Gday...

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