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.

1894  -      The International Olympic Committee Is Founded

Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded following efforts by Pierre de Coubertin to reinstate the ancient Olympic Games that were first held in Greece in 776 BCE. Today, the IOC constitutes a single legal entity that organizes the Summer and Winter Olympic Games and owns copyrights, trademarks, and other intangible properties associated with the Games, such as the Olympic logos.

1894  -       Alfred Kinsey is born

Kinsey was an American biologist noted for his 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and its 1953 follow-up, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Based upon thousands of interviews, the Kinsey Reports generated much controversy because they discussed taboo subjects, challenged conventional beliefs about sexuality, and approached sexual variation in a nonjudgmental, value-neutral fashion.

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".  

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