Australian Explorers
Wednesday, June 6, 1827. : Explorer Allan Cunningham discovers the Darling Downs.
Allan Cunningham was born on 13 July 1791 in Wimbledon, England. As a botanist who came to Australia suffering from tuberculosis, he found that Australia’s climate helped him regain some of his health, and he was anxious to discover more of the country he came to love. Initially, he explored as part of John Oxley’s expeditions to follow the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers in 1817.
By the 1820s, the pastoral industry in the young colony of New South Wales was growing, and there was greater need for more grazing land. In April 1823, Cunningham departed from Bathurst to find an easier route north between the settlements around Bathurst and the Liverpool Plains which Oxley had discovered five years earlier. On this expedition, Cunningham discovered Pandora’s Pass, the only point where sheep and cattle could easily cross the mountain barriers, at the junction of the Warrumbungle and Liverpool Ranges. In 1827, Governor Darling sent Cunningham to determine what lay north of the Liverpool Plains and west of Brisbane. On 6 June 1827, Cunningham found a vast area of excellent pastoral land which he named the Darling Downs, in honour of the Governor. A year later, Cunningham discovered an easier route to the Darling Downs, travelling through the Great Dividing Range from Brisbane; thus was found Cunningham’s Gap.
Australian History
Saturday, June 6, 1835. : John Batman, the native-born founder of Melbourne, signs a treaty with Aborigines entitling him to 250,000 hectares of land in Port Phillip Bay.
John Batman was born in Parramatta, Sydney, in 1801. As a native born Australian, Batman was interested in opening up new pastureland and promoting the growth of the colonies. He applied for land in the Westernport Bay area of southern Australia, now Victoria, but was not granted any. In May 1835, he led a syndicate calling themselves the ‘Port Phillip Association’ to explore Port Phillip Bay, looking for suitable sites for a settlement. On 6 June 1835, he signed a ‘treaty’ with the Aborigines, giving him free access to almost 250,000 hectares of land. Batman referred to the exchange as the “most extraordinary sale and purchase”. The treaty was sealed with signatures and markings on parchment; the Aborigines were given an assortment of blankets, beads, tomahawks, mirrors, scissors and flour, and promised further such payments every year.
In August that year, Governor Bourke declared Batman’s treaties invalid on the grounds that native Australians were not entitled to own the land, and therefore could not sell it. Bourke issued a proclamation warning off Batman and his syndicate as trespassers on crown land. Despite the attempts at government intervention, the foundling settlement of Melbourne remained, and flourished.
Batman’s place in Australian history is unique for several reasons. He was the only 19th century white to acknowledge that Aborigines owned the land first. He set out to undertake an annual rental for what was then a reasonable amount of food and goods, rather than buy it from them for a pittance. Further, he is the only native-born Australian to have founded a state capital city.
Australian History
Monday, June 6, 1853. : The Bendigo Goldfields petition is presented at a meeting of the Anti-Gold-Licence Association.
The search for gold in Australia was wrought with controversy from the time it was first discovered in Australia, as early as the 1830s. At that time, discoveries were suppressed for fear of the effects it would have when the convicts heard about it. When gold was ‘officially’ discovered in Australia in 1851, it was at a time when the government in New South Wales sought to encourage gold finds, to limit the numbers leaving Australia for the Californian goldfields.
There were numerous significant early gold strikes in Victoria, but the real gold rush in the colony began when gold was discovered in July 1851 near Ballarat. This provided an economic boost for Victoria, which had achieved independent government separate from New South Wales the same month. Within a year, tens of thousands of prospectors had arrived at the Victorian goldfields. The swelling population crowded into a small area led to many grievances among the diggers. Their greatest complaint concerned the unfair licence fee of thirty shillings a month. This had to be paid, regardless of whether or not the diggers found gold, and the goldfields police were harsh and abusive in their enforcement of licence checks.
George Edward Thomson was a recent arrival in Australia, and had seen some success on the goldfields at Forest Creek (later Castlemaine) and Sandhurst (later Bendigo). Prior to his arrival in Australian in 1852, he had been an active political and social agitator in England. Early in June 1953, Thomson formed an Anti-Gold-Licence Association on the Ballarat goldfields. At a meeting of the Association on 6 June 1853, Thomson and others within the Association presented a petition demanding the licence fee be reduced. The petition, which was signed by miners from Sandhurst, Forest Creek, Ballarat and other diggings, also called for reforms within the goldfields police, and for the miners to be given the right to vote.
Thomson took the petition to Melbourne and presented it to Lieutenant Governor CJ La Trobe early in August. The demands were rejected. It was this disregard of the diggers’ voices which eventually led to the battle of the Eureka Stockade, and the democratic reforms that resulted from that event.
Australian History
Monday, June 6, 1859. : Today is Queensland Day, marking the day that Queensland separated from the colony of New South Wales.
The colony of the Moreton Bay District was founded in 1824 when explorer John Oxley arrived at Redcliffe with a crew and 29 convicts. The settlement was established at Humpybong, but abandoned less than a year later when the main settlement was moved 30km away, to the Brisbane River. Another convict settlement was established under the command of Captain Patrick Logan. On 10 September 1825, the settlement was given the name of Brisbane, but it was still part of the New South Wales territory.
In 1859, Queen Victoria signed Letters Patent, which declared that Queensland was now a separate colony from New South Wales. On 6 June 1859, the former Moreton Bay District was granted separation from New South Wales, and given the name of Queensland, with Brisbane as its capital city. The western border was set at 141 degrees East. June 6th is celebrated every year as Queensland Day, the day which marks the birth of Queensland as a self-governing colony. On 1 January 1901, Queensland became one of the six founding States of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Australian History
Wednesday, June 6, 1888. : The British Crown annexes Christmas Island.
The Territory of Christmas Island is a small, non-self-governing Territory of Australia located in the Indian Ocean, 2,360 km northwest of Perth in Western Australia and 500 km south of Jakarta, Indonesia. It was named by Captain William Mynors of the East India Ship Company vessel, the Royal Mary, when he arrived on Christmas Day, 25 December 1643. Over the years it was visited by explorers until the discovery of nearly pure phosphate of lime led to annexation of the island by the British Crown on 6 June 1888.
Soon afterwards, a small settlement was established in Flying Fish Cove by G Clunies Ross, the owner of the Keeling Islands, and phosphate mining began in the 1890s using indentured workers from Singapore, China, and Malaysia. The island was administered jointly by the British Phosphate Commissioners and District Officers from the UK Colonial Office through the Straits Colony, and later the Colony of Singapore. Japan invaded and occupied the island in 1942, and interned the residents until the end of World War II in 1945.
After the war, the United Kingdom transferred sovereignty to Australia. In 1957, the Australian government paid the government of Singapore 2.9 million pounds in compensation, the estimated value of the phosphate foregone by Singapore. The first Australian Official Representative arrived in 1958 and was replaced by an Administrator in 1968. Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands together are called Australia’s Indian Ocean Territories (IOTs) and since 1997 share a single Administrator resident on Christmas Island. As of 2011, there were approximately 2000 Christmas Islanders. The ethnic composition is 70% Chinese, 20% European and 10% Malay. English is the official language, but Chinese and Malay are also spoken.
World History
Tuesday, June 6, 1944. : Allied forces land on the coast of Normandy as D-Day commences.
General Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, born 14 October 1890, served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. In this position, he was charged with planning and carrying out the Allied assault on the coast of Normandy under the code name Operation Overlord, with the ultimate aim of the liberation of western Europe and the invasion of Germany.
In the early hours of 6 June 1944, Allied forces began their assault against Hitler’s “Fortress Europe”, marking the beginning of D-Day in the largest amphibious assault ever launched. By the end of the day 155,000 Allied troops, including some 18,000 paratroopers and glider-borne troops, were in Normandy. The initial assault involved about 1,300 RAF planes, followed by 1,000 American bombers dropping bombs on targets in northern France.
The United States and Britain each lost about 1,000 troops whilst Canada lost 355 in the initial stages of D-day. The invasion cracked Nazi Germany’s grip on Western Europe and marked the beginning of the advance that eventually ended the war with Germany.
World History
Friday, June 6, 1980. : For the second time in a week, a computer error falsely warns US forces of an impending Soviet nuclear attack.
The Cold War began in the aftermath of World War II. It was marked by political tensions and military rivalry between the world’s emerging super-powers, the United States and the USSR. It was so called the Cold War because no direct fighting occurred between the USA and the USSR. Instead, the ‘war’ took the form of diplomatic pressure, trade embargos, propaganda, espionage and proxy wars. In the many proxy wars that marked the Cold War era, countries were supported by either the US or USSR, but did not directly involve troops from the super powers. Proxy wars included the Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis, the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War and the subsequent boycotting of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games by many Western countries.
In 1980, the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union had been simmering for thirty years. On 3 June 1980, the US computer warning system predicted a 220-missile nuclear attack on the US. Shortly after the initial alarm, it was revised to an all-out attack of 2200 missiles. A computer error had created the illusion. Three days later, on 6 June 1980, the same computer error occurred again.