On this day June 24 Australia 1870 - Australian horseman and poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, commits suicide. 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. Adams 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. 1975 - Nicole Polhuis (nee Perkins) born at Crown St Womens Hospital Sydney 2010 - Julia Gillard, Australias first female Prime Minister, is sworn in. 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. The next day Julia Gillard was sworn in as Australias first female Prime Minister. Other places 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. Arnold, born 29 March 1915, was a private pilot from Boise, Idaho. He was in the employ of the United States Forest Service searching for a missing military aeroplane 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. 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. He 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. 1948 - The Soviet Union forces a blockade of Berlin in an attempt to stop the division of Germany into communist and free states. The Berlin blockade was one of the first major crises of the Cold War. The Soviet Union blocked Western railroad and street access to West Berlin. The Western sectors of Berlin were also isolated from the city power grid, depriving the inhabitants of domestic and industrial electricity supplies. It was an attempt to stop the division of Germany into communist and free states. By forcing a land and water blockade of Berlin, the Soviet Union expected the Allies would abandon West Berlin. In an immediate response the very next day Operation Vittles commenced, to supply food and other necessary goods to the isolated West Berliners. This became known as the Berlin Airlift. The aircraft were supplied and flown by the United States, United Kingdom and France, but pilots and crew also came from Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand in order to assist the supply of Berlin. The Soviet Union lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949. East and West Germany were established as separate republics that month. 1978 - Eight missionaries and their children are murdered in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. The earliest permanent white residents of Rhodesia were missionaries, and the preservation of their lives was respected by the most warlike of the countrys tribes. However, the escalating terrorist war in Rhodesia in the mid-1970s posed new dangers for missionaries who were intent on continuing their activities without official protection. Between 1976 and 1978, dozens of missionaries were abducted or murdered: in many cases, no trace of them was ever found. The worst massacre occurred on this day on a group of Pentecostal missionaries. At Emmanuel Mission School, between Rhodesia and Mozambique, eight British missionaries and four young children, including a three-week-old baby, were bayoneted to death by terrorists. The killings were carried out by a group of between 10 and 12 nationalist guerrillas. The murders aroused world-wide anger against the World Council of Churches which, in August 1978, announced an $85,000 grant to the guerrilla-terrorist groups fighting against a peaceful settlement in Rhodesia.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 12:29:48 +0000
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