Gday...

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.

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