Australian History
Friday, June 24, 1870. : Australian horseman and poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, commits suicide.
Adam Lindsay Gordon was born on 19 October 1833, at Fayal in the Azores, a group of Portuguese islands in the Atlantic Ocean, about 1,500 km from Lisbon, Portugal. Educated in his teenage years in England, he was a wayward youth. After completing his education, his father sent him to South Australia, where he worked variously as a horse breaker, mounted policeman, poet and even a member of parliament. 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.
Adam Lindsay Gordon’s 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, on 24 June 1870.
Australian History
Thursday, June 24, 2010. : Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister, is sworn in.
After Kevin Rudd was sworn in as the 26th Prime Minister of Australia in December 2007, he quickly became one of the country’s most popular leaders. However, before he could finish his first term as Prime Minister, Mr Rudd experienced a huge decline in popularity, for a variety of reasons. As a result, there was a push to replace him, driven largely by the ALP Right faction in Victoria and South Australia, led by Victorian senator David Feeney, Victorian MP Bill Shorten and South Australian senator Don Farrell.
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. On 24 June 2010 Julia Gillard was sworn in as Australia’s first female Prime Minister.
World History
Tuesday, June 24, 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.
Kenneth Arnold, born 29 March 1915, was a private pilot from Boise, Idaho, United States, and a part time Search and Rescue Mercy Flyer. He was in the employ of the United States Forest Service searching for a missing military aeroplane on 24 June 1947 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. The speed barrier had not yet been broken, but the objects were clearly exceeding it.
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. In a United Press story several days after the 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”.
World History
Thursday, June 24, 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. It began on 24 June 1948, when 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, on 25 June 1948 “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. Ultimately 278,228 flights were made and 2,326,406 tons of food and supplies were delivered to Berlin. The Soviet Union lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949 (although theoretically, the blockade ended at 23:59 on 11 May 1949), but the airlift operation continued right through to September of that year. East and West Germany were established as separate republics that month.
World History
Saturday, June 24, 1978. : Eight missionaries and their children are murdered in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Rhodesia was the name of the British colony located in southern Africa and governed by white minority rule until 1979. The colony was named after Cecil Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company acquired the land in the nineteenth century. Rhodesia gained internationally recognised independence from Britain in 1980 and became the Republic of Zimbabwe.
The earliest permanent white residents of Rhodesia were missionaries, and the preservation of their lives was respected by the most warlike of the country’s 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 24 June 1978 on a group of Pentecostal missionaries. At Emmanuel Mission School, 15 km south-east of Umtali and 8 km from the eastern border 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.