered that the book was a collection of short theological works by John Frith, written whilst Frith was in prison, and printed eighty years earlier. Frith had been burned to death for introducing reform ideas into England. The sextodecimo was one of his illegal books and included sections titled "Of the Preparation to the Cross" and "A Lettre which was Written to the Faithfull Followers of Christes Gospell." Frith's book was subsequently reprinted under the title: "Vox Piscis, or the Book-Fish containing Three Treatises, which were found in the belly of a Cod-Fish in Cambridge Market on Midsummer Eve, A.D. 1626."

1810  -             Governor Macquarie opens Australia's first post office.

In 1809, Lieutenant Colonel Lachlan Macquarie arrived in Sydney to take up the position of Governor of the New South Wales colony, which he held from 1810 to 1821. With his military training and vision for organisation and discipline, Macquarie was an ideal candidate to restore order to the colony, following the Rum Rebellion against deposed Governor William Bligh. Macquarie upheld high standards for the development of New South Wales from penal colony to free settlement. He introduced the first building code into the colony and ordered the construction of roads, bridges, wharves, churches and public buildings.

One of Macquarie's earliest duties was to appoint an official postmaster. The first postmaster of Sydney was Isaac Nichols, an ex-convict who took up the post in 1809. Australia's first post office was opened the following year by Governor Macquarie, on 23 June 1810, and was situated on Circular Quay, Sydney. Mail continued to be delivered by coach and messengers on horseback to outlying areas of New South Wales. Australia's first delivery postman was a private servant of George Panton, then Sydney Postmaster, in 1828.

1913  -             The first Federal postage stamps in Australia are issued.

Australias earliest postal deliveries were carried out by boar along the Parramatta River, between Sydney and Parramatta. Costing twopence for private mail, the service was utilised only by offices and their families, as convicts were either illiterate or could not afford to send letters. However, demand increased as free settlers arrived in the colony. The first official post office in Australia was opened by Governor Macquarie in Sydney in June 1810. By 1844, every town was serviced by a post box, and through the nineteenth century, each of the colonies of Australia instituted its own postal services.

Sir Henry Parkes, commonly regarded as the Father of Federation, was a strong advocate of bringing all telegraph, telephone and postal services under the banner of one government. Thus, the Australian Constitution gave control of communication services to the Federal Government under the Postmaster-General's Department, which became effective on 1 March 1901. It controlled all postal services in Australia, and later also controlled the telecommunications services.

Initially, stamps used within each of the colonies prior to Federation remained in use. Costs varied in different localities until all states adopted the penny-post system used throughout the British Empire, in May 1911. Following a design competition, the first Commonwealth postage stamps in Australia went into circulation on 23 June 1913. The chosen design depicted an image of a kangaroo inside a map of Australia.

1985  -             An Air India jet crashes off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people on board.

Canada, like many other countries in recent times, felt the brunt of terrorism personally on 23 June 1985. On that day, Air India Flight 182, enroute from Toronto to London and carrying twenty two flight crew and 307 passengers, was bombed just 45 minutes from London's Heathrow airport while the aircraft was off the coast of Ireland. All 329 people were killed when the plane dropped from an altitude of 30,000 feet into the sea. The majority of the 280 Canadian passengers aboard were of Indian origin. The bombing was the single largest terrorist attack before the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, and the largest mass murder in Canadian history.

The cause of the crash was suspected to have been a bomb planted by Sikh extremists. The main suspects in the bombing were members of a Sikh separatist group called the Babbar Khalsa, devoted to creating a Sikh state called Khalistan in the Punjab. The investigation and prosecution took almost twenty years and was the costliest in Canadian history at nearly CAD $130 million. On 16 March 2005, the two accused, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, were found not guilty by Justice Ian Josephson in British Columbia and were released. Inderjit Singh Reyat was convicted of involvement in the bombing. On 10 February 2003 Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter in constructing the bomb used on Flight 182 and received a ten year sentence.

2000  -             15 people die in a fire at a Backpacker hostel in Childers, Queensland.

Childers is a small town of approximately 2,500 people, which lies inland from the central coast of Queensland, and 325 km north of the state capital of Brisbane. Europeans first settled the area in the 1850s, and sugar cane has become the most common crop in the district. As fruit-picking work is also available in the locality, it is a popular place for young backpackers.

In the early hours of the morning of 23 June 2000, a fire swept through the Palace Backpackers Hostel, killing 15. The fire started in a downstairs TV lounge, from where it quickly spread, rushing up the stairwell and destroying the century-old former pub. Survivors criticised the lack of fire safety precautions in the building. There were no alarms or water sprinklers, and later investigations revealed that the hostel had been refused a fire safety permit 17 months earlier. However, nothing further was done to ensure the owners of the building applied for a permit. No further inspections of the hostel were conducted, despite a local law that said it needed to be satisfied that premises were free of fire hazards.

Five days after the fire, fruit-picker Robert Long was captured, 30km south of Childers, after his girlfriend named him as a likely suspect. A loner with a history of petty crimes until he tried to burn his girlfriend and her daughter in Darwin, Long appeared to be seeking revenge after the hostel ousted him for non-payment of rent. In 2002 Long was jailed for life over the blaze.

2006  -             The world's oldest known animal in captivity, a 176-year-old tortoise, dies.

"Harriet" was a Giant Galapagos tortoise, at least 176 years old, which resided at Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo near Beerwah, Queensland, Australia. Believed for one hundred years to have been a male, she was the world's oldest living chelonian in captivity. A chelonian is a reptile with a shell or bony plates.

The giant tortoise was taken from the Galapagos Islands by naturalist Charles Darwin in 1835 as a personal pet during his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. On that voyage was a young naval officer, John Clements Wickham. After studying Harriet whilst formulating his theory of evolution, Darwin handed the tortoise on to Wickham when the latter sailed for Brisbane to take up a post as police magistrate. Over the years, the tortoise was carefully tended, and in 1958, was moved to naturalist David Fleay's wildlife park on the Gold Coast. She was moved to Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast in 1987 where she enjoyed celebrity status until her death on 23 June 2006.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1870  -             Australian horseman and poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, commits suicide.

Adam Lindsay Gordon was born on 19 October 1833, at Fayal in the Azores, a group of Portuguese islands in the Atlantic Ocean, about 1,500 km from Lisbon, Portugal. Educated in his teenage years in England, he was a wayward youth. After completing his education, his father sent him to South Australia, where he worked variously as a horsebreaker, mounted policeman, poet and even a member of parliament. He had an intense love of horses and riding, but this proved to be his undoing: in July 1868, he suffered a riding accident which caused some brain damage, and plummeted him into depression. The depression was compounded by numerous financial burdens and heavy debt.

Adam Lindsay Gordon's poetry expressed his love of horses. It also captured the emerging Australian identity and use of Australian idioms. The day after the publication of his poems as "Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes" he took himself off to Brighton Beach in Melbourne, where he committed suicide, on 24 June 1870.

1947  -             The term 'flying saucer' is coined after pilot Kenneth Arnold reports seeing nine objects speeding by Mount Rainier, in the US state of Washington.

Kenneth Arnold, born 29 March 1915, was a private pilot from Boise, Idaho, United States, and a part time Search and Rescue Mercy Flyer. He was in the employ of the United States Forest Service searching for a missing military aeroplane on 24 June 1947 when he sighted nine bright saucer-like objects flying in a chain formation between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, in Washington state, USA. Arnold reported that the objects appeared to weave in and out of formation, at an estimated speed of 1,200 miles an hour. The speed barrier had not yet been broken, but the objects were clearly exceeding it.

Reporting on the craft after the sighting, Arnold described them as thin and flat, rounded in the front but chopped in the back and coming to a point, more or less saucer-like or disc-like. In a United Press story several days after the incident, he was quoted as saying, "They were shaped like saucers and were so thin I could barely see them." In a written statement to Army Air Forces intelligence on July 12, Arnold several times referred to the objects as "saucer-like." Thus began the terminology of "flying saucers".

1948  -             The Soviet Union forces a blockade of Berlin in an attempt to stop the division of Germany into communist and free states.

The Berlin blockade was one of the first major crises of the Cold War. It began on 24 June 1948, when the Soviet Union blocked Western railroad and street access to West Berlin. The Western sectors of Berlin were also isolated from the city power grid, depriving the inhabitants of domestic and industrial electricity supplies. It was an attempt to stop the division of Germany into communist and free states. By forcing a land and water blockade of Berlin, the Soviet Union expected the Allies would abandon West Berlin.

In an immediate response the very next day, on 25 June 1948 "Operation Vittles" commenced, to supply food and other necessary goods to the isolated West Berliners. This became known as the Berlin Airlift. The aircraft were supplied and flown by the United States, United Kingdom and France, but pilots and crew also came from Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand in order to assist the supply of Berlin. Ultimately 278,228 flights were made and 2,326,406 tons of food and supplies were delivered to Berlin. The Soviet Union lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949 (although theoretically, the blockade ended at 23:59 on 11 May 1949), but the airlift operation continued right through to September of that year. East and West Germany were established as separate republics that month.

1978  -             Eight missionaries and their children are murdered in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

Rhodesia was the name of the British colony located in southern Africa and governed by white minority rule until 1979. The colony was named after Cecil Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company acquired the land in the nineteenth century. Rhodesia gained internationally recognised independence from Britain in 1980 and became the Republic of Zimbabwe.

The earliest permanent white residents of Rhodesia were missionaries, and the preservation of their lives was respected by the most warlike of the country's tribes. However, the escalating terrorist war in Rhodesia in the mid-1970s posed new dangers for missionaries who were intent on continuing their activities without official protection. Between 1976 and 1978, dozens of missionaries were abducted or murdered: in many cases, no trace of them was ever found.

The worst massacre occurred on 24 June 1978 on a group of Pentecostal missionaries. At Emmanuel Mission School, 15 km south-east of Umtali and 8 km from the eastern border between Rhodesia and Mozambique, eight British missionaries and four young children, including a three-week-old baby, were bayoneted to death by terrorists. The killings were carried out by a group of between 10 and 12 nationalist guerrillas. The murders aroused world-wide anger against the World Council of Churches which, in August 1978, announced an $85,000 grant to the guerrilla-terrorist groups fighting against a peaceful settlement in Rhodesia.

2010  -             Julia Gillard, Australia's first female Prime Minister, is sworn in.

After Kevin Rudd was sworn in as the 26th Prime Minister of Australia in December 2007, he quickly became one of the country's most popular leaders. However, before he could finish his first term as Prime Minister, Mr Rudd experienced a huge decline in popularity, for a variety of reasons. As a result, there was a push to replace him, driven largely by the ALP Right faction in Victoria and South Australia, led by Victorian senator David Feeney, Victorian MP Bill Shorten and South Australian senator Don Farrell.

On the evening of 23 June 2010, then-Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard and member for Lalor, Victoria, called for a leadership ballot. When it became clear that Ms Gillard had the support of the Caucus, Kevin Rudd was forced to stand aside as leader of the ALP. On 24 June 2010 Julia Gillard was sworn in as Australia's first female Prime Minister.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1580  -             The Book of Concord, a collection of doctrinal standards of the Lutheran Church, is published for the first time.

"The Book of Concord: The Lutheran Confessions of 1529-1580" is a collection of confessions of faith published in 1580, which outline the doctrines of the Lutheran church. The book was first published on 25 June 1580, fifty years after the presentation of the Augsburg Confession, the central document of the Lutheran reformation, to Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg.

The Lutheran Church resulted when Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic monk, openly questioned the teachings of the Roman Catholic church, in particular, the nature of penance, the authority of the pope and the usefulness of indulgences, which were monetary payments of penalty believed to absolve one of one's sins. The Reformation of the church began with Luther's act of nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church, Germany, in 1517. That document contained an attack on papal abuses and the sale of indulgences by church officials. After Luther died, the fledgling Lutheran church struggled with its own divisions. The Book of Concord was an attempt to heal this divisiveness and it came to serve as the source book for Lutheran orthodoxy.           

1847  -             Melbourne, capital of Victoria, is proclaimed a city.

The city of Melbourne, Australia, began as an illegal settlement after native-born Australian John Batman applied for land in the Westernport Bay area of southern Australia but was denied his request. In May 1835, he led a syndicate known as the 'Port Phillip Association' to explore Port Phillip Bay and, when he found a suitable site, he established a small settlement, naming it Batmania. Shortly afterwards, he signed a 'treaty' with the indigenous Wurundjeri people, giving him free access to almost 250,000 hectares of land, and in return, paying them an annual offering of dozens of items such as blankets, axes, knives, scissors, mirrors, handkerchiefs, flour and clothing. However, Governor Bourke declared Batman's treaty invalid, and issued a proclamation warning off him and his syndicate as trespassers on crown land. Regardless, the infant and illegal settlement thrived.

Conceding its existence, early in March 1837 Governor Bourke directed that the town be laid out. He named the flourishing settlement 'Melbourne' after the British Prime Minister of the day. By the end of April, the proposed Melbourne city plan by Sydney surveyor Robert Hoddle was lodged at the government survey office in Sydney.

On 25 June 1847, Melbourne was declared a city by letters patent of Queen Victoria. When Victoria separated from New South Wales in 1851, it was the natural choice to be the capital. Melbourne is now the second largest city in Australia.        

1852  -             89 people die as the town of Gundagai, NSW, Australia, is inundated by floods.

The town of Gundagai is located on the Murrumbidgee River 390 km south-west of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Australian explorer Hamilton Hume, together with immigrant William Hovell, were the first Europeans to visit when they passed through the area in 1824, and their expedition subsequently opened up the area for farming land. Explorer Charles Sturt identified a spot near Gundagai as the best crossing point of the river for coaches and drovers. A settlement gradually grew up along the Murrumbidgee River at the river crossing, and by 1852, there were around 300 people living along the river flats.

It had already been seen that the flats were prone to flooding, but people ignored the warnings and continued building in close proximity to the water. Torrential rain had been falling in the Snowy Mountains for most of the month of June 1852. Despite the rising river, many people chose to wait out the floods in the lofts of their houses rather than evacuate, as they were familiar with floods. However, in the early hours of 25 June 1852, a torrent swept down the Murrumbidgee valley. Houses collapsed and people were swept away. A punt sent out to rescue people capsized, its occupants thrown into the raging waters. Two Aborigines, Yarri and Jackey Jackey, showed great courage and heroism as they took their canoes out into the torrent to rescue people stranded in trees and the water. Although they rescued 49, another 89 were killed in the Gundagai flood.

After another, higher flood in 1853, the town was relocated to its current site on the hill, Mount Parnassus, above the river. In 1867 an iron truss bridge, the Prince Alfred bridge, was built to span the flood plain. Until the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, the Prince Alfred bridge, at 921 metres, was the longest bridge in New South Wales.

1950  -             North Korea invades South Korea, sparking the Korean War, which lasted for 3 years.

The Korean War was a conflict between North Korea and South Korea during the Cold War era. Some consider the war to have been a proxy war between the United States and its allies, and the Communist powers of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union.

Korea, a former Japanese possession, was initially divided in the final days of World War II, on 10 August 1945. With the Japanese surrender imminent, the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea along the 38th parallel: Japanese forces north of that line would surrender to the Soviet Union and those south of that line would surrender to the United States. Whilst the division was not considered to be permanent, in December 1945, the US and the Soviet Union agreed to administer the country temporarily. Subsequently, both countries established governments in their respective halves according to their political ideology.

In the early morning of 25 June 1950, North Korea launched a full-scale invasion of South Korea. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was overrun three days later. The USA immediately pushed a resolution through the U.N.'s Security Council calling for military assistance to South Korea, and US troops arrived on the 1st of July to engage the enemy. American intervention prompted the arrival of communist Chinese forces in late 1950, and subsequently the war became a stalemate, spanning three years. During the war, South Korea suffered 1,312,836 military casualties, including 415,004 dead. This figure does not include the innocent civilians. 36,940 Americans were killed, and UN allies lost 3,094. A truce agreement was signed on 27 July 1953, and resulted in the continued division of North and South Korea.

1991  -             Slovenia declares its independence from Yugoslavia.

Slovenia is a former Yugoslav republic on the Adriatic Sea. The Austro-Hungarian kingdom was established in 1867 and Slovenia became part of Hungary until the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 after it was defeated in World War I. After the war, Slovenia announced its independence and joined Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, and Communist Yugoslavia was formed by Marshall Tito in 1945. Marshall Tito died in 1980, and nationalism from the Balkan states incited the push for independence. Slovenia finally declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, sparking months of intense fighting with the Serbian-dominated Yugoslavian army.

1997  -             Christie's in New York auctions off Princess Diana's gowns, raising millions for charity.

In February 1981, Buckingham Palace announced the engagement of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. When they married on 29 July 1981, it was classed as a fairytale wedding. Charles, 32, and Diana, 20, were married at St Paul's Cathedral in a ceremony attended live by 3500 guests, and viewed by a television audience of 750 million. A national holiday was called to mark the occasion. However, within a few years, difficulties were reported within the royal marriage. Fifteen years after the "fairytale wedding", the marriage ended in divorce. Diana agreed to relinquish the title of "her royal highness," to be known in the future as Diana, Princess of Wales.

Princess Di, as she was fondly known, was a tireless worker for charity. Shortly after her divorce, her eldest son, Prince William, suggested the idea of selling some of her gowns for charity. The money raised would be directed to the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund and the AIDS Crisis Trust. Thus, on 25 June 1997, Christie's in New York City auctioned 97 of the Princess's gowns, raising $3.26 million.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1858  -             Explorer John McDouall Stuart discovers Chambers Creek, later to be renamed Stuart Creek.

John McDouall Stuart was born in Dysart, Fife, Scotland, on 7 September 1815. He arrived in South Australia in 1839. He had a passion for exploration and gained experience when he was employed as a draughtsman by Captain Charles Sturt on an expedition into the desert interior. Following his experience with Sturt, Stuart led a number of expeditions west of Lake Eyre.

On his first attempt to venture into Australia's unexplored interior, Stuart discovered a large creek with apparently permanent water southwest of Lake Eyre, on 26 June 1858. He named it Chambers Creek after James Chambers, the man who would later become the sponsor for future expeditions. Although this was the only significant discovery on this expedition, Chambers Creek became a vital starting point in opening the way for further exploration into central Australia.

When the South Australian government offered a reward of two thousand pounds to the first expedition to reach the northern coast, Stuart chose to push beyond Lake Eyre in the attempt to reach the north. 1860 saw Stuart's fourth expedition, and his second attempt to cross Australia from south to north. On 26 June 1860, this expedition was brought to an abrupt end when the local Warramunga tribe launched an ambush. The site is now known as Attack Creek. Stuart eventually succeeded in crossing the continent two years later.

1861  -             A rescue party leaves Melbourne to search for explorers Burke and Wills, who are long overdue from their attempt to cross Australia from south to north.

The Burke and Wills expedition was supposed to mark the state of Victoria's greatest triumph: Victoria hoped to be the first state to mount an expedition to cross the continent from south to north. Instead, due to mismanagement and lack of clear communication, three of the four members of the party who finally made the attempt to cross to the gulf and back, never made it back. Robert O'Hara Burke, William John Wills and Charles Gray all died. John King alone survived, after being taken in and nursed by the Aborigines of the Cooper Creek area.

Several different rescue parties set out to search for any sign of the Burke and Wills expedition. Victoria mounted its own rescue mission, headed up by Alfred Howitt, an experienced bushman. Howitt's party departed Melbourne on 26 June 1861: ironically, this was just a few days before Burke died of malnutrition and likely nardoo poisoning at Cooper Creek.

When Howitt reached Swan Hill, he met up with William Brahe, who had been left in charge with instructions that if the party did not return in three months, he was to return to Menindee. Brahe returned to Cooper Creek with Howitt, where they found no sign of Burke and Wills having been there. Burke had indeed returned and found the lettering freshly blazed on the coolibah tree at the depot, giving instructions to dig for the supplies Brahe had left. When Burke left the Dig tree to try to reach the police station at Mt Hopeless, 240km away, he failed to leave further messages emblazoned on the Dig tree indicating that his party had returned and were now making for Mt Hopeless. Thus, no rescue party had any knowledge that Burke had returned to Cooper Creek: this miscommunication was a significant factor in the tragic demise of Burke and Wills.

1880  -             Bushrangers, the Kelly Gang, execute police informer Aaron Sherritt, shortly before they themselves are captured.

Ned Kelly, Australia's most famous bushranger, was born in December 1854 in Beveridge, Victoria. As a teenager, he became involved in petty crimes, regularly targeting the wealthy landowners. He gradually progressed to crimes of increasing seriousness and violence, including bank robbery and murder, soon becoming a hunted man. Ned Kelly's gang consisted of himself, his brother Dan, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart. One of Kelly's more daring bank robberies was carried out in December 1878 when Kelly and his gang rode into the Victorian town of Euroa, where they robbed the National Bank of about 2,000 pounds. As a result of this robbery, the reward for their capture was increased to 1,000 pounds each.

Aaron Sherritt was an associate of the Kellys, having grown up in the same area, and he was quite close to the Byrne family. He was engaged to Byrne's sister for awhile. After the gang was outlawed following the murder of three policemen at Stringybark Creek in October 1878, Sherritt turned police informant for money. Sherritt advised the police to camp out in a cave near Byrne's family home in the hopes of capturing Byrne as he visited his mother. Sherritt's presence was noted, and Byrne's sister broke off her engagement to him.

Many months later, on the night of 26 June 1880, Sherritt was at home with his new wife, mother-in-law and four policemen. When Sherritt answered a knock at the door, he was shot dead by Byrne. The police officers hid, as they were unsure whether they were Byrne's real target, and did not report the killing until late the following morning. Within a couple of days, Byrne was himself killed in a shootout at Glenrowan between the gang and the police. Ned Kelly was the only one to survive to stand trial, after which he was hanged.

1945  -             Australia joins the United Nations.

The term "United Nations" was first used officially during World War II, on 1 January 1942, when 26 states joined in the Declaration by the "United Nations", pledging themselves to continue their joint war effort and not to seek peace as separate entities. During the course of the war, it was recognised that there was a need for a new organisation to replace the largely ineffectual League of Nations. This was stated in the Moscow Declaration, issued by China, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR in 1943.

As the war drew to an end, USA President Franklin D Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin initiated a conference to take place in April 1945. Its purpose was to plan the charter of an organisation to promote peace, security, and economic development. Nations which had signed the original 1942 declaration and had declared war on Germany or Japan no later than 1 March 1945, were called to the founding conference held in San Francisco, to draft the UN charter. The conference was attended by representatives of fifty nations. Australia became an inaugural member of the newly-formed United Nations when it signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco on 26 June 1945. The UN charter was ratified by the required number of states on 24 October 1945.

1960  -             Madagascar gains full independence from France.

Madagascar is an island nation located off the southeastern coast of Africa, in the Indian Ocean. Covering an area of 592,800 square kilometres, it is the world's fourth largest island.

The island was believed to have first been settled by people from Borneo sometime between 350 BC and 550 AD. In the ensuing centuries, various other races migrated to the island, especially from eastern Africa. Kingdoms were established throughout Madagascar, until the highland kingdom of Imerina became the dominant force on the island. Arabs arrived from the eighth century and were the first to establish trading posts along the northern coast. The first European contact came in 1500, when Portuguese sea captain Diogo Dias sighted the island. By the late 1600s, the French had established numerous trading posts along the east coast, and had begun settling in parts of the island.

Between 1883 and 1896, France invaded Madagascar in a series of incursions which became known as the Franco-Hova or Franco-Malagasy wars, and ended with the overthrow of the ruling Merina monarchy. Madagascar was made a full Protectorate of the French government; the Queen was deposed the following year and exiled first to Reunion island, then to Algeria.

During the twentieth century, an independence movement developed among nationalists on the island, leading to the Malagasy Uprising of 1947-48. The colonial authorities responded swiftly and violently, crushing the rebellion and killing somewhere between 30,000 and 80,000 nationals. However, the movement gained the attention of the French authorities, and gradually the island began its progress towards achieving independence by peaceful means. In October 1958, the autonomous state of the Malagasy Republic was proclaimed and in 1959, the republic adopted its own constitution. Madagascar then achieved full independence on 26 June 1960.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1725  -             Remarkable baby prodigy, Christian Heinecken, dies.

Christian Friedrich Heinecken, who was known as the "Infant of Lübeck", was born on 6 February 1721. He is said to have first talked within a few hours of being born. By the age of ten months, he could hold a discussion on most subjects, including the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible).

Young Heinecken had an excellent faculty for numbers, and at age two, he could converse eloquently on historical events of the Bible. By the time he was three years old, he had a knowledge of universal history and geography, Latin and French. In 1724, soon after his third birthday, the boy was taken to Copenhagen and presented to King Frederick IV of Denmark. Shortly after this, Christian became ill and predicted his own death, which occurred when he was just four years old, on 27 June 1725.

1861  -             The journal of Australian explorer William Wills closes, shortly before his death.

The Burke and Wills expedition was supposed to mark the state of Victoria's greatest triumph: Victoria hoped to be the first state to mount an expedition to cross the continent from south to north. Instead, due to mismanagement and lack of clear communication, three of the four members of the party who finally made the break to cross to the gulf and back, did not return to Melbourne. Robert O'Hara Burke, William John Wills and Charles Gray all died.

Wills kept a detailed journal of the expedition. By 22 June 1861, Wills wrote that he was unable to stand up, with his legs and arms barely skin and bone. The final entry in his journal was dated 27 June 1861. Four days later, his companion King found him dead. King alone survived, after being taken in and nursed by the Aborigines of the Cooper Creek area. Wills's body was retrieved some months later by a rescue party, together with his journal.

1862  -             Explorer John McDouall Stuart crosses the Roper River in northern Australia, where he finds excellent pastureland.

John McDouall Stuart was a Scottish-born explorer who was determined to cross Australia from south to north. Stuart led a total of six expeditions into Australia's interior, with five of them being attempts to be the first to cross the continent from south to north, commencing from Adelaide. He succeeded on his fifth attempt, reaching the northern waters at Chambers Bay in July 1842. It was on this journey that Stuart first crossed the Roper River in the Northern Territory (then part of South Australian territory). On 27 June 1862, he described it as "certainly the finest country I have seen in Australia". He went on to write in his journal: "If this country is settled, it will be one of the finest Colonies under the Crown."

1880  -             Helen Keller, the first blind and deaf person to communicate effectively with the sighted and hearing world, is born.

Helen Keller was born on 27 June 1880 near Tuscumbia, Alabama, USA. Though normal at birth, she lost her senses of sight and hearing as a result of a fever, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, in February 1882 when she was 19 months old. Her loss of ability to communicate at such an early developmental age was very traumatic for her and her family. An eye physician referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teaching speech to the deaf. After examining Helen Keller, Bell arranged to have a teacher sent for her from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.

The teacher who arrived was 20-year-old Annie Sullivan. Subject to severe tantrums, Helen was a challenge for Sullivan, whose first task was to instill discipline in the spoiled girl. Sullivan's big breakthrough in communication with Helen came one day when Helen realised that the motions her teacher was making on her palm, while running cool water over her palm from a pump, symbolised the idea of "water". From that point on, Helen constantly demanded the names of all the other familiar objects in her dark, silent world.

With Sullivan's help, Keller learned to think intelligibly and to speak using the Tadoma method, which involved touching the lips and throats of others as they spoke, feeling the vibrations, and spelling of alphabetical characters in the palm of Helen's hand. She also learned to read English, French, German, Greek, and Latin in Braille. Helen Keller became the first deaf and blind person to graduate with a college degree, and ultimately published 14 books. She met every President of the United States from Calvin Coolidge to John F Kennedy, and wrote to eight US Presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 to Lyndon B Johnson in 1965, receiving letters from all of them.

Annie Sullivan died on 20 October 1936, having left the legacy in Helen Keller of a deaf/blind author, activist and lecturer who inspired many others to success. Keller's books include The World I Live In (1908), Out of the Dark (1913), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller's Journal (1938), and Teacher (1955). In 1913, assisted by an interpreter, she began lecturing on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. Her lecture tours took her several times around the world, and she did much to remove the stigmas and ignorance surrounding sight and hearing disorders, which previously had often resulted in the committal of the blind and deaf to asylums. Helen Keller died on 1 June 1968.

1880  -             Bushranger Ned Kelly's siege of Glenrowan begins.

Glenrowan was, and is, a small town located approximately 180km northeast of Melbourne. Following the murder of police informer Aaron Sherritt the day before, on 27 June 1880 Ned Kelly's gang expected a large number of police to travel to Glenrowan by train. They attempted to coerce some of the townsfolk into helping lift the rail tracks, thereby causing the train to crash and kill a large number of the expected police. Few were willing to assist, and people were gradually rounded up and held in the Glenrowan Inn so that they could not warn the train.

After entertaining the hostages for hours with games and dancing, the Kelly gang allowed the more trusted hostages to go home at nightfall, as the train was running late. Thomas Curnow, the local schoolteacher, was one of those released, and when he heard the approaching train in the early hours of June 28th, he ran quickly to warn of the danger ahead. This gave the police time to prepare. Wearing their famous armour, the Kelly brothers held a shootout with police. Several hostages were injured in the gun battle and two later died from gunshot wounds. Gang members Dan Kelly, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne were killed, and Ned was shot twenty-eight times in the legs, which were unprotected by the armour. He survived to stand trial, and was sentenced to death by hanging, by Judge Redmond Barry on 29 October 1880. Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne on 11 November 1880.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1789  -             Governor Arthur Phillip sets out to trace the course of the Hawkesbury River.

Captain Arthur Phillip was Governor of the colony of New South Wales, the first settlement of Europeans on Australian soil. Phillip was a practical man who suggested that convicts with experience in farming, building and crafts be included in the First Fleet, but his proposal was rejected. Thus, he faced many obstacles in his attempts to establish the new colony, including the fact that British farming methods, seeds and implements were unsuitable for use in the different climate and soil.

Less than three months after the arrival of the First Fleet to Australia, Phillip set out to explore Sydney Harbour, in search of more land suitable for settlement. Together with eleven men and enough provisions for six days, Phillip travelled as far as he could by boat up Sydney Harbour, tracing the Parramatta River to the point where Parramatta itself would be established six months later, as Rose Hill. The party then spent four days travelling overland towards the Blue Mountains. Further progress was halted by ravines and untraversible countryside, and insufficient supplies, and Phillip returned to Sydney Cove determined to send out further exploration parties.

On 28 June 1789, Phillip departed on a journey to trace the course of the Hawkesbury River as far upstream as he could. Phillip noted the promising rich soil and timber as he traced the river to Richmond Hill, which his party had first seen in April 1788. He then reached the junction with the Grose River, where rocky falls prevented further progress.

1790  -             Father of the Australian wool industry, John Macarthur, first arrives in Sydney.

Australia is known as the country that was built on the sheep's back. Its reputation as the world's largest producer of fine quality wool is due to the man often regarded as the Father of the wool industry in Australia: John Macarthur.

John Macarthur arrived in Port Jackson as a lieutenant in the New South Wales Corps on 28 June 1790. Under Commanding Officer Major Francis Grose he was appointed paymaster for the colony, and later promoted to Inspector of Public Works. In 1793, Macarthur was given a land grant of 100 acres which he cleared and improved, assisted by convict labour. After receiving another land grant, he and his wife Elizabeth worked hard to improve and develop the land, eventually planting 120 acres of wheat, and numerous fruits and vegetables.

In October 1797, the first flock of Spanish merino sheep arrived in Australia. They had been bought in South Africa by British officers Henry Waterhouse and William Kent, who then sold some of them to the Macarthurs. The Spanish Merino was a hardy sheep which was tolerant of Australia's extreme conditions. Unlike other settlers, Macarthur did not try to cross-breed the sheep with other breeds, which only resulted in sheep with coarse wool of a lower quality. By 1803, the Macarthur flock numbered over 4000. The Macarthurs had improved the bloodline and strength of the flock by purchasing merinos from flocks in different regions, thus limiting inter-breeding of similar bloodlines. The first bales of wool were sent to England in 1807.

1836  -             Snow falls in Sydney in the only significant snowfall event to occur in that city to date.

Regular snow in Australia is restricted to the Snowy Mountains and high country of the southern states. Snowfalls have occurred during unusual weather patterns in southwest Western Australia and southern Queensland, but given the size of the continent, snow is very limited.

Of all Australia's capital cities, the one most likely to receive snowfalls is Canberra. While snow is not uncommon in the Blue Mountains and west to Orange, it rarely hits the New South Wales capital. Sydney recorded its first and only significant snow event on the morning of 28 June 1836. On this day, snow began around 6:00 am and continued through to mid-morning, coating the hills in white. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that "the terrified state of the natives indicated the rare nature of such a visitation". Snow fell again to a lesser degree on 2 July and 5 July, as it was a particularly cold winter.

1838  -             Queen Victoria is crowned in Westminster Abbey, a year after her accession to the throne.

England's Queen Victoria was born on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace in London. Although christened Alexandrina Victoria, from birth she was formally styled Her Royal Highness Princess Victoria of Kent. Victoria's father died when she was less than a year old. Her grandfather, George III, died less than a week later. Princess Victoria's uncle, the Prince of Wales, inherited the Crown, becoming King George IV. When George IV died in 1830, he left the throne to his brother, the Duke of Clarence and St Andrews, who became King William IV. Victoria was recognised as heiress-presumptive to the British throne, and in 1837, at the age of 18, she succeeded her uncle, William IV, to the throne to become the last monarch of the House of Hanover.

Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838. Although respect for the Crown had waned in preceding years, Victoria proved to be a popular Queen who was well informed of political matters and worked well with Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister in the early years of her reign. Victoria's 64-year reign was marked by enormous growth and expansion of the British empire.

1845  -             Aborigines attack the exploration party of Ludwig Leichhardt during the night, killing John Gilbert.

Ludwig Leichhardt was born in Prussia and studied in Germany. He was a passionate botanist who had an interest in exploration, although he lacked necessary bush survival skills. In October 1844, he left from Jimbour Station on the Darling Downs on an expedition to find a new route to Port Essington, near Darwin. The trip took 14 months and covered over 4,800km.

Whilst on this trip, Leichhardt had a few encounters with Aborigines, often unnoticed. Leichhardt was sympathetic towards Aborigines and their culture, but in some way he or his party offended them: there were rumours that some of his men had interfered with Aboriginal women. On the night of 28 June 1845, Aborigines attacked the party. One of Leichhardt's men, John Roper, suffered a spear through his arm. The shaft of the spear had to be broken off and the head pulled through in order to extricate it. He was also struck by a spear through his cheek, which damaged an optic nerve. James Calvert, 19 years old, was struck by five spears, penetrating his knee and groin.

John Gilbert was a collector for John Gould, the man famous for producing thousands of detailed sketches of Australian birds. On the night of the attack, Gilbert was killed instantly by a spear through his neck. The men buried him at the site, and his grave was only discovered in 1983. Leichhardt honoured his fallen comrade by naming the Gilbert River, which flows into the Gulf of Carpentaria, after him.

1880  -             The first telephone exchange in Australia opens in Melbourne.

Alexander Graham Bells demonstration of the first practical telephone in 1876 had ramifications worldwide within a very short period of time. For a continent separated by thousands of kilometres from Bells achievements, Australia was very quick to embrace telephony. The concept of ones voice being carried over long distances, and the fact that a telegraph operator trained in Morse Code was no longer required to decode telegraph signals in order for messages to be relayed promised major benefits to the colonies which had grown up with a sense of isolation from the rest of the world.

Experimentation with the telephone commenced in Australia between 1786 and 1788. Early tests were conducted by Charles Todd, South Australian Government Astronomer and Postmaster General, and a leading figure in the development of telegraphy and telephony in Australia. Transmissions enabling the human voice to carry over distances of up to 400 kilometres were successfully trialled. In 1877, Bell published the details of his telephone in the Scientific American. Following this publication, people from around the world including the Australian colonies - were quick to develop their own telephones.

Melbourne was the first Australian city to install a commercial telephone. This was undertaken by engineering firm Robison Bros between their office in Melbourne city and their South Melbourne foundry. The first telephone exchange was also opened in Melbourne on 28 June 1880. When the Melbourne Telephone Exchange Company was formed by W.H Masters and T.T. Draper, with 100 lines, line no. 1 was assigned to Robison Bros. Brisbane was the next city to open a telephone exchange, and by 1887 each of the capital cities had its own exchange.

1914  -             Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are assassinated, sparking WWI.

Until 1878 Bosnia and Herzegovina, just outside Austria, had been governed by the Turks. After the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, Austria was granted the power to administer the two provinces. Bosnia was populated primarily by the Croats, ethnic Serbs and Muslims. Nationalism among the Bosnian-Serbs was inflamed when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina directly into the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1908.

His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este, born 18 December 1863, was an Archduke of Austria and from 1896 until his death, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke was one of the leading advocates of maintaining the peace within the Austro-Hungarian government during both the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-1909 and the Balkan Wars Crises of 1912-1913.

"The Black hand" was a secret nationalistic Serb society who determined to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he accepted the invitation of Bosnia's governor to inspect the army manoeuvres outside Sarajevo. During their tour, a bomb was thrown at the vehicle in which they were travelling, but missed. Shortly afterwards, however, another attempt on their lives by a lone gunman succeeded. Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated at approximately 11:00am on 28 June 1914. The assassination led to war between Austria and Serbia, which escalated into World War I as other European countries allied themselves with one side or the other.

1919  -             The Treaty of Versailles officially ends WWI.

Six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 culminated in the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles was the peace treaty which officially ended World War I between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany. It was undersigned by German foreign minister Hermann Müller on 28 June 1919 and ratified on 10 January 1920. The Treaty required that Germany claim full responsibility for causing the war and that it make reparations to certain members of the Allied forces. Further conditions imposed by the Treaty included Germany losing a certain amount of its own territory to a number of surrounding countries and being stripped of all its overseas and African colonies. Germany was also required to substantially reduce its military to limit its ability to make war again.

1960  -             45 men are killed in a gas explosion at a coal mine in Monmouthshire, Wales.

The country of Wales, in the United Kingdom, was vastly changed during the Industrial Revolution when the Glamorgan and Monmouthshire areas were exploited for coal and iron. The landscape of abundant green hills and valleys altered as coal mines were dug and the area became an important coal-producing area. It is also an unfortunate fact that the UK coal mining industry has claimed many lives since it began in the 1700s.

The Six Bells Colliery in southern Wales began production of coal in 1892. It was one of the largest coal mines in Monmouthshire and, by 1960, employed 1,450 people. On 28 June 1960, there were around 700 men working below the surface at Six Bells when a gas explosion 305m down killed 45 miners. 37 men were killed in the initial explosion, largely from the buildup of lethal carbon monoxide gases, whilst another eight remained trapped below the surface. Despite the efforts of six rescue teams, the trapped men were unable to be reached in time. Subsequent investigations indicated that the explosion was probably caused by a build-up of coal gas ignited by a spark from a falling stone. It remains one of the UK's worst single mining accidents.         

Cheers - John

Gday...

67  -     The apostle St Peter is believed to have been crucified on this day.

St Peter, originally called Simon, was one of Christ's disciples. He came from the fishing village of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. Simon, along with his brother Andrew, was called by Jesus to follow Him, whilst fishing in Lake Gennesaret. Christ changed his name to Peter, which comes from the Aramaic term for rock, as Peter would become the Rock on which Christ would build His church.

As one of Jesus's chosen twelve disciples, Peter was a significant figure in the early Christian church. Tradition suggests that he died by crucifixion, upside-down, on 28 June 67 AD. He is said to have requested being crucified upside down because he did not believe he was worthy to die in the same manner as did his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Clement of Rome in his Letter to the Corinthians placed Peter's death in the time of Nero. Among the Roman Catholics, Peter is regarded as the first bishop of Antioch, later bishop of Rome, and therefore the first Pope.

1613  -             The Globe Theatre in London burns down during the first performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII.

The Globe Theatre in London was an Elizabethan theatre built in 1599 in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, and where most of William Shakespeare's plays were first presented. The Globe burned down on 29 June 1613, when a cannon shot during the first performance of Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" ignited the thatched roof of the gallery. A new Globe Theatre was completed before Shakespeare died, and remained in use until 1642, when the Puritans closed it down. It was destroyed to make way for tenement buildings in 1644. A new Globe Theatre was completed in 1996 thanks to the efforts of the late Sam Wanamaker. It was reproduced as closely as possible to the original in design and location and was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in May of 1997, with a production of Henry V.

1790  -             The inventor of the idea of dental floss, Levi Spear Parmly, is born.

Levi Spear Parmly was born in Braintree, Vermont, on 29 August 1790. As one member of a long line of dentists, he was concerned by the poor dental hygiene of Americans. Toothbrushes and tooth powders were too expensive for many typical Americans. Most people resorted to homemade cleaners, such as gunpowder or table salt, into which a damp cloth was dipped, then used to scrub the teeth.

In 1819, Parmly published a book entitled "A Practical Guide to the Management of the Teeth". In this book, he advocated flossing with waxed silken thread "to dislodge that irritating matter which no brush can remove, and which is the real source of disease". The concept of bacteria being caused by food lodged between teeth was a new concept, and Parmly's revolutionary ideas earned him the unofficial title of The Apostle of Oral Hygiene.

Dental floss was not a popular concept for some time. Silk was clearly the best material for the purpose, being strong enough to withstand being passed repeatedly between the teeth, but it was expensive. Parmly found that coating the silk with wax made it even more effective.

The first dental floss patent was awarded to Asahel M. Shurtleff of the dental-supply company Codman & Shurtleff, of Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1874. The description of the patented product was An Improved Pocket Thread Carrier and Cutter, similar to modern floss packages. However, the company did not actively market the floss until 1882. It was not until Johnson & Johnson developed and marketed the idea of floss on a broader scale from about 1896, that it became more readily available to the common market. the concept actually arose when Robert Wood Johnson, inspired by English physician Joseph Lister, who introduced antiseptic surgery in the late 1870s, began pre-packaging sterile surgical bandages, dressings and surgical sutures. The idea of dental floss made out of the same material was borne out of this.

During World War II, the supply of silk was cut off by the Japanese, forcing America to find a substitute. Nylon had recently been invented by the DuPont Company, which had already offered nylon as a substitute for silk in parachutes for the Army Air Corps. By the end of the war, nylon was being used in numerous other applications, including dental floss.

1835  -             The Port Phillip Association is formed for the purpose of settling land in the area that later becomes Melbourne.

Port Phillip is a large bay in southern Victoria, Australia, on the northern end of which is situated the Victorian capital city of Melbourne. The bay was discovered in February 1802 by Lieutenant John Murray, who was sent by Governor Philip Gidley King to survey the northern coastline of Bass Strait. Although Murray named the bay Port King after the Governor of New South Wales, King later renamed it Port Phillip, to honour Captain Arthur Phillip who had led the First Fleet to New South Wales. Explorer Matthew Flinders entered Port Phillip Bay six weeks later and charted the entire bay, and further mapping of the area was undertaken in January 1803 by Surveyor-General Charles Grimes.

Settlers first arrived in the Port Phillip area in October 1803, but did not stay long. Lieutenant-Governor David Collins was under orders from the British Government to establish a settlement on the southern coast, and brought 308 convicts, 51 marines, 17 free settlers, 12 civil officers, and a missionary and his wife. The settlement was not a success, as fresh water was in short supply. The local timber was unsuitable for many uses, and the treacherous entrance to Port Phillip Bay made the site unusable as a whaling base. Hearing of better land and timber in Van Diemen's Land, Collins moved most of the settlement across Bass Strait. Despite this failure, however, the land in Port Phillip Bay remained of interest to numerous parties.

One such group was the Port Phillip Association, an initiative of John Batman. A native born Australian, Batman was interested in opening up new pastureland and promoting the growth of the colonies. Following the successful 1824 expedition of explorers Hamilton Hume and William Hovell, Batman, together with lawyer Joseph Tice Gellibrand, applied for land in the Westernport Bay area of Port Phillip, but their request was denied. In May 1835, Batman and Gellibrand led a syndicate calling themselves the 'Port Phillip Association' to explore Port Phillip Bay, looking for suitable sites for settlement. In June 1835, Batman signed a 'treaty' with elders of the indigenous Wurundjeri people, giving the syndicate free access to almost 250,000 hectares of land in exchange for an annual offering of dozens of items such as blankets, axes, knives, scissors, mirrors, handkerchiefs, flour and clothing. In order to settle the land which the Association believed had been legitimately acquired, the Port Phillip Association was formalised, on 29 June 1835.

Governor Bourke declared Batman's treaty invalid, and issued a proclamation warning off him and his syndicate as trespassers on crown land. Nonetheless, the illegal settlement which Batman established under the name of Batmania prospered. By 1837, Governor Bourke conceded the existence of the village and directed that the town be laid out. He renamed it 'Melbourne' after the British Prime Minister of the day.

1868  -             The lighthouse is lit at Bustard Head, the first lighthouse constructed after Queensland separated from New South Wales, and the scene of many tragedies.

In 1859, the Colony of the Moreton Bay District separated from New South Wales and became Queensland. Although the new colony had a lengthy coastline 6 973km of mainland coastline, and another 6 374km of island coastlines - it had just one lighthouse, and that was at Cape Moreton in the southeast. As the colony grew, and new trade opportunities developed, the need for more lighthouses became apparent.

Bustard Head, a headland originally named by James Cook in 1770, is located about 20km north of the Queensland coastal town of 1770. It was identified in 1864 as one of the sites most in need of a new lighthouse. Plans were drawn up in 1865; orders for the tower were placed with Hennet, Spinks and Company of Bridgwater, England and the lantern was ordered from Chance Brothers of Birmingham, England. The construction tender was awarded to WP Clark, who was later also involved in the construction of lighthouses at Double Island Point, Pine Islet, Low Isles, Cape Cleveland and Dent Island. Standing 18 metres high, the Bustard Head Lighthouse was made from cast iron sheets, and completed in 1868, with the light first lit on 29 June 1868.

Being in such a remote area, requiring the crossing of two treacherous tidal creeks, the lighthouse soon became known for its disproportionate number of tragedies and fatal accidents, given the small number of people who have actually resided on the island. During its construction, one of the workmen died in a construction accident. In 1887, Kate Gibson, wife of the lighthouse keeper Nils Gibson, was found with her throat cut by a razor an apparent suicide. In 1889, 20-year-old Mary Gibson, daughter of the lighthouse keeper, was drowned after leaving Bustard Head in a sailboat, along with a repairman, Alfred Power, and Elizabeth Wilkinson, the wife of the assistant lighthouse keeper. Six year later, Nils Gibson himself died from cirrhosis of the liver. In 1898, two-year-old Milly Waye, who had been born at the lighthouse, died after being severely scalded with boiling water. In 1912, the lighthouse keepers daughter Edith Anderson was abducted while returning to Bustard Head after working at a nearby cattle station. The man escorting her, Arthur Cozgell, was shot. Before dying, Cozgell identified the attacker as local lad George Daniels. Neither Daniels nor Anderson were ever found. Shortly after this, another of the lighthouse keepers daughters died after suffering an epileptic fit. Records at the Queensland State Archives reveal even more tragedies.

Still operated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, the light was automated in 1986. Although neglected for many years, the site is now managed by the Bustard Head Lighthouse Association.

1917  -             The accident of stockman Jim Darcy causes a chain of events that eventually leads to the founding of Australias Flying Doctor Service.

Much of the Australian outback is characterised by extreme isolation. In the early 1900s, the population density of the outback was less than one person per square kilometre, and essential services beyond urbanised areas were few and far between.

James Darcy, more commonly known as Jim, was a stockman at Ruby Plains, a pastoral and cattle station about 50 km south of Halls Creek in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. On 29 June 1917, Darcy was mustering stock when his horse stumbled in a hole, throwing the stockman to the ground before rolling over him and pinning him down. It was several hours before Darcy was discovered by his workmates. He had to be ferried many kilometres back to Ruby Plains on a flat wagon with no springs to cushion him during the bumpy ride. No one was qualified to give him the necessary treatment there, so he faced an agonising twelve-hour ride to Halls Creek.

There was neither doctor nor hospital in the township, but the postmaster, Fred Tuckett, had limited medical knowledge. He administered morphine for Darcys pain, and recognised the young man was suffering internal injuries. In search of a doctor, Tuckett telegraphed both Wyndham and Derby, but the doctors from both settlements were out of town. He then telegraphed his former first-aid instructor in Perth, Dr Joe Holland, who diagnosed Darcy as having a ruptured bladder. Holland advised the postmaster that Darcy needed to be operated on immediately. Following instructions by telegraph, Tuckett operated on Darcy, using just a pocket-knife and razor. Dr Holland checked in on Darcy's progress when he could. The young stockman seemed to be healing at first, but when complications set in, it was apparent that the doctor needed to attend. On 9 August, Holland found passage on the only ship travelling to Derby, the cattle boat SS Moira, which was not licensed to carry passengers. At Derby, Holland continued overland by Model T Ford until he had to change to a horse and sulky. He then walked the remaining distance to Halls Creeks. The journey covered over 3 700 km and took two weeks. When he arrived, a grief-stricken Tuckett informed him that, although the operation had been a success, Darcy had died a day earlier as a result of complications and malarial fever.

The case caught the attention of John Flynn, a Presbyterian minister who had become aware of the need for better medical facilities for people who lived far from major settlements. Although Flynn had established numerous bush hospitals in the Australian outback, he had an even greater vision: that of a medical service utilising the emerging technology of radio and aircraft to bring assistance to people in remote areas. Thanks to assistance from various benefactors and other visionaries, in May 1928 Flynns vision was realised when the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service was established at Cloncurry, in western Queensland. The service succeeded, and in 1942 was renamed the Flying Doctor Service. Queen Elizabeth II approved the prefix "Royal" in 1955 following her visit to Australia. The Royal Flying Doctor Service, or RFDS, is still an integral part of Australia today, providing essential medical services to people living in remote areas.

1949  -             Due to the coal miners' strike, severe restrictions are placed on electricity consumption in Queensland, Australia.

The Australian coal miners' strike of 1949 was sparked by a clash between the miners' basic rights and concerns, and the government's interest in supporting business and mining interests. Coal mining had a high fatality rate, with around 25 miners being killed at work annually, so miners sought the implementation of essential safety policies, as well as a 35-hour week, long service leave, and a 30 shilling a week pay rise. To counter the control of the unions, some of which were led by members of the Communist Party of Australia, the Chifley government brought in strong anti-union laws. Thus, beginning on 27 June 1949, 23 000 coal miners, primarily in New South Wales and Queensland, went on strike.

Supply was severely restricted and laws were brought in to prevent wastage of the limited supply. On 29 June 1949, the Brisbane newspaper 'Courier Mail' reported that breakfast could only be cooked in a half-hour period between 6am and 8am; lunch had to be cold, but beverages could be heated between 11:30am and 1:30pm; cooking for the evening meal was permitted for one hour only between 4:30pm and 6:30pm; and two houselights only could be used up until 9pm, after which a single light could be used until 11pm. In addition, radio stations in Queensland were permitted to be on air only between 6:45am and 9am, and 6:30pm until 10pm, with just a news bulletin being broadcast at midday between 12:30 and 12:50. Operating hours for trams were cut down considerably. Radiators and air conditioning units were forbidden to be used, as was any form of heating for the bath or sink. Irons, laundry boilers and washing machines were limited to a mere two hours per week.

Prime Minister Ben Chifley's initial response was to make it illegal to offer financial aid or support to any of the striking miners. The strike finally ended when, on 1 August, Chifley sent in government troops to operate coal mines near Newcastle in New South Wales, forcing the miners to acquiesce.

2001  -             The British Government announces that a memorial in honour of Diana, Princess of Wales, is to be built in London's Hyde Park.

On 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car crash in Paris. The accident happened after Diana left the Ritz Hotel in Paris with her companion, Dodi Al Fayed, who was the son of Mohammed Al Fayed, owner of Harrods. Dodi Al Fayed and the car's driver were also killed in the crash. Only Diana's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, survived the accident.

On 29 June 2001, the British government announced it would honour Diana with a fountain on the banks of the Serpentine, the 40-acre artificial lake in London's royal Hyde Park. The design competition began in September 2001 and a shortlist from the entries was chosen two months later. The concept of a fountain was preferable to that of a statue, as it was felt the movement of water would best encapsulate Diana's character and spirit.

The memorial fountain was officially opened by the Queen on 6 July 2004. Since its opening, the memorial has become one of London's most popular attractions, with around one million people visiting each year.         

Cheers - John

Gday...

1834  -             A public meeting is held in Exeter Hall, London, to discuss plans for the new colony of South Australia.

Explorer Matthew Flinders was the first European to investigate the possibilities for settlement on South Australia's coast, doing so in 1802. The exploration of Charles Sturt to chart the Murray River was a further catalyst to the establishment of a colony on the southern coast. Consequently, the British authorities moved to establish an official colony, which would be known as South Australia.

On 30 June 1834, a meeting was held at Exeter Hall at The Strand in London, England, to advise the public of the principles, objects, plan and prospects of the new colony of South Australia. The meeting, organised by the founding members of The South Australian Association, was attended by around 2500 people, including many members of Parliament. One of the speakers was Daniel Wakefield, brother of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who helped his brother draft the speech. EG Wakefield was a strong advocate for the establishment of a free colony, rather than one based on convict labour, and he lobbied heavily for Parliament to pass the bill to enable the colonisation of the province of South Australia. During his speech, Daniel Wakefield stated:

"It was proposed to make the colony independent, from the first, of the mother country. This the Right Hon. Gentleman declined to do; and the consequence was, that we were obliged to modify the plan to meet his views. Therefore it is that the measure appears before you in its present shape; but it still has my cordial approbation and concurrence, because the Commissioners are to be only temporary, and after a time the government of the new nation is to be confided to the inhabitants themselves (hear, hear!)."

1861  -             Explorer Robert O'Hara Burke dies on the banks of Cooper Creek.

Robert O'Hara Burke, with William Wills later appointed second-in-command, led the expedition to try to cross Australia from south to north and back again. They set out from Melbourne in August 1860, farewelled by around 15,000 people. The exploration party was very well equipped, and subsequently very large. Because of its size, the exploration party was split at Menindee so that Burke could push ahead to the Gulf of Carpentaria with a smaller party. The smaller group went on ahead to establish the depot at Cooper Creek which would serve to offer the necessary provisions for when the men returned from the Gulf. After several unsuccessful forays into the northern dry country from Cooper Creek, Burke decided to push on ahead to the Gulf in December 1860, regardless of the risks. He took with him Wills, Charles Gray and John King.

The expedition to the Gulf took longer than Burke anticipated: upon his return to Cooper Creek, he found that the relief party had left just seven hours earlier, less than the amount of time it had taken to bury Gray, who had died on the return journey. Through poor judgement, lack of observation and a series of miscommunications, Burke and Wills never met up with the relief party. They perished on the banks of Cooper Creek. Burke died on or around 30 June 1861. King alone survived to lead the rescue party to the remains of Burke and Wills, and the failure of one of the most elaborately planned expeditions in Australia's history.

1861  -             The worst of the Lambing Flat Riots occur, during which Chinese gold miners are massacred.

The present-day town of Young in the central west of New South Wales began as a gold-mining settlement known as Lambing Flat. At the height of its popularity, the rich alluvial gold deposits attracted a population of around 20 000. While most of the diggers were from other parts of Australia, many migrants came from Europe and North America. Around 1000 miners were Chinese, and they soon became the target of violence from the white diggers.

The Chinese were not welcome on the Australian goldfields. They were thorough workers, often picking meticulously through the discarded tailings or abandoned mines of other diggers. They were viewed with suspicion as few spoke English, and they were regarded as idol-worshippers. Chinese mining methods used more water than European methods, and such practices were not appreciated in a country known for its heat and droughts. Furthermore, few of them traded their gold in the towns, preferring to store it up and return to China with their wealth. The colony of Victoria was the first to introduce Anti-Chinese immigration legislation, imposing a poll tax of £10 per head for each Chinese person arriving in Victorian ports in 1855. Within a few years all other colonial governments had enacted similar laws to restrict the number of people from China entering the colonies. This did not stop the Chinese from arriving in droves and spreading out to goldfields in New South Wales and Victoria.

During the first year of the gold rush on the Lambing Flat fields, there were four major clashes between the Chinese and white diggers in the region. Following the first riot in October 1860, a Sub-Commissioner and three troopers were assigned to the goldfield, but this did not prevent a second riot occurring just two months later. After the third riot late in January of 1861, more troopers were sent, and for several months there was relative peace at Lambing Flat. However, the most vicious attack was yet to come.

Tensions came to a head on 30 June 1861. It is estimated that around 3 000 European diggers banded together in a rowdy gang called a roll up and, armed with picks, whips, knives, sticks and anything that could be used as a weapon, converged on the Chinese camp. Chinese tents and equipment were destroyed, gold plundered, and dozens of the men themselves had their pigtails, or queues, cut off - a matter of great dishonour for them - or worse, they were scalped. An unknown number of Chinese were murdered: although the official death toll for Chinese was given as two, eyewitness accounts suggest between 30 and 40 were killed, and several hundred more injured. The flag carried by the diggers, on which was written 'Roll-up Roll-up No Chinese', is now on display in the Lambing Flat Folk Museum.

The Lambing Flat riots continued for several more weeks, settling only after military intervention and the arrest of the main ringleaders among the white diggers. However, public outcry at these arrests caused many of the ringleaders to be released. In the end, only one person was actually convicted and gaoled. The name Lambing Flat was changed to Young after then-Governor of New South Wales, Sir John Young, in an attempt to wipe the atrocities of June 30 from the history of the town. The government responded, ironically, not with legislation to protect other racial groups, but with laws restricting access to goldfields for aliens and to refuse miners' rights to same. The Chinese Immigration Restriction Act was passed at an Intercolonial Conference in 1880 1881. This was, in effect, the beginning of the White Australia Policy, as it led to the adoption of uniform restrictive immigration laws.

1908  -             The first Australian south to north transcontinental motor car journey begins.

Australia's love affair with the car as a means of travelling the continent's huge distances began with the first transcontinental motor car trip. Engineer Horace Hooper Murrag Aunger was born on 28 April 1878 at Narridy, near Clare, South Australia. He collaborated with cycle maker Vivian Lewis and Tom O'Grady to build the first petrol-driven motorcar in South Australia. Aunger teamed up with Henry Hampden Dutton to be the first to cross Australia from south to north by motorcar. Their first attempt left Adelaide in Dutton's Talbot car on 25 November 1907, and travelled north through countryside suitable only for a modern 4WD. When the pinion in the Talbot's differential collapsed south of Tennant Creek, the car had to be abandoned as the wet season was approaching. Travelling on horseback, the men met the railhead at Oodnadatta, from where they returned to Adelaide.

Dutton then purchased a larger, more powerful vehicle, again a Talbot. Then men made their second attempt to cross the continent from south to north, leaving Adelaide on 30 June 1908. They were joined at Alice Springs by Ern Allchurch. Reaching the abandoned Talbot at Tennant Creek, the car was repaired, and they drove in convoy to Pine Creek, where the original Talbot was freighted by train to Darwin. The men continued in the second Talbot, reaching Darwin on 20 August 1908. The car in which the men completed their journey now sits preserved in the Birdwood museum, South Australia.

1954  -             Millions of people in America, Europe and Asia witness a total eclipse of the sun.

An eclipse of the sun, or solar eclipse, happens when the moon is between the Earth and sun, causing the moon to cast a shadow on the surface of the Earth. This phenomenon only occurs during the New Moon. The 30 June 1954 total eclipse of the sun, in which the moon cast its shadow over three continents, was first witnessed in Nebraska, in the USA. The shadow then moved across the North American continent and the Atlantic Ocean at 2,897 kilometres per hour. The phenomenon was seen in Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. It was observed by many that when the sun was totally eclipsed by the moon, the skies turned dark briefly, the temperature dropped and birds returned to their nests.     

1971  -             A Russian space mission ends in tragedy when three cosmonauts are found dead in their space capsule, despite a perfect landing.

Russia initially led the "space race", launching the first man and woman into space, although they did not achieve the first moon landing. The Soyuz space craft was, and is, a series of spacecraft designed by Sergey Korolyov for the Soviet Union's space program. The Soyuz succeeded the Voskhod spacecraft design and were originally built as part of the Luna program. They were later used to carry cosmonauts to and from the Salyut and Mir space stations and are now used for transport to and from the International Space Station.

On 30 June 1971, three Russian cosmonauts were found dead in their space capsule, the Soyuz 11, after it made what appeared to be a perfect landing in Kazakhstan. The cosmonauts, Lieutenant-Colonel Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkoy and Viktor Patsayev, had been conducting scientific experiments and observations after docking with the Soviet space station, Salyut 1. An ensuing inquiry found that the men had suffered a fatal rise in their blood pressure, which occurred when the cabin became depressurised after re-entry. The accident resulted in a complete redesign that led to the 7K-T. It deleted one crew space so that all cosmonauts could wear spacesuits during launch and re-entry.

1985  -             39 Americans being held hostage in Beirut are released after 17 days in captivity.

Islamic Jihad was originally the name of a militant Islamist group based in the Syrian capital, Damascus, but has also been adopted by various other militant groups. On 14 June 1985, a group of Americans was captured and held hostage after the plane they were on was hijacked by two members of the extremist Islamic Jihad group. TWA Flight 847, heading from Rome to Athens, was diverted by Lebanese gunmen demanding the release of over 700 Shiite Muslims imprisoned in Israel, and in southern Lebanon prisons run by the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army.

Whilst most of the group was released, 40 remained as hostages. One man, US Navy diver Robert Stethem, was killed on the first day of the hostage crisis after the terrorists' demands were not met, and four others were held by the radical Hezbollah group. The remaining 35 were kept in different Beirut safe-houses. The freedom of the hostages was gained on 30 June 1985, after intervention by the Syrian President, Hafiz al-Assad.

In 1987, Imad Mughniyah, a senior officer with Hezbollah, was secretly indicted for the TWA hijacking, but remains at large. Mugniyah is included in both the FBI and EU list of wanted terrorists, having been implicated in many of the noted terrorist attacks of the 1980s and 1990s, primarily American and Israeli targets.

2010  -             Mildura, Victoria becomes the first Australian city to switch over entirely to digital television.

Digital television is a new innovation of the twenty-first century which involves the sending and receiving of moving images and sound by digital signals. This is different to the previously used analogue television signals which had been in use since the invention of television. The advantage of using digital technology is that it uses less bandwidth than analogue, and unlike analogue, it is not limited to just a few channels available.

Australia began offering digital television from around 2008, with a planned complete switchover of all towns and regions between 2010 and 2013. On 30 June 2010, the rural city of Mildura in Victoria's far northwest became the first Australian city to switch over entirely from analogue to digital television transmission.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1836  -             Australian explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell discovers the Loddon River in Victoria.

Major Thomas Mitchell was born in Craigend, Scotland, in 1792. He came to Australia after serving in the Army during the Napoleonic Wars, and took up the position of Surveyor-General of New South Wales. He was a talented poet, artist, geologist and botanist who meticulously charted each of his four journeys into the NSW interior.

In 1836, Mitchell set out to disprove Sturt's theory that the Darling River flowed into the Murray - an obsession that had dominated his second expedition a year earlier. On this, his third journey, Mitchell confirmed the junction of the Darling and Murray Rivers, and set out to explore upstream along the Darling but was forced by drought to return to the Murray. After returning downstream, Mitchell discovered the Loddon River on 1 July 1836 whilst exploring south of the Murray. He originally referred to the Loddon by its Aboriginal name, "Yarrayne". This expedition eventually led to the opening up of "Australia Felix", the rich pasture land of western Victoria.

1851  -             Victoria separates from New South Wales.

When James Cook became the first European to sight and map the eastern coastline of Australia, he claimed the eastern half of the continent for England under the name of New South Wales. After the arrival of the First Fleet, England sought to secure its claim on New South Wales be establishing further settlements south, and eventually north and west.

In 1803, the British Government instructed Lieutenant-Governor David Collins to establish a settlement on the southern coast. This settlement was not a success and the site was abandoned, but expeditions continued to be mounted to explore the land between Sydney and Port Phillip. Thanks to the initiative of John Batman, Melbourne was settled in 1835, and despite being regarded as an "illegal" settlement, the foundling colony thrived. Governor Bourke formally named Melbourne in 1837.

The Port Phillip Colony encompassed Melbourne and "Australia Felix", which was the fertile western district discovered by Major Thomas Mitchell. The first petition for formal separation of the colony from New South Wales was presented to Governor Gipps in 1840, but rejected. It was another ten years before the British Act of Parliament separating Victoria from New South Wales was signed by Queen Victoria. The New South Wales Legislative Council subsequently passed legislation formalising Victoria's separation on 1 July 1851.

1937  -             England implements the world's first telephone emergency system.

The world's first telephone emergency system began in England as a response to an emergency situation in which five people were killed. Phone calls were delayed when people attempted to report a fire. It was decided that a single-number system was necessary to enable emergencies to be reported quickly and efficiently. The British emergency system was implemented on 1 July 1937. The first actual call on the British 9-9-9 emergency number occurred 7 days later, on 8 July 1937, when a woman reported a burglar outside her home. The burglar was duly apprehended.

1942  -             Australia's worst maritime disaster occurs when the Montevideo Maru is torpedoed by American submarine USS Sturgeon.

The war in the Pacific was initiated when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Thus began the Japanese conquest of the Pacific region. Having taken out a large portion of the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese then set their sights on expanding their empire from the Indian/Burmese border, south through Malaya, across the islands of Indonesia to New Guinea, northwest to the Gilbert Islands and north to the Kuril Islands off the Japanese coast. In January 1942, Japanese forces landed in Rabaul on the island of New Britain, now part of Papua New Guinea. There, they established a defence base, launching offensives against Australian troops.

Prior to the invasion, there were an estimated 1400 troops in the region. Of these, around 400 managed to escape. The remaining 1000 were taken as prisoners of war (POWs), along with more than 200 civilians. One group consisting of almost 80 Australian officers and Army nurses was successfully moved from the base to Japanese territory. The next group, made up of the remaining POWs and civilians, was transferred to the Japanese transport ship Montevideo Maru to be taken to Hainan, off the southern coast of China.. The carrier left Rabaul on 22 June.

The Montevideo Maru was not marked as a POW carrier. On 1 July 1942, the ship was torpedoed by the submarine USS Sturgeon. It sank off the coast of the Philippines, near Luzon. All 845 POWs and 209 civilians were killed, locked in the ships hold as it went down.

The Australian public was unaware of the tragedy until after the war. The last news that families and friends had of the POWs was their internment at Rabaul. When Australian troops arrived at Rabaul to liberate them, there was no trace of the military and civilian prisoners who had been there three years earlier. Several civilian survivors shed light on the mystery, telling of the departure of the Montevideo Maru with the prisoners on board. The story was only fully uncovered after Australian officer Major H S Williams investigated, travelling first to Manila, then to Japan.

On 1 July 2012, seventy years after the tragedy, a memorial was unveiled in Canberra to honour the 1054 Australian prisoners who died aboard the Montevideo Maru. The event remains Australias worst maritime disaster.

1959  -             "Mr Squiggle" first airs on ABC TV in Australia.

Mr Squiggle and Friends was a long-running childrens television series on Australias ABC. It featured a marionette with a large pencil for its nose. Mr Squiggle regularly flew to Earth from his residence at 93 Crater Crescent, The Moon on his spaceship named Rocket. In each episode, Mr Squiggle would create imaginative and creative drawings from squiggles sent in to the programme by children from across Australia, accompanied by their letters.

The concept of Mr Squiggle was created by puppeteer, cartoonist and illustrator Norman Hetherington. Mr Squiggle first appeared on the Children's TV Club on ABC TV, but developed into a regular series of short, five minute slots, with occasional longer special programmes. Hetherington manipulated the marionette from overhead: drawings were usually completed upside-down, so would remain largely unrecognisable until Mr Squiggle called out "Upside down! Upside down!" and the sketch was turned around. Scripts were largely written by Hetherington's wife Margaret. A female helper assisted Mr Squiggle each time, variously Miss Gina, Miss Pat, Miss Jane, Roxanne and Rebecca. Other characters included the grouchy Blackboard; Bill the Steam Shovel; and Gus the Snail, who sported a TV for a shell, then a flower pot.

The first Mr Squiggle episode appeared on 1 July 1959, and the show continued to run for forty years. The final episode, which was produced in 1996, was aired on 9 July 1999.

1978  -             Australia's Northern Territory is granted self-government.

The Northern Territory is a federal territory of Australia, bordered by the states of Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia. From 1825 to 1863, the Northern Territory was part of New South Wales. In 1863, as a result of the successful 1862 expedition of John McDouall Stuart to find an overland route through the desert from Adelaide to the north, control of the Northern Territory was handed to South Australia. On 1 January 1911, the Northern Territory was separated from South Australia and transferred to Commonwealth control. This meant that the laws governing people of the Northern Territory were dictated by the authorities in Canberra, in a society vastly different from their own.

Over the ensuing decades, the Northern Territory took small steps towards attaining self-government. The Territory was allowed to make its own legislature in 1947. In 1974, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam announced that self-government would soon be granted, and a Legislative Assembly made up of 19 members was formed. However, a major catalyst to the granting of self-governance was the tragedy of Cyclone Tracy, which devastated most of the city of Darwin at Christmas in 1974. The cyclone and subsequent response highlighted problems with the arrangement of having a federal minister responsible for the Territory from Canberra, thousands of kilometres away.

The Northern Territory was granted self-government on 1 July 1978. Around 6000 people gathered at the Cenotaph in Darwin. The inaugural ministry was sworn in, followed by a guard of honour and the first official raising of the new Territorian flag by Flight Sergeant Gordon Mcloughlin. The Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, stated, Todays historic occasion symbolises the strength and the spirit of men and women of the Territory, a spirit that has endured suffering, withstood hardships and overcome many times of adversity. Most state responsibilities came under the purview of the Northern Territory government. Exceptions included matters relating to Aboriginal land, uranium mining, national parks and some industrial relations. Of major significance was the fact that citizens were now permitted to own freehold land. This was a tremendous boost to the economy, as it allowed for major construction works of new tourism and entertainment facilities such as accommodation and casinos, and educational institutions such as universities, to go ahead without waiting for approval from Canberra bureaucrats.

Territory Day continues to be celebrated on 1 July every year. It is the only day when fireworks are permitted to be lit by the public.

1997  -             After more than 150 years of British administration, Hong Kong is returned to Chinese control.

Britain invaded China in 1839, during the First Opium War. After Britain occupied Hong Kong, China ceded the island to the British under the Convention of Chuenpi (Chuanbi) signed on 20 January 1841. Hong Kong Island then became a Crown Colony on 29 August 1842 under the Treaty of Nanking. Following the Second Opium War (1856-1860), China was forced to cede the Kowloon Peninsula, adjacent to Hong Kong Island, along with other area islands. In 1898, the UK commenced a 99-year lease of Hong Kong and surrounding islands and territories, increasing the size of the Hong Kong colony. The lease would expire at midnight on 30 June 1997.

Negotiations on the future of Hong Kong were initiated between Britain and China in 1982. On 19 December 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang signed the Joint Sino-British Declaration approving the 1997 turnover of the colony. The Declaration allowed for the formulation of a "one country, two systems" policy by China's communist government, permitting Hong Kong to have a capitalist economy and enjoy existing rights and freedoms. Democratic elections for the new Legislative Council were held in 1995. On 1 July 1997, Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, was sworn in as the new leader.

2000  -             Australian PM John Howard introduces the GST.

The GST (Goods and Services Tax) is a value added tax of 10% on most goods and services sold in Australia. Introduced by the Howard Government on 1 July 2000, it replaced the previous wholesale sales tax system and various minor taxes such as stamp duty and bank account debits tax. The idea for a broad-based value-added tax was first proposed in Australia by Treasurer Paul Keating in the mid-80s but was rejected by Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke who believed it to be unpopular with the Australian public. The idea was refloated in 1991 by Dr John Hewson, leader of the opposition as the nation approached the 1993 election. Initially starting with a seemingly invincible lead over the Labor government, the Liberal-National Coalition lost its lead when Hewson seemed unable to clearly explain how GST would be incurred on the cost of everyday items, in a television lead.

John Howard, re-elected leader of the Liberal party in 1995, led the Liberal-National Coalition to a large victory in the 1996 elections. In the lead-up to the 1998 election, Howard campaigned on the GST and narrowly won. However, the government lacked a senate majority, and with Labor adamantly opposed to the introduction of the GST, Howard turned to the minor parties for support. The Democrats had opposed the GST during the 1998 election campaign, but their leader, Meg Lees, was amenable to the notion of amending the government's GST legislation to make the tax fairer. Lees wanted exemptions to be made for food, education and other goods and services. After months of negotiations the government relented, and the legislation was passed on 28 June 1999, and the GST introduced on 1 July 2000. The issue split the Democrats, and to date, the party has yet to recover from their loss of support.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1865  -             William Booth and his wife establish the organisation that later becomes the Salvation Army.

William Booth was born on 10 April 1829 in Sneinton, Nottingham, England. Though his father was wealthy when he was born, financial mismanagement saw the family plunged into poverty, and young William was apprenticed to a pawnbroker at the age of thirteen. He became the family's chief provider when his father died later that same year. Several years later, Booth was converted to Christianity, studying and teaching himself in order to be a Methodist lay preacher, whilst supplementing his income with pawn-broking. Lack of work for lay preachers led him to open-air evangelising in the streets and on Kennington common. In 1851 Booth joined the Wesleyan Reform Union, and on 10 April 1852, his 23rd birthday, he left pawnbroking and became a full-time preacher at their headquarters at Binfield Chapel in Clapham.

Booth still sought to evangelise, and when his repeated requests for more time for evangelistic campaigns were refused by his church, he resigned from the ministry and became a full time evangelist. He became known for preaching the gospel to the poor and underprivileged. When William Booth preached the first of nine sermons in a tattered tent on an unused Quaker cemetery in London on 2 July 1865, the East London Christian Mission was born. Booth and his wife held meetings every evening and on Sundays, to offer repentance, Salvation and Christian ethics to the poorest and most needy, including alcoholics, criminals and prostitutes. He and his followers practised what they preached, performing self-sacrificing Christian and social work, such as opening Food for the Millions shops (soup kitchens), not caring if they were scoffed at or derided for their Christian ministry work.

In 1878, the organisation became known as the Salvation Army. They adopted a uniform and adapted Christian words to popular tunes sung in the public bars.

1897  -             Inventor Guglielmo Marconi receives his first patent for a wireless telegraph.

Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy, on 25 April 1874. Marconi is best known for the development of a wireless telegraphy system, which came to be known as "radio". Marconi demonstrated the transmission and reception of Morse Code based radio signals over a distance of 2 or more kilometres (and up to 6 kilometres) on Salisbury Plain in England in 1896. He made the first wireless transmission across a body of water on 13 May 1897 from Lavernock Point, South Wales to Flat Holm Island. He also received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal on 12 December 1901 at Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland (now in Canada) using a 400-foot kite-supported antenna for reception. This was significant in that, prior to this transmission, it was believed that a radio signal could only be transmitted in the line of sight.

Marconi was awarded a British patent for radio communication, specifically "Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus there-for" on 2 July 1897, and this was followed by the US patent on 13 July 1897. Marconi was awarded the 1909 Nobel prize in physics. After Marconi died on 20 July 1937, radio stations throughout the world observed two minutes of radio silence in tribute.

1937  -             Female aviator Amelia Earhart goes missing.

Amelia Mary Earhart was born on 24 July 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, USA. She was the first woman to achieve the feat of flying across the Atlantic. Her first trip across the Atlantic in a Fokker F7 Friendship took 20 hours and 40 minutes. She then flew solo across the Atlantic in 1932. On 11 January 1935 Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to California. She had departed Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii, and after a journey of over 3,800km in 18 hours, she arrived at Oakland Airport in Oakland, California.

In 1937, together with her navigator Fred Noonan, she attempted a round-the-world flight in a Lockheed Electra. Approximately five weeks after she set off, her plane disappeared, last heard about 100 miles off Howland Island in the Pacific, on 2 July 1937. Speculation has been rife over the years regarding what happened to Amelia Earhart. The usual conspiracy theories and alien abduction theories have abounded. Some have claimed Earhart was captured in the South Pacific Mandate area by the Japanese and interned for a number of years before either perishing or being executed. This originated when a man, then 15, claimed he had been toying with his radio and a woman came upon the speaker, claiming to be Amelia Earhart. There was then a scream and the woman said Japanese soldiers had entered the plane, she begging them not to hurt her. Then the transmission went dead. Regardless of the rumours, no evidence has ever been found to substantiate them, and the circumstances surrounding Earhart's disappearance remain a mystery.

1940  -             743 people, are killed when their liner, the "Arandora Star", is hit by a German torpedo.

During WWII, German and Italian civilians were considered "enemy aliens" in allied countries within Europe. Internment camps were set up to hold these innocent civilians so they could not relay vital information to their enemy homelands. However, suspicion of the "enemy aliens" was rife, and it was decided that they would be sent to St Johns, Newfoundland, on the east coast of Canada.

The Arandora Star was commissioned to transport the internees from the Isle of Man to Canada when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat, on 2 July 1940. On board were 479 German civilians interned when war broke out in 1939, 86 German POWs, approximately 730 Italian civilians interned after Mussolini declared war on 10 June 1940, a crew of 174 and a military guard of approximately 200. When the torpedo initially hit, the lower decks were immediately flooded, generators went offline and all communications between the bridge, engine-room and wireless office were destroyed. As the passengers rushed onto the decks, their presence hampered the operations of the crew trying to lower the lifeboats. Furthermore, not all the lifeboats were functional. In total, 743 people were killed, including military personnel and hundreds of innocent German and Italian civilians, while 813 survived.

1964  -             US President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Bill, outlawing racial discrimination.

The US Civil Rights Act of 1964 was landmark legislation outlawing discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin. It developed out of the Civil Rights Bill which was introduced by President John F Kennedy in 1963. Originally conceived to protect the rights of black men, the bill was amended prior to passage to protect the civil rights of all men and women. The bill created equal rights in voting, education, public accommodations, union membership and in federally assisted programmes, regardless of an individual's race, colour, religion or national origin. The Bill was passed on 2 July 1964, by the House of Representatives by 289 to 126 votes.

2002  -             Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly a balloon solo around the world.

Steve Fossett, born 22 April 1944 in Jackson, Tennessee, USA, made his fortune in American financial markets, allowing him to pursue his dreams of adventure. Known for his five world record non-stop circumnavigations of the Earth, as a long-distance solo balloonist, a sailor, and a solo airplane pilot, Fossett currently holds official World Records in 5 sports.

On 19 June 2002, Fossett launched from Northam, Western Australia, on his sixth attempt to fly solo around the world by balloon. He succeeded in achieving his aim on 2 July 2002, landing in Queensland, Australia. He completed the journey in 13 - 14 days and covered approximately 31 260 kilometres.

2007  -             The MV Pasha Bulker is refloated after running aground off Newcastle, New South Wales, almost a month earlier.

The MV Pasha Bulker was a Japanese bulk freighter which gained some notoriety in Australia. Measuring 225 m long with a beam of 32.2 m and a mass of 76,741 metric tons, its cargo hold capacity was 90,911 cubic metres.

On 8 June 2007, it was waiting in the open ocean outside the Newcastle harbour to load coal during stormy conditions. Ignoring warnings to move further out to see to avoid the storm, the ship ran aground about 30 metres off Nobby's Beach around mid-morning. Later investigations indicated the ship's captain failed to take proper precautions as it still had a fully operational engine room and both anchors stored when it beached. The primarily Filipino and Korean crew were rescued by the Westpac Rescue helicopter service directly from the ship. Due to the storm, the ship was forced into a position virtually parallel to the beach, where it stuck firmly on the sand and became trapped between the beach and a rocky reef.

After almost three weeks of assessment and preparation, the first salvage attempt was undertaken on 28 June, on the high tide. However, when one of the cables connecting the ship to the tug boat Keera snapped, the procedure was aborted. Another attempt the following day was similarly hampered when cables attached to the Supertug 'Pacific Responder' and a sea anchor also broke. On the 1st of July, three salvage tugs successfully turned the carrier so that it faced deep water and was close to being able to clear the reef. However, further action was deferred amid fears of an oil leak - which turned out to be a small amount of lubricating oil.

The third attempt was made to tow the Pasha Bulker the following day. Finally, at around 9;37pm on the evening of 2 July 2007, the ship was successfully refloated. After being towed 11 nautical miles, or 20 km, from the shore it was inspected for oil spills and hull damage. Minor repairs were made in Newcastle before the ship was then towed back to Japan by the Japanese supertug Koyo Maru.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1054  -             Chinese astronomers observe the supernova explosion which created the Crab Nebula.

According to the observations of Chinese astronomers, on 4 July 1054 a "guest star" suddenly appeared where one had never been seen before, and was bright enough to be visible in daylight. Its brightness gradually faded over a period of two years, but its position was recorded and mapped. Petroglyphs of the North American Indians indicate that they, too observed and recorded the phenomenon. In 1758 a French amateur astronomer, Charles Messier, discovered a nebulous patch similar in appearance to the claw of a crab near the star Zeta Taurui on the border of Taurus and Auriga where the bright star had been seen. Thus, the phenomenon came to be known as the Crab Nebula.

1776  -             Today is Independence Day in the United States, celebrating the signing of the American Declaration of Independence.

The American Declaration of Independence is the document which declared the American colonies' independence from England. On 11 June 1776 the "Committee of Five", consisting of John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Robert R Livingston of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, was formed to draft a suitable declaration. The declaration was essentially the work of Jefferson, who showed it to other committee members, who made several minor corrections. Jefferson then produced another copy incorporating these changes. The final draft was submitted to the US Congress on 28 June 1776.

In early July 1776, representatives of the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted the final draft of the Declaration of Independence. All the colonies voted in favour of the resolution, and the Declaration was ratified on 4 July 1776, a day which came to be celebrated as Independence Day. John Han****, the president of the Second Continental Congress, was the first to sign the Declaration. Whilst some regions of the United States began to set aside July 4 as a day of celebration soon after adopting the Declaration, it was only in 1783, when the war of independence against the British ended, that the day was declared a holiday in some areas.

1854  -             Controversial Australian political figure, King O'Malley, is born.

King O'Malley was born on 4 July 1854 at Stanford Farm on the Canadian American border, although the exact date and place of his birth is not completely certain. He immigrated to Australia in 1889 where he worked as an itinerant insurance salesman, also preaching evangelical Christianity and temperance. In 1895 he settled in Gawler, South Australia, and in 1896 he was elected to the South Australian House of Assembly as a radical democrat, opposed to the wealthy landowners who then dominated colonial politics.

O'Malley became a controversial figure and prominent in Australian politics. He became Minister for Home Affairs and played a prominent role in selecting the site of the future capital of Australia. O'Malley drove in the first survey peg marking the beginning of the development of the city of Canberra on 20 February 1913. A teetotaller, he was responsible for the highly unpopular ban on alcohol in the Australian Capital Territory. He was instrumental in beginning the building of the Transcontinental Railway from Melbourne to Perth, and pushed for the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, a state-owned savings and investment bank. He was also the one who advocated the spelling of "Labor" in the Australian Labor Party as being more modern than "Labour".

O'Malley died on 20 December 1953, the last survivor of the first Commonwealth Parliament. His role in helping to develop the national capital is remembered in Canberra with the suburb of O'Malley being named after him.

1884  -             France presents the Statue of Liberty as a gift to the people of America.

The Statue of Liberty is a copper neoclassical statue which stands on Liberty Island, formerly Bedloe's Island, in New York Harbor. Commonly regarded as a symbol of freedom to Americans, its full title is "Liberty Enlightening the World". Gustave Eiffel was the Structural Engineer of the Statue of Liberty and its Sculptor was Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. The idea of presenting the United States with a monument was proposed by French author, historian, jurist and anti-slavery activist Edouard de Laboulaye in 1865.

Bartholdi was commissioned to design a sculpture with a completion date of 1876, the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence. The statue was completed in Paris in June 1884, presented to America by the people of France on 4 July 1884, then dismantled and shipped to US in 1885 as 350 individual pieces in 214 crates. In response, the American community in Paris gave a return gift to the French of a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty, standing about 11 metres high, and sculpted to a quarter-size scale. This statue now stands approximately one and a half kilometres downstream from the Eiffel Tower on Ile des Cygnes, an island in the Seine River.

1991  -             Prominent and highly respected heart surgeon, Victor Chang, is gunned down in Sydney.

 Victor Peter Chang (Yam Him) was born in Shanghai, China, on 21 November 1936. The death of his mother from cancer when he was twelve years old was a deciding factor in his choice to become a doctor. He came to Australia to complete his secondary schooling in 1953, then studied medicine at the University of Sydney, graduating with a Bachelor of Medical Science with first class honours in 1960, and a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1962. After further study in England, and becoming a Fellow of both the Royal College of Surgeons and American College of Surgeons, he joined the cardiothoracic team at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, in 1972.

The era of successful heart transplants in Australia can be attributed largely to the influence of Dr Victor Chang. He was instrumental in raising funds to establish a heart transplant programme at St Vincent's. The first successful transplant under the programme was performed on a 39 year old shearer from Armidale in February 1984, who survived several months longer than he would have otherwise. Arguably, Chang's best-known success was when he operated on Fiona Coote, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, on 7-8 April 1984. Over the next six years, the unit at St Vincent's performed over 197 heart transplants and 14 heart-lung transplants, achieving a 90% success rate for recipients in the first year. To compensate for the lack of heart donors, Chang developed an artificial heart valve and also worked on designing an artificial heart.

Victor Chang was murdered in the suburb of Mosman on 4 July 1991, after two Malaysian men rammed Chang's car, forced him to stop, and demanded money. When Chang refused, the men killed him. The murder was related to transplant waiting lists. Within less than two weeks, Chiew Seng Liew was charged with the murder, and Jimmy Tan was charged as an accessory. The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, to enable research into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of heart muscle diseases, was launched in honour of Victor Chang on 15 February 1994.

2015  -             The first ever oceanic crossing by a completely solar-powered aircraft, the Solar Impulse 2, is completed.

Solar Impulse 2 is long-range experimental solar-powered aircraft project developed in Switzerland. It is also the name of the two solar-powered aircraft in the project. The concept of a long-range solar-powered aircraft project was developed by Swiss aeronaut Bertrand Piccard, who co-piloted the first balloon to circle the globe, Breitling Orbiter 3, along with Swiss businessman and pilot André Borschberg. The prototype, Solar Impulse 1, conducted its first test flight in December 2009, and in July 2010 it flew 26 hours for an entire day and night. This proved the worth of the project, and was followed by further solar-powered test flights, including a multi-stage flight across the United States in 2013.

Solar Impulse 2 was completed in 2014. It held a number of improvements, including more solar cells and more powerful motors. It was launched from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates on 9 March 2015 in an attempt to circumnavigate the world. Despite setbacks in the weather, the riskiest leg of the journey, the five-day non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Hawaii was undertaken successfully and completed on 4 July 2015. This was considered a record-breaking flight. However, the next leg of the journey, from Hawaii to the US mainland, and thus the continuation of the round-the-world venture, was postponed until 2016, due to damaged batteries.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1788  -             Governor Arthur Phillip sends a despatch to the British under-secretary of state, detailing the dire situation with rations in the New South Wales colony.

When Governor Arthur Phillip raised the British flag at Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, high hopes were held for the development of a self-sufficient colony in New South Wales. Problems arose very early, however. Much of the grain that the British had brought on the First Fleet had either gone mouldy or had been eaten by rats, so little grain remained to be planted. The English tools were not strong enough to clear the tough vegetation or to break up the soil for ploughing and planting, and broke easily. The convicts themselves were disinclined to work, a situation made worse by the hot and humid conditions. Very few of them had experience in farming. As a result, the colony faced near-starvation in its first two years, and Phillip had to bring in drastic measures to preserve the remaining food until supplies could be replenished.

Rations had to be meted out very carefully until farms could start producing crops. Many convicts were hungry enough to steal food, and punishment for theft was severe, ranging from lashing with a cat o' nine tails, or even death by hanging. On 5 July 1788, in a despatch to the under-secretary of state, Evan Nepean, Phillip detailed the weekly rations awarded to both working male convicts and the marines who guarded them. These men received "7 pounds of bread or in lieu thereof 7 pounds of flour, 7 pounds of beef or in lieu thereof pork, 3 pins of pease, 6 ounces of butter, 1 pound of flour or in lieu thereof 12 pounds of rice". Women were given two-thirds of this amount and most of the children received one-third.

Fortunately, thanks to Phillip's forethought, Sydney was saved from complete starvation. The Norfolk Island colony, established soon after the arrival of the First Fleet, proved to be crucial, developing as a farm and supplying Sydney with grain and vegetables during the early years of the colony's near-starvation.

1811  -             Venezuela becomes the first South American country to declare independence from Spain.

The first permanent Spanish settlement in South America was founded in Venezuela in 1522. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the people of Venezuela began to seek independence from colonial rule. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe weakened Spain's imperial power, and the people of Venezuela siezed the opportunity to assert their own control. They achieved autonomy after a coup on 19 April 1810, and later declared independence from Spain on 5 July 1811. The war for independence continued for many years, during which half of Venezuela's white population was killed, until the country achieved independence from Spain in 1821 under the leadership of Simon Bolivar. Venezuela, along with what are now Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, was part of the Republic of Gran Colombia until 1830, when Venezuela separated and became a sovereign country.

1900  -             British Parliament passes the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act.

When Captain Arthur Phillip arrived in Port Jackson with First Fleet of convicts on 26 January 1788, he raised the British flag and claimed the entire eastern part of the Australian continent, including Van Diemens Land. As Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of New South Wales, Phillip was required to take formal possession on behalf of the British Crown, of territory ... extending from the Northern Cape or extremity of the coast called Cape York to the southern extremity of the said territory of New South Wales or South Cape and of all the country inland westward as far as the one hundred and thirty-fifth degree of east longitude . Gradually, Great Britain extended the borders west to offset French interests, until the entire continent was claimed.

Six distinct colonies emerged, each achieving self-government at different times through the decades, although all remained subject to the authority of the British Government. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the push for federation of the states gained momentum. Seven delegates were selected from each of the colonies to formulate a draft constitution, along with three delegates from New Zealand. Numerous constitutional conventions and conferences were held between 1891 and the end of the century. By early 1898, a draft constitution had been agreed upon. It was brought before each of the colonial parliaments for approval. The constitutional system protected the rights of the states, while establishing a national government to represent their common interests. Initially rejected by the states, amendments were made in 1899, and the final draft was approved by the Australian people via a referendum held in each colony. It was necessary for the British Parliament to also agree to the constitution, so further alterations were negotiated.

The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act was passed by British parliament on 5 July 1900. This document set out guidelines for how the Federation would be founded, and how the laws and authorities of the new nation would be shaped. The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution was then given Royal Assent on 9 July 1900.

1905  -             Australia's second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, commences his second term.

Alfred Deakin was born on 3 August 1856 in Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. In 1879, Deakin gained a seat in the colonial Parliament of Victoria, and after holding office in several ministries, he began to turn his efforts towards the push for Federation. Following Federation in 1901, he was elected to the first federal Parliament as MP for Ballarat, becoming Attorney-General in Prime Minister Edmund Barton's government.

Deakin succeeded Barton as Prime Minister in 1902 when the latter retired. Deakin's own Protectionist Party did not hold a majority in either house, and he was unwilling to accept aspects of Labor's legislation, so he retired in 1904. Watson and Reid succeeded him, but when they proved unable to maintain a stable ministry, Deakin was returned to office, on 5 July 1905. He was pushed out by the Labor Party in 1908, but after forming a coalition with Reid, Deakin again returned as Prime Minister in 1909 heading up a majority government, a position he held until his defeat at the polls in 1910. Deakin retired from politics altogether in 1913, and died in 1919.

1954  -             The BBC in Britain broadcasts its first daily television news programme.

Prior to the advent of live news broadcasting, television studios relayed news in the form of Newsreels. Being prepared ahead of time, Newsreels consisted of news events already a day or more old. Britain's first television news programme was broadcast on the BBC on 5 July 1954. The bulletin went for 20 minutes and was read by Richard Baker. The newsreader was not shown, but his voice was heard reading the current news, while headlines, still photographs and maps were shown on the screen. Richard Baker went on to become best known as the anchor man for the BBC news from 1954 to 1982.

1996  -             Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell, is born.

Dolly the sheep was created at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. The cell from which she was cloned was taken from a six year old ewe. Whilst she was born on 5 July 1996, scientists did not announce her birth until February 22 of the following year. The cloning technique used in the creation of Dolly was somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus from one of the donor's non-reproductive cells is placed into a de-nucleated embryonic cell and coaxed into developing into a foetus.

Dolly died from complications related to a lung infection on 14 February 2003. There has been ongoing controversy since Dolly's birth and death, particularly revolving around the suggestion that Dolly was subject to premature ageing, as the cell from which she was cloned was taken from a 6 year old sheep.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1535  -             Sir Thomas More is executed for treason after refusing to recognise King Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church in England.

Sir Thomas More was a scholar, lawyer, diplomat and Christian humanist. More initially served as personal secretary to King Henry VIII, but gradually became entrusted with more responsibilities, eventually rising to the position of Chancellor. However, he resigned from this position the day after Henry VIII manipulated Parliament to remove the freedom of the Church that had been written into English law since the Magna Carta. More was imprisoned in the Tower of London before being executed fifteen months later, on 6 July 1535, for refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church in England.

1841  -             Australian explorer Eyre reaches King's River, just short of his final destination of King George's Sound on his epic journey from east to west, only to find the river too high to cross on horseback.

Edward John Eyre's westward journey across the Australian continent began at Streaky Bay on 3 November 1841. He and his Aboriginal guide, Wylie, had faced starvation after the other two Aborigines in the party shot and killed Eyre's overseer, John Baxter, and made off with most of the supplies. Early in June they received respite when they came across a French Whaling ship, the "Mississippi", captained by John Rossiter. They stayed with the ship for nearly two weeks, but with King George's Sound only another 300 miles away, Eyre was anxious to push on. His final hurdle before reaching the Sound came in the form of the deep King River, on 6 July 1841. Unwilling to wait for the tide to recede, Eyre and Wylie left their horses and supplies on the river bank and crossed on foot, holding above their heads their most necessary items for survival.

1885  -             Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine is tested successfully on nine-year-old Joseph Meister.

The rabies vaccine was invented by French chemist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was born on 27 December 1822 in Dole, Jura, France. Known as the founder of microbiology, he moved into this field when he discovered the role of bacteria in fermentation. His experiments with bacteria conclusively disproved the theory of spontaneous generation and led to the theory that infection is caused by germs.

Recognising that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms, Pasteur's research soon led others to investigate sterilisation, disinfection, vaccines, and eventually antibiotics. Pasteur created and tested vaccines for diphtheria, cholera, yellow fever, plague, rabies, anthrax, and tuberculosis.

The rabies vaccine was first tested on nine-year-old Joseph Meister, on 6 July 1885. After being bitten by a rabid dog, Meister was treated by Pasteur with a rabies virus grown in rabbits and weakened by drying, a treatment he had earlier tried on dogs. The treatment was successful and Joseph did not develop rabies. Meister later went on to become a caretaker at the Pasteur Institute.

1942  -             WWII diarist Anne Frank and her family are forced into hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.

Anne Frank was a German Jew who, as a teenager, was forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust of World War II. Born on 12 June 1929, she suffered through persecution of the Jews in WWII. On 6 July 1942, Anne was forced to go into hiding as German troops invaded and occupied the Netherlands. She, her family and four other people spent two years in an annex of rooms above her fathers office in Amsterdam. After two years of living in this way, they were betrayed to the Nazis and deported to concentration camps. Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, just two months before the end of the war. Her legacy is her diary, originally given to her as a simple autograph/notebook for her thirteenth birthday. In it she recorded not only the personal details of her life, but also her observations of living under Nazi occupation until the final entry of 1 August 1944.

1943  -             The last of the heavy Japanese bombing attacks on Darwin occurs, though less serious attacks continue.

 Darwin, capital city of Australia's Northern Territory, was just a small town with a civilian population of less than 2000 during World War II. Nonetheless, it was a strategically-placed naval port and airbase. The first of an estimated 64 air raids against Darwin during 1942-43 occurred on 19 February 1942. At least 243 civilians and military personnel were killed, not counting the indigenous Australians whose deaths were not counted, as the Japanese launched two waves of planes comprising 242 bombers and fighters.

Following the February raid, other parts of Australia including Darwin, northwest Western Australia and even regions of far north Queensland were subject to over one hundred more raids. Airport base areas attacked included Townsville, Katherine, Wyndham, Derby and Port Hedland, while Milingimbi, Exmouth Gulf and Horn Island were also targeted. 63 more Japanese raids occurred against Darwin and its immediate surroundings, some of them heavier than others. On 6 July 1943, the last of the heavy air attacks against Darwin occurred. The attack was directed against the US Liberator base at Fenton, located about 150 kilometres south of Darwin. Three pilots were killed, while three bombers damaged and eight Spitfires and a Liberator were destroyed.

Three more minor attacks were carried out in August. The final attack on Australian soil occurred on 12 November 1943. There was only minor damage around the town of Darwin, and no casualties.

1988  -             167 people are killed in the world's worst offshore oil disaster when the Piper Alpha oil drilling platform explodes and catches fire in the North Sea off Scotland.

The Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd. The rig was situated about 193km off the north-east coast of Scotland. In its time, it produced approximately 10 percent of the oil and gas production from the North Sea. The platform began production in 1976, first as an oil platform and then later converted to gas production. In 1988, it was the centre of a network of pipes from other rigs pumping to the shore. It was also the location of the world's worst offshore oil disaster.

On 6 July 1988, leakage from a buildup of natural gas condensate ignited, causing a massive explosion. The explosion then ignited secondary oil fires, melting the riser of an upstream gas pipeline. The released gas caused a second, larger explosion which engulfed the entire platform, with the resultant fire reaching over 100m into the air and visible from 100km away. Out of the 225 who worked on the platform, 167 people were killed. An investigation into the disaster blamed the design of the platform, such as the absence of blast walls, and safety procedures on the rig, including evacuation plans.

1997  -             The robot buggy 'Sojourner' is released from the space probe, Mars Pathfinder, to begin exploring Mars.

The Mars Pathfinder, a space probe launched on 4 December 1996 by NASA aboard a Delta II rocket, was the first of a series of missions to Mars that included rovers, or robotic exploration vehicles. It landed on Mars on 4 July 1997. It consisted of a lander and a lightweight wheeled robot, or rover, called Sojourner. The rover, named after the famous American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, was designed to execute different experiments on the Martian surface.

There were initially difficulties in releasing the rover from the lander. Scientists from NASA worked to remotely free the robot from the probe when it was obstructed first by a partially deflated airbag, then by communication difficulties between computers on board the probe and the 'Sojourner'. It was finally released from the probe two days later, on 6 July 1997. The Sojourner, weighing approximately 10kg and mounted with a camera, travelled on 6 wheels designed to move independently in order to cope with the Mars terrain. The first information the Sojourner recorded was a surface temperature of minus 93 degrees C.

The final data transmission from Mars was on 27 September 1997. During that time, the Mars Pathfinder returned 16,500 images from the lander and 550 images from the rover, as well as more than 15 chemical analyses of rocks and soil and extensive data on winds and other weather factors. Contact with the lander was eventually lost on sol (Mars solar day) 83. The exact reason for the final failure of the lander is not certain, but it was probably due to a failure of a battery, resulting in night-time cooling of the spacecraft that rendered it inoperable. NASA ceased its efforts to recontact Pathfinder on 10 March 1998.

Cheers - John

Gday...

1817  -             Explorer John Oxley declares the rich pasture land around the Lachlan River as "forever uninhabitable".

Three years after the successful crossing of the Blue Mountains by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth in 1813, explorer John Oxley set off to search for more pasture land. George Evans had discovered the Lachlan River, so Oxley set out to determine its course with Evans as his second-in-command, in the first large-scale exploring expedition in Australian history.

Along the way, the progress of Oxley's party was frequently stopped by marshes as it was a flood year. He was unable to continue with either horses or boats, as the flooding hid snags and dangerous obstacles lurking just below the surface. Oxley departed from what he called "the immense marshes of this desolate and barren country" and headed south-west in search of further rivers.

Oxley's party stopped just fifty kilometres short of the Murrumbidgee River, ironically because of lack of water. After describing the countryside in numerous negative terms such as "melancholy", "miserable" and "impossible desert", Oxley abandoned his southward trek and returned to the upper reaches of the Lachlan where the river channel was again lost amongst floods and swampland. This led Oxley to the conclusion that the interior of NSW was largely marshland and unsuitable for settlement. On 7 July 1817, Oxley declared what is now valuable pastureland around the Lachlan River to be "forever uninhabitable, and useless for the purposes of civilised man".

1826  -             Sir Charles Todd, a crucial figure in securing the construction of Australia Overland Telegraph Line, is born.

Charles Todd was born on 7 July 1826 in London, England. He came to Adelaide with his wife Alice, after whom Alice Springs is named, on 5 November 1855. He was instrumental in linking Adelaide and Melbourne by telegraph in 1858, and five years later began addressing the possibility of linking Australia with the rest of the world via telegraph. As Superintendent of Telegraphs and Government Astronomer in South Australia, he persuaded the government to build the 3200km overland telegraph from Port Augusta in the south to the port of Darwin in the north. The British-Australian Telegraph Company would then connect the cable from Darwin to Java.

During the construction of the Line, the Todd River was named and discovered. The telegraph line was completed in 1872. Todd, later given the position of Postmaster General in South Australia, was also involved in early experiments with the telephone in Australia, trialling voice transmissions over distances up to 400 kilometres, between 1786 and 1788. His legacy to Australia was in enabling the young country to maintain up-to-date communications with the rest of the world, whether by telegraph or telephone.

1835  -             Escaped convict William Buckley, after whom the phrase "Buckley's Chance" was named, gives himself up.

William Buckley was born in Marton, Cheshire, England in 1780. He arrived in Australia as a convict, and was a member of the first party of Europeans to attempt the first settlement at Sorrento, on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. On 27 December 1803, soon after his arrival, he escaped from custody.

Despite the friendliness of the local indigenous Wathaurong people, Buckley was concerned they might turn hostile, and initially chose to try to survive on his own. However, he soon realised his inability to fend for himself in the harsh bushland, and he sought out the Wathaurong again. On his way, he happened upon a spear stuck in the grave of a recently deceased member of the tribe; the Aborigines, finding him with the spear, believed he was their tribal member returned from the dead, and greeted his appearance with feasting and a corroboree. Buckley spent the next 32 years living among the indigenous Wathaurong people. Bridging the cultural gap between Europeans and Aborigines, he gained many valuable bush skills and was a crucial factor in reconciliation in those early days. To keep the peace between the two races, Buckley gave himself up to free settler John Batman's landing party on 7 July 1835.

Ultimately, Buckley was pardoned and became a respected civil servant. The Australian saying "Buckley's chance" means to have a very slim chance, and was spawned by his amazing story of survival in the bush.

1841  -             Explorer Edward Eyre completes the first crossing of Australia from east to west, travelling across the Nullarbor Plain from Adelaide to Albany.

Edward John Eyre was born on 5 August 1815 in Hornsea, Yorkshire. After coming to Australia, he gained valuable bush skills whilst droving cattle overland from Sydney through to the Liverpool Plains, Molonglo and Port Phillip.

From 1839, Eyre made several exploration ventures into the countryside north of Adelaide. In June 1840, Eyre left Adelaide to explore north towards the centre of Australia. He encountered salt lake after salt lake: each time he attempted to go around a salt lake, he found his way barred by yet another. This led to Eyre's theory that Adelaide was surrounded by a vast horseshoe-shaped salt lake. By sheer bad luck, Eyre was unable to locate any of the breaks between the numerous salt-lakes which encircled the area, but by no means prevented access through to Australia's interior. It was another 18 years before other explorers disproved his theory.

He then turned his attentions towards the goal of being the first European explorer to cross overland from east to west. Departing from Fowler's Bay on what is now the Eyre Peninsula, he travelled across the Nullarbor Plain to King George's Sound, now called Albany. He began the journey with his overseer, John Baxter, and three other Aborigines, intending to cross the continent from south to north. On the cliffs at the edge of the Great Australian Bight, two of the Aborigines killed Baxter whilst attempting to steal food and weapons. They disappeared into the night and were not seen again. Eyre and his faithful remaining Aboriginal companion, Wylie, endured months of gruelling trekking across the Nullarbor, finally reaching Albany and civilisation on 7 July 1841.

1958  -             The highest ever recorded tsunami hits Lituya Bay, Alaska.

Tsunamis are natural phenomena which may be generated by coastal or submarine earthquakes, by underwater volcanoes, or the displacement of huge amounts of rock and soil from another source. "Tsunami" is a Japanese word for harbour wave, but they are not the same as tidal waves. Tsunamis may vary in height from a mere few centimetres to well in excess of 50 metres.

The largest ever tsunami in recorded history occurred in Lituya Bay, Alaska, on 7 July 1958. An earthquake measuring between 7.9 and 8.3 on the Richter Scale occurred along a nearby faultline, displacing approximately 40 million cubic yards of dirt and glacier from a mountainside at the head of the Bay. The resultant landslide triggered a tsunami, or series of waves, the tallest of which reached an estimated 524 metres (1700 feet) in height.

Two people were killed when their fishing boat was sunk. Other damage was minimal due to the fact that the area is so remote. Scientists determined the height by finding the high water mark on nearby land.

1996  -             In Australia, the average cost of a Big Mac is $1.97.

McDonalds, in the "assembly line" format we know it today, was begun by Richard and Maurice McDonald back in December 1948. It was an unusual venture of its time, having only a limited menu of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, french fries and drinks, which allowed for quicker and cheaper production. The first McDonalds opened in Australia in 1971. Whatever the cost is of a Big Mac today, back on 7 July 1996, an average Big Mac in Australia would set the buyer back only $1.97.           

2005  -             A series of bomb attacks rocks London, killing over 50 people, at the opening of the G8 meeting in Scotland.

Just a day after Britons received the welcome news that London had been chosen to host the 2012 Olympic Games, the city was hit by a series of bomb blasts. On 7 July 2005, also the first day of the 31st G8 summit, three blasts targeted the Underground railway system and a double decker bus was blown apart. 52 people were killed and 700 injured in the explosions which came during the busy morning peak hour. Whilst the Underground bombs were determined to have been set off remotely, there is speculation that a terrorist prematurely set off the bomb that ripped open the double decker bus. No warning of the impending attacks was issued to police or authorities.

Al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the bombing of New York's World Trade Centre on 11 September 20001, issued a videotaped statement in September claiming it was behind the London bombings. However, police investigators identified four men whom they believed to be suicide bombers. As of April 2006 it is believed that the bombers acted alone, and that the attack was probably planned with a budget of only a few hundred pounds sterling by 4 men using information from the Internet.

Cheers - John

Wow - Big Mac - $1.97- went to Macca's the other day - 2 x quarter pounders, 1 large chips, orange juice and -$20!!!!!!