Australian History
Sunday, April 9, 1865. : Ruthless bushranger “Mad” Dan Morgan is shot dead.
It is unknown on which date, exactly, Dan Morgan was born, but it is believed that he was born in 1830, and adopted in 1832 by John Roberts, with whom he stayed until the age of 17. Morgan’s first job was as a stockman in the Murrumbidgee River area.
Morgan’s life of crime began with the theft of two horses in 1847. After moving to the Victorian goldfields, he progressed to more crimes, including further horse theft, until he was arrested in 1854. He was sentenced to 12 years’ jail at Pentridge, where he underwent hard labour on the prison hulks in Port Phillip Bay.
After absconding on ticket-of-leave in 1860, Morgan moved to the Lambing Flat district of NSW, where the town of Young now stands. Between 1863 and 1865 he earned a reputation as a particularly vicious and ruthless bushranger, committing a number of murders. The reward for his capture was raised to 500 pounds in 1864.
Morgan was finally caught after he held several workers hostage at Peechelba Station. When the police party arrived on 9 April 1865, Morgan was shot through the back during a standoff. He was buried in the Wangaratta cemetery.
Australian History
Thursday, April 9, 1903. : Australian navy ship HMQS Gayundah, previously involved in a mutiny on the Brisbane River, transmits the first wireless message received from a ship at sea to an Australian wireless station.
The development of the wireless telegraphy system, which came to be known as “radio” is attributed to Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi first demonstrated the transmission and reception of Morse Code-based radio signals over a distance of 2 or more kilometres in England in 1896, and from this point began the development and expansion of radio technology around the world.
The HMQS Gayundah was a British gunboat which was deployed in Queensland waters under the command of British ex-Royal Navy Captain Henry Townley Wright as part of the colonial government’s response to concerns about the Russian presence in the Pacific. When the Russian threat proved non-existent, the ship was anchored in the Brisbane River. Questionable conduct by Captain Wright and the attempts by the Queensland government to remove him, led to the incident known as the Mutiny on the Gayundah on 25 October 1888. During this episode, the Captain asked his gunner where the Gayundah’s aft 6-inch gun should be aimed in order to hit the Queensland Parliament building. Wright was escorted from the vessel by the Queensland police.
Following this, the Gayundah served as a training ship. After Federation in 1901, the Gayundah became part of the Commonwealth Naval Forces, and was involved in experiments with ship-to-shore wireless telegraphy. On 9 April 1903, the Gayundah transmitted the first wireless message received from a ship at sea to an Australian wireless station. She was later used as a guard ship in Australian waters during World War I. Upon formation of the Royal Australian Navy in 1911, the Gayundah was redesignated HMAS Gayundah, and put into service patrolling Australia’s water borders along the north-west coast of the continent. The vessel was decommissioned in 1921, becoming a gravel carrier for private company Brisbane Gravel Pty Ltd. In the 1950s, she was sold for scrap, although her hull was later sold to Redcliffe Town Council. In 1958, the Gayundah was beached as a breakwater near the cliffs at Woody Point, Redcliffe, where she remains as a rusty skeleton.
Australian History
Wednesday, April 9, 1947. : The Ghost of Point Hicks legend is spawned when a newspaper reports on the mysterious disappearance of a lighthouse keeper from Cape Everard, Victoria.
Point Hicks, near the Victoria-New South Wales border on Australia’s south-eastern coast, was the first part of mainland Australia sighted by James Cook in 1770. On 19 April 1770, officer of the watch, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, sighted land and alerted Captain Cook. Making out low sandhills, Cook named the cape Point Hicks, but the name was changed to Cape Everard during the mid-1800s after its original name fell into disuse. The name “Point Hicks” was reinstated as part of the bicentenary celebrations of Cook’s journey up the eastern coast. A lighthouse was built on this remote location on the Wilderness Coast in far east Gippsland in 1887-88, and began operations in 1890.
When still known as Cape Everard, it was the scene of a mystery. Former police trooper and World War II Prisoner-of-war, Robert Grace Christofferson (or Kristoferson) had sought seclusion following his discharge from the Army in 1945, and been assigned as assistant lighthouse-keeper at the Cape Everard Light station. Early in the morning of 3 April 1947, Christofferson went to check on crayfish pots on the rocks at the base of the lighthouse. He never returned. It was believed he must have been washed off the rocks. Although police searched for six days, no trace of his body was ever found.
On 9 April 1947, the Snowy River Mail reported the strange disappearance from Cape Everard, giving rise to what became known as the legend of the ghost of Point Hicks. It is said by those who like a romantic ghost story that Christofferson’s hob-nailed boots can be heard climbing the magnificent spiral staircase to the top of the lighthouse, or in the pantry of his cottage. Apparently, he has even been known to shine brass doorknobs and vents inside the lighthouse…
World History
Tuesday, April 9, 1895. : Astronomer James Keeler proves that the rings of Saturn are made up of particles, not solid as previously believed.
The gas giant Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest planet in the solar system after Jupiter. It is distinguishable by the prominent system of rings which surrounds it. The rings were first observed by Galileo Galilei in 1610, but only identified as actual rings by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens in 1655. In 1675, Giovanni Domenico Cassini determined that what had been perceived as a single ring was actually composed of numerous smaller rings with gaps between them; the largest of these gaps was later named the Cassini Division. It was believed, however, that the rings were solid.
Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell, born in 1831, was a mathematical physicist who studied the interaction of moving particles. In 1857, he determined that Saturn’s rings must consist of small particles. His 1859 paper, “On the Stability of Motion of Saturn’s Rings”, concluded that the rings could not be completely solid or fluid. Maxwell demonstrated that stability of the rings could ensue only if the rings consisted of numerous small solid particles.
The man who proved Maxwell’s theory was James Edward Keeler, an American astronomer born in 1857. On 9 April 1895, he did a spectrogram of Saturn’s rings. Using light reflected from Saturn’s rings, he showed that particles in the inner part of a ring moved at a different rotational speed from those in more distant parts of a ring. By this, he proved that they could not be solid objects because they did not rotate at a uniform rate; rather, they had to consist of a swarm of small individual objects.
World History
Monday, April 9, 1945. : Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German pastor, theologian and participant in the resistance movement against Nazism, is executed.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau, Germany. He became a Lutheran pastor and theologian, attaining his doctorate at the University of Berlin before doing further postgraduate study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
Bonhoeffer was a strong opponent of Nazism, and in 1939 joined a secret group of high-ranking military officers based in the Abwehr, or Military Intelligence Office, who wanted to overthrow the National Socialist regime by killing Hitler. After assisting Jews to escape to Switzerland, money was traced back to him: he was arrested in April 1943 and charged with conspiracy. In July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler, and Bonhoeffer was found to have connections to the conspirators in the plot. He was executed by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, together with his brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher. The last words he spoke were, “This is the end — for me, the beginning of life.”
Bonhoeffer is considered a martyr for his faith, and was absolved of any crimes by the German government in the mid-1990s. His death on April 9th is commemorated in the calendar of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, and he is still considered one of the greatest, most insightful theologians.
World History
Wednesday, April 9, 2003. : Iraqis and US troops pull down a massive statue of Saddam Hussein in a show of contempt for the dictator.
Saddam Hussein, born 28 April 1937 in Tikrit, Iraq, was dictator of Iraq from 1979 until 2003. He led Iraq through a decade-long war with Iran. He was also responsible for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 which led to the Gulf War the following year. Following the terrorist attacks on New York’s Twin Towers in 2001, Hussein, though not directly responsible for the attacks, came under renewed pressure from the United States, which sought to remove the dictator from power.
Early in April 2003, US tanks rolled into Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq, in preparation for the battle which would topple Hussein’s regime. On 9 April 2003, Iraqis unhappy with a leader who squandered millions whilst ignoring the plight of the poverty-stricken, scaled the enormous statue of Hussein which stood in the central square of Baghdad, and attempted to bring it down with a rope. They were joined by US troops who used an armoured vehicle to help pull down the statue. One US soldier draped an American flag over the face of the broken statue, but after the crowd showed their disapproval of the gesture, the flag was replaced with an Iraqi one.
Hussein disappeared, but he was captured by US forces on 13 December 2003 after being located hiding in a small underground pit on a farm near the town of Tikrit. His trial occurred over many months during 2006, and on 5 November 2006, Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam Hussein was executed on 30 December 2006 at approximately 06:10 local time, at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base in northeast Baghdad.