Gday...

1861  -             William Landsborough organises a relief expedition to find the missing Australian explorers Burke and Wills.

Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills set off from Melbourne in 1860 with a huge party of men, supplies and camels, aiming to be the first to cross Australia's interior from south to north and back again. Only one of the party survived the entire trek: John King, who was tended to by the Aborigines of the Cooper Creek area.

A number of expeditions set out to rescue Burke and Wills when their fate was still unknown. The first of these was led by Alfred Howitt, leaving from Melbourne; the second left from Adelaide under the leadership of William McKinlay; a third set out from Rockhampton, under Frederick Walker. Howitt's expedition determined the untimely fate of Burke and Wills, but his report did not reach the major town centres before the other expeditions set out. William Landsborough, born in 1825, led the fourth expedition to find Burke and Wills. He departed from Brisbane on 14 August 1861, and in the course of his search, became the first recorded explorer to cross the continent from north to south, although the official honours for the first successful crossing south to north and back again (alive) went to John McDouall Stuart. It is notable that McKinlay's journals of his relief expedition also suggest he crossed the continent but he, too, remains uncredited.

1875  -             The Queenslander newspaper reports on the first ever game of Association Football, later Soccer, played in Australia.

Soccer is a popular sport in Australia, and is played by men and women at both the recreational and professional level. Soccer had its origins in Association Football which was quite distinct from either Australian Rules Football or Rugby Football, both of which had formed as new codes in the southern colonies of Victoria and New South Wales during the 1850s and 1860s. Reports of early football games in the Brisbane area appear to have been played under the code of Melbourne Rules which later became Australian Rules.

On 14 August 1875, newspaper The Queenslander reported on the first game of London Association Football ever played in Brisbane. The match had taken place a week earlier, on 7 August, between the Brisbane Football Club and the inmates and warders of the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum, now Wolston Park Hospital at Goodna. One of the rules stipulated that the ball should be neither carried nor handled under any circumstances. This code later became known as soccer'. Not only was the Brisbane game the earliest known such game played in the Brisbane region, it was most likely the first to be played in Australia. In 1884, soccer games commenced on a regular basis in Brisbane.

1945  -             Japan surrenders in WWII.

Japan, a major antagonist in WWII, had suffered catastrophic losses following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively, and conventional attacks upon other major cities, such as the firebombing of Tokyo. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria debilitated the only significant forces the Japanese still had left. The USA had captured the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, bringing the Japanese homeland within range of naval and air attack. Hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, and millions more were casualties or refugees of war.

Japan surrendered to the Allies on 14 August 1945, when Emperor Hirohito accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, also known as the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender. The official surrender papers were signed on 2 September 1945 aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

1963  -             The Yirrkala Bark Petitions are presented to the Australian Parliament, becoming a catalyst to the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Commonwealth law.

The Yirrkala Bark Petitions were pair of bark paintings sent to the Australian Parliament in 1963. They were signed by 13 clan leaders of the Yolngu people of Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula in northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, in response to the announcement by Prime Minister Robert Menzies that bauxite mining leases could be granted by the Federal Government. The Yolngu people sought recognition of their rights to the land they had traditionally occupied by using traditional forms, combining bark painting with text typed on paper for the petitions the first of their kind.

The Bark petitions protested the granting of mining rights on 300 square kilometres of land which had been excised from Arnhem Land, and called for the government to reconsider its decision. They also requested that a Parliamentary committee be sent to speak directly with tribal elders. There had been no consultation with Aboriginal leaders regarding the mining licences, and the Yolngu people were concerned that the mining would not only disturb their sacred sites, but restrict their own access to such sites.

The petitions were first tabled in the House of Representatives on 14 August 1963 by Jock Nelson, Member of Parliament for the Northern Territory, and again on 28 August by the Leader of the Opposition, Arthur Caldwell. The first traditional documents to be recognised by the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia, the documents sought to gain the Commonwealth Parliament's recognition of rights to traditional indigenous lands on the Gove Peninsula. Although the petitions did not achieve constitutional change directly, they were a catalyst to the process of legislative and constitutional reform which led to the eventual recognition of Indigenous rights and people in Australian law. They brought about changes to the Constitution in the 1967 referendum, which led to the statutory acknowledgement of Aboriginal land rights a decade later, and the overturning of the concept of terra nullius by the High Court in 1992. Thus, the petitions were instrumental in shaping the nations acknowledgment of Aboriginal people and their native land rights.

2000  -             An operation gets underway to rescue the men stranded in the sunk Russian submarine, the 'Kursk', in the Arctic Circle.

Two days earlier, the Russian submarine 'Kursk' was on an exercise of firing dummy torpedoes at a battlecruiser when an explosion ripped through the first two of nine compartments. As the 'Kursk' hit the seabed, more on-board torpedoes exploded, registering 1.5 on the Richter scale, blasting a two-metre-square hole in the hull and ripping open the third and fourth compartments. Russia waited two days before it released details of the accident to the world, on 14 August 2000, by which time the country had sent out ten of its own ships to the distressed submarine. There was no radio contact with the survivors in the 'Kursk', only the sound of them pounding on the hull. By the time any other nations could offer assistance, the 'Kursk' was lying lifeless and powerless 150m down on the seabed of the Barents Sea. The delay contributed to the loss of all on board.

A salvage team from the Netherlands was finally able to retrieve the 'Kursk' in October 2001.

2003  -             North America suffers a power outage affecting over 50 million people.

The United States has suffered a number of major power outages in the last few decades, with millions of consumers affected in 1965, 1977 and 1996. To date, the biggest was the one that occurred in the middle of summer, on 14 August 2003, hitting the northeastern states and Canada.

50 million people were affected in a massive breakdown in the power grid which was initially attributed to terrorist attack. However, investigations later indicated that the fault lay mainly with the Ohio-based plant operator, FirstEnergy. When one of FirstEnergy's plants shut down unexpectedly, it severed a major supply route into the main electrical grid. The alarm system failed to alert employees to the problem, meaning that the plant did not opt out of the electrical grid. This created enormous extra demands on neighbouring power grids, which in turn caused overloading, and ultimately led to a domino effect as other power supplies failed one by one. Many areas had power restored within 30 hours, although full service to all affected areas was not restored for a week.   

Cheers - John