Twenty Third day of the month of October throughout the not-so-many eons of Oz history

1786 - Barron Field, who claimed to be the first poet of Australia *ahem* and was for a number of years an actual judge in New South Wales, was hatched today.


1789 - A 15 year old Matthew Flinders' joined the Royal Navy at the muster of the ship Alert, although her did not sail on her. 
*He's important as he sailed all around Oz, but more importantly he was proudly owned by a cat named Trim.

1803 - Rev. Robert (Bobby) Knopwood conducted the Very First Anglican Church Parade on the spot that is now Sorrento, Victoria, as part of the brand new Collins Settlement in which the convicts, in tattered clothes, were told to give thanks for their safe arrival.

Nice.

1813 - Erstwhile explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt, was pupped in Prussia (now Germany) before he, too got itchy feet to go tramping all over the Fair Isle of Oz.... until he didn't.

1823 - John Oxley farewelled his friends as he tip-toed through the tulips on his way outta Sydney to scope out the areas northwards for a suitable site for a new settlement, as he surveyed the coast betwixt Gladstone and Fingal Head in the previously mentioned HMSC Mermaid (that Phillip Parker King drove into a tree!!!) which led to the Brisbane River discovery of the Oxley person paddling about its tootsies.

Ballroom dancing, anyone?

1861 - South Australian John McKinlay’s relief expedition to locate Burke and Wills found the burial site of party member Charles Gray.

1861 - John Davis, fellow member of John McKinley's expedition, wrote in his diary;

"Awfully hot day, and no wind to help us. We read today the story of poor Kennedy's sad exploring expedition. Poor fellow, perhaps we may all of us share the same fate as his companions, who all died or were killed, like himself, on their perilous journey, with the exception of a black fellow. Watch kept all night; natives close at hand." [sic]

1862 Jackey – Indigenous man. Hanged at Bathurst for the sexual assault of Louisa Brown at Winburndale.

1884 Thomas Henry Carbury was Hanged at the Perth Gaol for the murder of Constable Hackett at Beverley.

1893 George Thomas Blantern was Hanged at Boggo Road Gaol for the murder of Flora McDonald at Marlborough Station.

1907 - Augustin De Kitchilan was Hanged at Fremantle Prison for the murder of Leah Fouracre at Peppermint Grove Farm.

1907 - Today saw the opening of the Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work in Melbourne's glorious Exhibition Building by Lady Northcote, (spouse of 1st Baron Northcote aka Henry aka 3rd Governor-General), with Pattie Deakin, (spouse of 2nd PM Alfred Deakin), running a very popular model creche during the five-week exhibition showcasing the work of musicians, artists and craftswomen, which was open to ALL women, including Aboriginal/Indigenous women.

Lady Northcote

1917 - Early wee hours saw the explosion of a brilliantly hued meteor over Ballarat

1937 – The ACTU politely requested that the Oz Government cease and desist trading with Japan, following the not-so-polite Japanese invasion of China.

1942 – The Battle of El Alamein, in Egypt, began with a massive artillery bombardment preceding attacks by British and Australian divisions.

1965 - Canberrans were celebrating (maybe) at the grand opening (not really) of their first two sets of traffic lights in the Great Capital of Oz. Only 32 years and 10 days (but who's counting?) after the Traffic Tarts of Sydney were shaking their ra-ras at their own new-fangled traffic light.

1976 - Much of southern Australia experienced a total solar eclipse....scare.

The city shat itself over the whole eclipse, scared the utter bejebus out of the populace with WARNINGS in the MSM, on the radio INTERRUPTING chit-chat with REPEATED WARNING WARNING WARNINGS  DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN repeatedly all over the shop like a mad woman's washing.

Much of southern Australia wasn't told to sit under the table in their aunt's kitchen, so much of Australia missed out on the lamingtons and lemonade.

22 Twenty twoooooooo October History

1858 The Lying In Hospital that opened today wasn't actually for women who were lazing their days away and you might know it better as the Melbourne Royal Women's Hospital...or whatever they've rebranded themselves as now.

Bendigo Advertiser

1894 Martha Needle was not a very nice lady.
Many people agreed with this sentiment when she was found guilty and hanged at Melbourne Gaol for poisoning her hubby, children and brother-in-law for the in$urance money.
*As a side note, the sea wall at St Kilda was built using bluestone bricks from Old Melbourne Gaol, 14 of them marked with initials and dates of executed people, including Martha herself.

1945 - Today the Royal Australian Navy decommissioned, then handed back the borrowed HMAS Nepal to the Royal Navy which later broke up the ship in 1956.

1956 - Part of the British nuclear tests was codenamed Breakaway; exploded on this day was 10.8 kilotonnes of TNT (45 TJ) from a tower. You can google the images and see what a mess was made.

1965 - A demonstration against the Vietnam War was held in Sydney with 65 people being arrested.

1999 - The leader of the National Party, Pat McNamara announced the (state) National Party would split from the coalition which they had formed with the (state) Liberal Party in 1990.
Didn't last long.

2007 - It was reported that Swedish museum officials handed back the remains of 10 Aboriginal people which had been illegally smuggled out of Australia 100 years before.

2021 - Melbourne waltzed itself out of the last of the lock downs with announcements from the likes of Reuters it was the world's 'most locked down city'

And if you're alive to bitch about, you're welcome.

21 October in Australian history

1800 Where there's a fat sheep there's a fair wether....the good ship Buffalo toddled off to England from Oz with 6 sample Merino fleeces from John Macarthur...er, Mrs Macarthur who did all the hard yakka.

1818 Michael Howe went a' bushranging, changed his title from convict to "Lieutenant Governor of the woods" and ended up in a sticky mess; being shot by Private William Pugh and convict Thomas Worrall will do that, even on the banks of the Shannon River, Tasmania.

1886 - George Chaffey signed a mad-arse agreement with the Victorian Govt to knock together an irrigation settlement at Mildura.

1890 - Proclamation Day on 21 October 1890 was the real beginning of self-government in Western Australia. Proclamation Day was celebrated throughout the Colony; streets were lined with decorations, and events including sports, picnics and, in Perth itself, a 'Monster Tea'. At night fireworks and balls were staged. For many years after 1890 a public holiday known as Proclamation Day was celebrated on 21 October each year and in recent years ceremonies have been arranged on 21 October to commemorate the establishment of the State's Constitution.

1915 -  Vera Deakin, daughter of former PM Alfred Deakin, established Australia's Red Cross Missing and Wounded Enquiry Bureau in Cairo.

1940 Pastor Doug Nicholls made a basic plea for Indigenous Peoples to be treated as equals.

Townsville Daily Bulletin

1957 - Excitement, peoples! Australia's very first automatic telephone weather service made it's grand entrance in Melbourne today.

1969 - Zelda D'Aprano went to the Commonwealth Building, where a number of government offices were located, and chained herself to the entrance of the building in protest for Equal Pay.

1972 - Yippee! The Snowy Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme was officially done and dusted, opened and online.

1978 – Civilian pilot Frederick Valentich went missing in a Cessna 182 over Bass Strait south of Melbourne, after reporting contact with an unidentified aircraft.

1985 - Throughout October 1985 Australian unions carried out industrial bans targeting the racist regime in South Africa. These covered aviation, shipping, building, mail, telecommunications and other industries, then finished with a march and rally in Sydney outside South African Airways on October 21. Their action came after the 1985 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting(CHOGM) meeting in the Bahamas watered down sanctions against apartheid.

2000 - The newly built Melbourne Museum was officially flung open for the great unwashed masses to mass.

2002 – Two people were killed in the Monash University shooting, while five others were injured.

20 October all day til midnight

 1862 The rails sang as the first official train rocked up to Sandhurst aka Bendigo from Melbourne. 

1899 The World's Oldest Blogger , young Olive Riley, was found in the cabbage patch at Broken Hill, and she commenced blogging to promote the idea that "one is not too old for the internet"

All About Olive

1900 Aussies off to war. New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia sent naval contingents as part of a British empire force deployed against anti-western Chinese secret societies.

1939 Compulsory military training Six weeks after Australia entered the Second World War, Menzies announced the reintroduction of compulsory defence training, to take effect on 1 January 1940. Unmarried men aged 21 were required to undergo 3 months training with the militia.

1966 Australia was formally Blessed when the POTUS, LB Johnson, popped in for a chinwag with Harold Holt (before he did the bolt)

1973 The Sydney Opera House was flung opened with gay abandon by the late great Elizabeth II.

1987 Everyone had their tits in a tangle. The Black Monday stock market crash caused the All Ordinaries Index to fall 25%, the single biggest one day drop in the market's history.

1989 The Grafton bus crash occurred, resulting in 21 people killed and 22 injured when a tourist bus collided with a semi-trailer on the Pacific Highway near Grafton.

2023 They didn't care to hear about the plague anymore...

Or some such.

19th October through Oz History

1800 - Napoleon issued instructions to Baudin and Hamelin, who sailed in the Geographe and the Naturaliste, to explore the east and south coasts of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).

1812 – Indefatigable, the first direct convict transport from Britain to Tasmania rocked up in Hobart.

1824 - Having gone for a Sunday ramble around the block to go have a gander at that new Port Phillip, Hume and Hovell managed to eyeball the very fast flowing, very flooded Murrumbidgee River.

1826 - Edwin Smith Hall birthed Sydney's third newspaper, The Monitor.

1833 Great Aussie poet, who wasn't too shabby on the back of a horse, Adam Lindsay Gordon was pupped.

1872 – Holtermann's nugget, a 286 kg slab of granite containing 82.11 kg of gold, was found in New South Wales.

1887 - The steamer SS Cheviot was wrecked at Point Nepean, Victoria, with 35 lives lost.

The nearby beach was afterwards named Cheviot Beach.

This is from where the then-Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared.

1897 - Today saw the delivery of a top chick who helped so many other women made into widows by war  they should have bronzed the baby shoes of the future Mrs Jesse Vasey.

1900 – Bill Ponsford, Australian batsman who twice broke the world record for the highest first-class score, was pupped in North Fitzroy, Melbourne.

1919 - The Darwin Rebellion was finally at an end when the despot ruler Dr Gilruth was evacuated with his family out of the NT.

1945 -The War Widow's Guild of Australia was formed today by Jesse Vasey OBE CBE.

1966 - NZ went all the way with LBJ for the US President's whirl-wind 24 hour visit.

1974 - First general election for the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly was held in the NT and was won by the Country Liberal Party.

1979 - The Aussie Federal Police was formed. This was achieved by merging the Commonwealth Police, ACT Police and the Narcotics Bureau.

1991 – The perjury trial of former Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen ends in a hung jury. Prosecutors decide against a retrial on the basis of Joh's advancing age & divided public opinion.

2000 – Charles Perkins, Aboriginal activist died.

2001 – SIEV-X, an Indonesian fishing boat en route to Christmas Island, carrying over 400 asylum seekers, sank in international waters with the loss of 353 people.

2022 - The first War Widows Day, on the birthday of Jesse Vasey, founder of the War Widows Gild, was celebrated in QLD and NSW.

2024 - The National War Widows Day will be held and celebrated nationally so that all war widows can participate and be honoured in their sacrifice to our country.

18 October Stuff that happened throughout Oz in history

1790 – HMS Supply returned from Batavia with more supplies for the colony. 

1847 The forced exile of Tasmanian Aboriginal People to Wybalenna on Flinders Island paved the way for the unimpeded ongoing invasion of Tasmanian Aboriginal Lands, but the so-called 'friendly mission' came to an end today when the settlement was closed  and the remaining 14 men, 23 women and 10 children were removed and taken to the former convict station at putalina/Oyster Cove.

1854 – Billy Murdoch, regarded as the finest cricket batsman of his day, was hatched in Sandhurst, Victoria.

1869 – The Lithgow Zig Zag Railway was opened. 

1907 - Several of the already-formed new Surf Lifesavings Clubs created the Surf Bathing Association of NSW. Surf Lifesaving clubs soon spread all around the Isle of Oz, with estimations that more than 800,000 people have been saved over the decades.

1909 - NSW agreed to peacefully surrender the spare 2,400 sq. kms it had kicking around in the backyard behind the shed to become the seat what the Federal Govt could shine it's trousers on... the A.C.T Australian Capital Territory, whose own capital is Canberra.

1919 – Adrian Knox was appointed as the second Chief Justice of Australia. 

1924 - From the sheep farm in Shag Valley, NZ, Frank Bell sent the first radio transmission to zip smartly around the globe to London, where it was received and replied to by Cecil Goyder.

1934 – Charles Prince of Morphettville was found guilty of fraud for the "ring in" of Redlock at the Murray Bridge Racing Club on July 28. 

Redlock Fraud

1934 -  Having popped in for a spot of tennis, the Duke of Gloucester sang for his supper by officially opening the Centenary celebrations for Victoria.

1944 - HMAS Geelong was one of four corvettes lost during the Second World War. It collided with an American merchant ship off New Guinea.

1967 -  HMAS Perth struck by return fire near Cape Lai, Vietnam, while on the United States 7th Fleet 'gunline'. This was the only occasion on which an Australian warship suffered casualties from enemy fire during the Vietnam War.

1973 - Patrick White, author, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

1973 - 'The Art of Aboriginal Australia', the first major international exhibition of contemporary Australian Indigenous art, was first exhibited in the new purpose-built gallery at the Art Gallery of NSW before it was exhibited in Canada.

2021 - Following the destruction of Indigenous Heritage sites at Juukan Gorge, the Australian Senate referred an inquiry to the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia for a report by 30 September 2020. The inquiry had to be extended, and it published its final report on 18 October 2021. The final report of the inquiry found that Rio Tinto's actions were “inexcusable and an affront, not only to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) but to all Australians”. Further, the report found that the disaster could happen again because legislation designed to protect cultural heritage has often “directly contributed to damage and destruction”.

17 October in Australian history

1854 – The Melbourne daily newspaper The Age was first published. 

1854 - The Melbourne Exhibition opened; which included the opening of the first Exhibition Building, and a right old knees up with cocoa and rout cakes to see the final stragglers off on their broomsticks after sunset...

1854 Hearing that Bentley got off scott free for the untimely demise of James Scobie in his hotel, the Ballarat miners started a wee riot that got so hot under the collar that the Eureka Hotel got a bit more than singed and crispy around the edges.

1861 - The inaugural Melbourne Cup blasted off ....which overshadowed the 

1861 -  Cullin-la-Ringo Massacre. In what is thought to be the largest massacre of white settlers by Australian aborigines, the killings occurred after a group of settlers from Victoria led by politician Horatio Wills, set up a camp at Cullin-la-Ringo, which is located in present-day Central Queensland. 19 people were killed during the massacre.

1898 – The Perth Zoo opened with two lions and a tiger and no bears, oh, my. 

1898 - A bloke who loved books more than those flighty sheilas, David Scott Mitchell made it known throughout the land that he intended to leave his extensive Australiana collection to the Sydney Public Library so long as they pulled their fingers out and gave it a proper roof over it's head.
Subsequently the separate wing, The Mitchell Library, was cobbled together.

1900 – Natural gas was found at Roma in Queensland... well, that's what they want everyone to believe, but in reality those Banana Benders were seriously addicted to baked beans

1917 – The two halves of the Trans-Australian Railway finally met, joining Western Australia to the eastern states. 

1917 - Sumner Locke Elliott, Australian (later American) novelist, and author of Careful, He Might Hear You, was hatched in Sydney. 

1938 – Les Murray, poet and essayist was pupped in Nabiac, New South Wales. 

1949 - The Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme went off like a frog in a sock with the Chief Engineer William Hudson firing the first blast at the now-drowned town of Adaminaby

1964 -  Australian athlete Betty Cuthbert earned her 4th Olympic gold medal when she won the women's 400m at the Tokyo Games in Olympic record 52.0.

1964 - Lake Burley Griffin , a planned puddle in our nation's capital, was finally filled and was inaugurated by the then-Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies.

Visit Canberra

History of Lake Burley Griffin

1973 QE II and Prince Phillip beamed down from the Mother Ship to the Land of Oz for a short but sweet visit which included the grand opening of the Sydney Opera House.

2010 - Fitzroy-born lass, Mary MacKillop was canonised by Pope Benedict XVI in Rome. Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop is Australia's first saint and throughout the universal Catholic church is now to be 'honoured devoutly among all the saints'.

Top chick.

2018 - Australian state of Queensland decriminalized abortion