Australian Explorers
Tuesday, May 25, 1830. : After tracing the Murray River for thousands of kilometres, Sturt’s party finally arrives back in Sydney.
Captain Charles Sturt was born in India in 1795. He came to Australia in 1827, and soon after undertook to solve the mystery of where the inland rivers of New South Wales flowed. Because they appeared to flow towards the centre of the continent, the belief was held that they emptied into an inland sea. Sturt first traced the Macquarie River as far as the Darling, which he named after Governor Darling. Pleased with Sturt’s discoveries, the following year Governor Darling sent Sturt to trace the course of the Murrumbidgee River, and to see whether it joined to the Darling. Sturt followed the Murrumbidgee in a whaleboat and discovered that the Murrumbidgee River flowed into the Murray (previously named the Hume).
Sturt continued to trace the course of the Murray southwards, arriving at Lake Alexandrina, from which he could see the open sea of the southern coast, in February 1830. However, the expedition then had to face an agonising journey rowing back up the Murray against the current. The men rowed in shifts from dawn until dusk each day, low on rations, through extreme heat, and against the floodwaters heading downstream. In March 1830 they reached the junction of the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers. By the time they reached their depot at Maude on the Murrumbidgee, they had rowed and sailed 3,000 km on Australia’s inland rivers, with no loss of life. The party reached Wantabadgery Station at the point of starvation, where they recovered until returning to Sydney on 25 May 1830.
Sturt’s discoveries were significant, for they allowed for the development of paddle-steamer transportation of goods and passengers along Australia’s inland waterways. The exploration also allowed more fertile pasture and grazing land to be opened up in southern Australia.
Australian Explorers
Tuesday, May 25, 1847. : Little-known Australian explorer Joseph Wild dies after being gored by a bull.
Little-known Australian explorer Joseph Wild is credited with discovering Lake George on 21 August 1820. Wild was an ex-convict, sentenced on 21 August 1793 in Chester for shooting a rabbit on another man’s property, and transported in 1797. He received a ticket-of-leave in 1810 and conditional pardon in January 1813. After being appointed first Constable of the Five Islands District, now Illawarra, in 1815, Wild undertook several expeditions into the interior of New South Wales with pastoralist Charles Throsby. At one stage, he teamed with Throsby, James Meehan and Hamilton Hume, the latter being the currency lad who later went on to chart a course from Sydney to Port Phillip Bay. Wild and Throsby were the first Europeans to explore the area that became the Australian Capital Territory.
Joseph Wild died on 25 May 1847 after being gored by a bull at Wingecarribee Swamp. He is buried behind the church in the Bong Bong Cemetery, Moss Vale, New South Wales.
Australian History
Wednesday, May 25, 1622. : The first recorded shipwreck in Australian waters occurs.
Australia has a history of shipwrecks which extends back to before European settlement. Around 8000 wrecks are believed to lie off the coast in Australian waters, although only a quarter of these have been located. The coastline of the great southern continent had not been fully mapped when the earliest ships, trading vessels on their way to the Spice Islands of present-day Indonesia, met their untimely fates, and nothing was known of the rocks and reefs that lurked beneath the waves.
Australia’s oldest recorded shipwreck is that of the Trial, also spelt Tryall or Tryal. The Trial was a ship of the English East India Company which was sent to the East Indies in 1621 under the command of John Brooke. The Master was following Hendrik Brouwer’s recently discovered route from the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia, via the Roaring Forties; though a faster route due to the strong winds, it was also more dangerous, taking vessels into uncharted waters. The crew of the ship first sighted Point Cloates, a peninsula on Australia’s far west coast, early in May the following year but, due to a navigational error, the Trial ran aground on an unknown reef on 25 May 1622. This reef is now known as Ritchie’s Reef, in which can be found the ‘Trial Rocks’. 100 crewmen lost their lives, along with the Company’s goods the ship was carrying. The remaining crew spent a week ashore before sailing a longboat to Java.
Whilst the Dutch had, by this time, already discovered the west coast by accident, this was the first time an English crew had sighted any part of the Australian coastline. Records suggest that the ship’s Master falsified the location of the rocks to hide his error. Consequently, Trial Rocks remained undiscovered for over 314 years, due to the fact that they were not where they were reported to be. The actual wreck site itself was determined only in 1969: however, no evidence has yet been found to identify the site conclusively as being that where the Trial went down.
Australian History
Wednesday, May 25, 1870. : Notorious Australian bushranger ‘Captain Thunderbolt’ is shot dead.
Bushranger Captain Thunderbolt was born Frederick Ward at Wilberforce near Windsor, NSW, in 1836. As an excellent horseman, his specialty was horse stealing. For this, he was sentenced in 1856 to ten years on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. On 1 July 1860, Ward was released on a ticket-of-leave to work on a farm at Mudgee. While he was on ticket-of-leave, he returned to horse-stealing, and was again sentenced to Cockatoo Island. Conditions in the gaol were harsh, and he endured solitary confinement a number of times. On the night of 11 September 1863, he and another inmate escaped from the supposedly escape-proof prison by swimming to the mainland.
After his escape, Ward embarked on a life of bushranging, under the name of Captain Thunderbolt. Much of his bushranging was done around the small NSW country town of Uralla. A rock originally known as “Split Rock” became known as “Thunderbolt’s Rock”. After a six-year reign as a “gentleman bushranger”, Thunderbolt was allegedly shot dead by Constable Alexander Walker on 25 May 1870. However, there remains some contention as to whether it was actually Thunderbolt who was killed, or his brother William, also known as ‘Harry’.
Australian History
Wednesday, May 25, 1904. : Five men are killed in a gold mining accident near Coolgardie, Western Australia.
The small town of Coolgardie lies about 570km east of Perth, Western Australia. The population of Coolgardie has fluctuated since its foundation, but now maintains a steady population of around 1300. The gold rush began when prospectors Arthur Bayley and William Ford found a rich reef of gold in 1892, which they named “Bayley’s Reward”, sparking a huge gold rush to Coolgardie. The town subsequently grew rapidly, becoming the third largest town in the state after Perth and Fremantle. However, within a few years, nearby Kalgoorlie was attracting more interest, as the gold deposits were much larger.
The town experienced tragedy on 25 May 1904 in what came to be known as the “Great Boulder Disaster”. The disaster occurred at the Great Boulder goldmine in East Coolgardie when five men – Thomas Bates, Thomas Norley, Robert Riseberg, Samuel Jones and James Cauldwell Harper – died in a mining accident. A great cage used in the mining operation fell 121 metres to the bottom of a shaft. It was the greatest number of fatalities in a single accident that had ever been seen on the Western Australian goldfields.
The funeral of the men was attended by relatives and an accompanying crowd of over 500 community members from the various societies and organisations to which the men killed had belonged. The inquest lasted for five days. It concluded that, while engine driver Matthew Reidell proceeded to regulate the steam pressure to retain the cages which hung in the shaft, the reversing lever flung over unaccountably, putting the steam on to sink both gigs and causing the engine to race. Reidell was unable to pull the lever back with the steam on, and the momentum sent both cages plummeting to the bottom of the mine.
World History
Friday, May 25, 2001. : Today is Towel Day, in memory of science-fiction author, Douglas Adams.
Douglas Noël Adams was born on 11 March 1952 in Cambridge, England. He attended Brentwood School from 1959 to 1970; one incident which inspired Adams through many later periods of writer’s block was when he took an English class, taught by Frank Halford, where Halford awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of Halford’s entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise.
Adams is best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a science-fiction comedy radio series first pitched to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. The series led to Adams expanding the concept as a novel, and for adaptation to television. Today, 25 May, is unofficially Towel Day, celebrating Adams’s life and his work in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was first set two weeks after Adams’s death on 11 May 2001. An international hitchhiker should always carry his towel because, according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”