Gday...

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.

Cheers - John