Australian Explorers
Saturday, April 30, 1831. : Captain Collet Barker, original discoverer of the site for Adelaide, is killed by indigenous Australians.
Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia, the only Australian state to have been founded by free settlers, remaining entirely free of convicts since its establishment.
The site of Adelaide was originally determined by Captain Collet Barker. Barker was sent by Governor Darling in April 1831 to explore southern Australia, following up on Charles Sturt’s discovery of the mouth of the Murray River. Barker explored around the eastern side of Gulf St Vincent, climbed Mt Lofty, and selected a suitable port for the future city of Adelaide. On 30 April 1831, Barker arrived at the sand spit where the Murray River enters the Southern Ocean. He elected to swim the channel, strapping his compass to his head. Somewhere, in the sandhills on the eastern side, Barker disappeared.
It was determined later, on the information of an aboriginal woman, that Barker had been speared to death by Aborigines and his body thrown into the sea. His remains were never discovered.
The city of Adelaide was later surveyed and designed by Colonel William Light, first Surveyor-General of South Australia, who arrived in South Australia in 1836 to follow up on Barker’s expedition. Light explored Encounter Bay and nearby regions until he discovered Port Adelaide which Barker had noted in his journals.
Australian History
Sunday, April 30, 2006. : Two Tasmanian miners are found alive after being trapped underground for five days.
Beaconsfield is a small town in the northeast of Tasmania, Australia, about 39 km north west of Launceston on the West Tamar Highway. The district was first settled in 1805 and became a centre for limestone quarrying. The mining of limestone led to the discovery of gold in 1869 which caused the area to boom immensely, and by 1881 Beaconsfield was known as the richest gold town in Tasmania.
On the evening of Anzac Day, 25 April 2006, a small earthquake caused a rock fall in the mine. Eleven miners came out safely, but three remained trapped in the shaft about 1 kilometre below the ground. On the morning of 27 April the body of 44-year-old Larry Knight was found in the shaft. On the evening of 30 April 2006, the other two miners were discovered to be alive, after being trapped in the mine for five days. Their survival was claimed as nothing less than a miracle. They were protected by the 1.2m square cage they were in at the time, and which was where they spent most of their following fourteen days. Brant Webb, 37, and Todd Russell, 35, survived by drinking mineralised water that dripped from the rocks throughout the mine. The family of Larry Knight put aside their grief to share the jubilation of the rest of the town.
The operation to rescue the trapped miners was a long and difficult one, as numerous obstacles were faced. However, Webb and Russell were finally freed at 4:47am on Tuesday, 9 May 2006, the same day selected for Larry Knight’s funeral. A bell at Beaconsfield’s Uniting Church, which had not been rung since the announcement of the end of WWII, pealed in celebration as the news broke, and residents immediately started to converge on the mine site. The men surfaced an hour later, after being initially taken by 4WD to the mine’s “crib room”, a room the size of a cafeteria and located about 700 metres below the ground, for recovery and health checks.
World History
Saturday, April 30, 1803. : The United States purchases the Louisiana Territory from France.
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition by the United States of more than 529,911,681 acres or 2,144,476 km2 of territory from France in 1803, at the cost of about 3¢ per acre, or 7¢ per hectare. The French territory of Louisiana included far more land than just the current US state of Louisiana. The lands purchased comprised 22.3 percent of the territory of the United States, from modern Louisiana up to North Dakota and portions of Montana, west as far as today’s New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado and east to Iowa and Minnesota west of the Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed on 30 April 1803, during the presidential term of Thomas Jefferson.
World History
Monday, April 30, 1900. : Legendary train driver Casey Jones is killed in a locomotive accident.
Johnathan Luther “Casey” Jones was born in 1863. As a youngster he was fascinated by trains, and as a teenager he worked for the Mobile and Ohio Railroad as an apprentice telegrapher. Working his way up through the ranks of the railroads, he became an engineer, working for the Illinois Central Railroad. By 1890 he was recognised by his peers as one of the best locomotive engineers in the business.
In 1899, Jones was given a regular passenger run on the Cannonball route which ran between Chicago and New Orleans. On 29 April 1900 Jones was in Memphis, Tennessee from the northbound Cannonball when he agreed to take the southbound Cannonball because the scheduled engineer was sick. He left Memphis at 12:50 am, 95 minutes behind schedule, but made up a great deal of the lost time with his skilled driving. On the morning of 30 April 1900, he noted a stationary freight train ahead of his speeding locomotive. After ordering his fireman to jump, Jones applied the brakes. The Cannon Ball crashed and Jones was killed, but the passengers were saved. Jones’s story has since been celebrated in ‘The Ballad of Casey Jones’.
World History
Tuesday, April 30, 1991. : Approximately 140,000 people are killed as a powerful cyclone hits Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is a country in southern Asia, on the Bay of Bengal. Much of the land is composed of the great combined delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers. Apart from the Chittagong Hills along the border with Myanmar, most of the country is no more than 90 m above sea level. The low-lying delta region, combined with the country’s tropical monsoon climate, means that Bangladesh is subject to severe flooding from monsoon rains, cyclones, and storm surges which bring major crop damage and high loss of life.
On the evening of 29 April 1991, a powerful tropical cyclone made landfall just south of the Chittagong district of south-eastern Bangladesh, with windspeeds up to 250kph. By the time the cyclone dissipated on 30 April 1991, between 125,000 and 140,000 people had been killed, and up to 10 million left homeless due to the 6m storm surge. Most deaths were from drowning, with the highest mortality among children and the elderly.
The storm caused an estimated $1.5 billion in 1991 US dollars in damage. The high velocity winds and the storm surge completely devastated the coastline and severely damaged the Bangladesh Navy and Bangladesh Air Force, both of which had bases in Chittagong.