Australian Explorers
Thursday, April 19, 1770. : Lieutenant Cook and his crew first sight the eastern coast of Australia.
Lieutenant James Cook was not the first to discover Australia, as he was preceded by numerous Portuguese and Dutch explorers. However, he was the first to sight and map the eastern coastline. Cook’s ship, the ‘Endeavour’, departed Plymouth, England, on 26 August 1768. After completing the objective of his mission, which was to observe the transit of Venus from the vantage point of Tahiti, Cook went on to search for Terra Australis Incognita, the great continent which some believed to extend round the pole. He first came across New Zealand, which had already been discovered by Abel Tasman in 1642. He spent some months there, charting the coastline. Nearly a year later, he set sail east.
On 19 April 1770, officer of the watch, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, sighted land and alerted Cook. Cook made out low sandhills which he named Point Hicks, although he did not yet know whether they formed part of an island or a continent. Point Hicks lies on the far south-eastern corner of the Australian continent, and Cook chose to fly before unfavourable winds up the eastern coast. Cook went on to chart the east coast of what was then known as New Holland, and claimed it for Great Britain under the name of New South Wales.
Australian History
Thursday, April 19, 1984. : Australia adopts Green and Gold as its national colours.
Up until the 1980s, three sets of colours were unofficially associated with Australia. Red, white and blue formed the colours of teh Australian flag. Blue and gold were Australia’s heraldic colours, seen in the wreath on the Commonwealth Coat of Arms granted by royal warrant in 1912, whilst also being chosen as the colours of the ribbon of the Order of Australia in 1975. Green and gold represented Australia in many ways – the green symbolising Australia’s landscape and the bush, and the gold symbolising grain harvests, sheep’s wool, mineral wealth, beaches and sunshine.
The colours of green and gold have also been informally associated with Australian sporting teams since the late 1800s, but have never been formally adopted as its “national sporting” colours. However, on 19 April 1984, Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen officially proclaimed Australia’s national colours as green and gold. The shades selected most closely resembled the shades of Australia’s national floral emblem, the Golden Wattle.
Australian History
Thursday, April 19, 1984. : Australia adopts ‘Advance Australia Fair’ as its national anthem.
‘Australians, all, let us rejoice, for we are one and free.’
This is the well-known opening line of Australia’s national anthem, ‘Advance Australia Fair’. The song was composed by Scottish-born composer Peter Dodds McCormick in the 1870s as a patriotic song, and first performed publicly in 1878. The occasion was the St Andrew’s Day concert of the Highland Society on 30 November that year.
In line with its nationalistic flavour, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ was performed by a 10,000-voice choir at the inauguration Federation ceremony for the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia, on 1 January 1901. McCormick was subsequently paid one hundred pounds for his composition in 1907. Early in the twentieth century, the song was proposed as a possible national anthem for Australia, to replace the Royal anthem ‘God Save the King’ (later ‘Queen’), but no official decision was made.
The decision to replace ‘God Save the Queen’ as a national anthem for the colonies began as early as the 1820s. The first legitimate competitions to find a new national anthem were held by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1943 and 1945. One of several further competitions in the lead-up to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics was the Commonwealth Jubilee celebrations competition held in 1951, which was won by Henry Krips with ‘This Land of Mine’. Another Australia-wide national anthem quest was held in 1972-3. Following this, in 1977, the government held a referendum and attached a national plebiscite to choose a new anthem. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ won with 43% against Banjo Paterson’s ‘Waltzing Matilda’ with 28% and Carl Linger’s ‘Song of Australia’ with 10%. In favour of keeping ‘God Save the Queen were 19%. In 1984, the Australian government made the final decision to change the national anthem as it sought to reinforce its independence from England.
‘Advance Australia Fair’ was adopted as the National anthem of Australia on 19 April 1984. There have been some modifications to the words through the years, to create more inclusive wording.
World History
Thursday, April 19, 1934. : The famous ‘Surgeon’s Photo’ of the Loch Ness Monster is taken.
Loch Ness, or Loch Nis in Gaelic, is a large, deep freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands, which extends for about 37 km southwest of Inverness. It is the second largest loch (lake) in Scotland, with a surface area of 56.4 km2, but is the largest in volume. It is 226 m deep at its deepest point. For centuries, witnesses have reported sighting a large monster with a long neck in Loch Ness, Scotland. Famous photographs have been proven to be hoaxes, but still the myth of the monster has persisted.
One such photograph was supposedly taken by surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson on 19 April 1934. The photograph appears to show the long neck and head of an unidentified water creature rising from the lake’s surface. The picture, which became famously known as ‘the surgeon’s photo’, was touted as absolute evidence of the existence of the Loch Ness monster. Sixty years later, on 12 March 1994, a big game hunter by the name of Marmaduke Wetherell admitted on his deathbed that he had faked the photograph. Dr Wilson’s name had only been included to add credibility to the photograph, which was in fact nothing more than a fake serpent neck attached to the back of a toy submarine.
World History
Monday, April 19, 1993. : Federal agents storm the Branch Davidian cult compound in Waco, Texas, with tear gas.
The Branch Davidians were a religious group which split from the Seventh-day Adventist church. In 1981 a young man named Vernon Wayne Howell moved to Waco, Texas where he joined the Branch Davidians. He became leader at the cult’s Mt Carmel complex, located some fifteen kilometres out of Waco, and in 1990 changed his name to David Koresh. He began to declare himself to be the Second Coming of Christ, began filling the cult member’s heads with apocalyptic warnings and insisted that they arm themselves.
On 28 February 1993, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided the Branch Davidian cult compound in Waco. As the agents attempted to enter the complex, a gun battle erupted, ultimately leaving four ATF agents and six Davidians dead. The standoff between the Branch Davidians and the FBI continued for 51 days. Negotiations stalled, as the Davidians had stockpiled years of food and other necessities prior to the raid. When federal agents moved in to end the siege at dawn on 19 April 1993 with tear gas, a fire broke out that killed approximately eighty cult members. Koresh was shot by his right-hand man, Steve Schneider, but the reasons for this remain unknown. Only eight Branch Davidians escaped with their lives.
World History
Wednesday, April 19, 1995. : 168 people are killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Oklahoma City is the capital and the largest city of the US state of Oklahoma. With a population of 1.3 million residents in the metropolitan area as of 2004, it is the 29th-largest city in the USA.
On 19 April 1995, Oklahoma City was the target of a terrorist attack. At 9:02am, a rented truck containing about 2,300 kg of explosive material exploded in the street in front of the Alfred P Murrah federal building, a US government office complex. The truck bomb was composed of ammonium nitrate, an agricultural fertilizer, and nitromethane, a highly volatile motor-racing fuel. 168 were killed in the explosion, including 19 children attending a day-care centre in the building. 800 more people were injured, while over 300 buildings in the surrounding area were destroyed or seriously damaged, leaving several hundred people homeless and shutting down offices in downtown Oklahoma City.
Within an hour of the explosion, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh was arrested, travelling north out of Oklahoma City after being pulled over for driving without a licence plate by an Oklahoma highway patrolman. At McVeigh’s trial, the United States Government asserted that the motivation for the attack was to avenge the deaths two years earlier of Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, whom he believed had been murdered by agents of the federal government. Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for the bombing and was executed by lethal injection at a US penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 11 June 2001.