Australian Explorers
Monday, August 25, 1828. : Explorer Allan Cunningham discovers Cunningham’s Gap.
Australian explorer Allan Cunningham was born in Wimbledon, England, on 13 July 1791. As a botanist who came to Australia suffering from tuberculosis, he found that Australia’s climate helped him regain some of his health, and he was anxious to discover more of the country he came to love. Initially, he explored as part of John Oxley’s expeditions to follow the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers in 1817.
In 1827 Allan Cunningham discovered the rich grazing and pastureland of the Darling Downs. The following year, he sailed to Moreton Bay to find a way to connect his discoveries of the Darling Downs and inland rivers with the Brisbane River and the new settlement there. Cunningham set out from Ipswich in August, and after travelling for several days, he climbed Mount Mitchell. It was from here that he sighted Cunningham’s Gap and the pastoral country that lay beyond, on 25 August 1828.
The discovery of Cunningham’s Gap meant that graziers and farmers of the Darling Downs no longer needed to send their products overland to Sydney and markets. Instead, they could now travel the less arduous way of coastal shipping.
Australian History
Sunday, August 25, 1793. : The first church opens in the penal colony of New South Wales, built largely by Reverend Richard Johnson himself.
Reverend Richard Johnson was first chaplain to the penal colony of New South Wales. Travelling with the First Fleet, he had been selected as chaplain by John Newton, the former slave-trader and now church leader who wrote the enduring hymn “Amazing Grace” after his conversion to Christianity. Newton was a friend of William Wilberforce, the British politician who led the movement to abolish slavery, and Wilberforce in turn was a close friend of the British Prime Minister at the time, William Pitt the younger. Through these connections, Johnson received a royal warrant as Chaplain to the Colony of New South Wales.
Johnson was a hard worker, not only successfully maintaining a farm in the poor soil and harsh conditions of New South Wales, but working tirelessly to not only minister to the convicts and colonists, but to attend those who arrived with the Second Fleet, sick and dying. He also worked to educate the children of the convicts. He is believed to have started teaching school in New South Wales within eighteen months of the First Fleet’s landing, and he opened the first building dedicated as a school in February 1793.
Under Governor Arthur Phillip, Johnson continued to preach Sunday services in the open air, lobbying regularly for an actual church building. Phillip wanted Johnson to focus more on preaching morality and less on the gospel, When Phillip returned to England in 1792 and was temporarily replaced by Major Francis Grose, who was intolerant of evangelical preaching, Johnson faced more obstacles to the construction of a church. His solution was to build the church himself, completing much of the labour with his own hands, and the help of the convicts assigned to him. Thus, the first church in New South Wales was opened on 25 August 1793. Although Grose did everything he could to discourage Johnson’s work, the chaplain persisted with his calling. Today he is remembered in the naming of Richard Johnson Square and a monument on the corner of Bligh and Hunter Streets. However, his greater legacy is the Christian foundation of Australia.
Australian History
Thursday, August 25, 1853. : Francis Cadell launches Australia’s first paddle steamer, the ‘Lady Augusta’, from Goolwa.
In 1828-9, Captain Charles Sturt became the first explorer to follow the course of the Murray River down to its mouth at Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. In doing so, he opened up the possibilities for a new means of transporting goods and passengers through inland NSW to the southern coast.
In 1851, the South Australian Government offered 2,000 pounds reward to the first two steamships to reach the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers. 31-year-old Scottish shipbuilder, Francis Cadell, had the 32m iron paddle steamer, ‘Lady Augusta’, built in Sydney with 2x20hp steam engines. He departed Goolwa on 25 August 1853, travelling 2,200km upstream, reaching Swan Hill on September 17. Cadell’s competitor, William Randell, built his own 17m paddle steamer ‘Mary Ann’ at Gumeracha and Mannum, with a single 8hp engine and a square boiler. Randell reached Swan Hill several hours behind Cadell, after the two had raced neck-and-neck most of the way.
Cadell went on to carry cargo mostly along the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers; the small Murray River town of Cadell in South Australia now bears his name. Randell plied his trade along the Murray-Darling system. The town of Mannum grew up around his boat-yards and docks at his Reedy Creek station.
Australian History
Wednesday, August 25, 1909. : Long Bay Gaol in Sydney is opened.
Long Bay Correctional Centre is located at Malabar, about 12 kilometres south of Sydney, New South Wales. It is Australia’s only prison to have been planned from the start with separate prisons for men and women. It was also the first prison in New South Wales to focus on rehabilitating inmates, rather than punishing them. The site was chosen in accordance with the tenets of 1770s English prison reformer John Howard, who believed jails should be positioned away from settled areas and preferably on the rise of a hill, where they would be subject to the full force of the wind. The entire plan for the gaol was based on new and different ideals in reform, such as the ‘restricted association’ advocated by William Frederick Neitenstein, comptroller-general of prisons from 1896 to 1909. ‘restricted association’ limited contact between different groups of prisoners to avoid long-term prisoners from having a corrupting influence on young or first-time offenders.
Construction on the female reformatory began in 1901, and this was the first section to be opened. The official opening occurred on 25 August 1909. The male penitentiary opened five years later, in 1914. In 1969, the women were transferred to a new facility at Silverwater. The original women’s reformatory was initially converted into a training centre, then later used for minimum security inmates.
World History
Friday, August 25, 1944. : Paris is freed after four years of German occupation.
The liberation of Paris during WWII occurred at the end of the Battle of Normandy, which lasted from 6 June 1944 to 25 August 1944. Twelve Allied nations provided units that participated in the largest seaborne invasion in history. Three million troops crossed the English Channel from England to Normandy in occupied France. The Allied assault on the coast of Normandy was carried out under the code name of Operation Overlord, and its ultimate aim was the liberation of western Europe and the invasion of Germany.
The battle of Normandy culminated in the liberation of Paris, which occurred after General Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered on 25 August 1944 after many days of fighting between the Resistance and the German occupiers. The French 2nd Armoured Division under General Philippe Leclerc was the first Allied force to enter the city, and was hailed with great cheers by the Parisians.
World History
Friday, August 25, 1967. : A sniper shoots and kills the leader of the American Nazi party, George Lincoln Rockwell.
George Lincoln Rockwell was born on 9 March 1918, in Bloomington, central Illinois. He formed the American Nazi Party in 1959, originally under the name of the World Union of Free Enterprise and National Socialists. He freely expounded his Hitler-like views, such as that all blacks should be deported to Africa and all Jewish people should be dispossessed and sterilised.
On 25 August 1967, Rockwell was reversing his car at the carpark of the Dominion Hills shopping centre in Arlington, Virginia. Two shots were fired from a nearby rooftop, through the windscreen of Rockwell’s car, hitting him in the head and chest and killing him instantly. A few minutes later, 29-year-old John Patler, a ‘captain’ in the American Nazi party, was arrested. Patler was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
World History
Friday, August 25, 1989. : Space probe ‘Voyager 2’ transmits the first ever pictures of Neptune.
The Voyager programme was originally part of NASA’s ‘Mariner’ programme. It involved sending unmanned space probes to Jupiter and Saturn, with Voyager 2 having the capability to continue on to Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 was launched on 20 August 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Twelve years later, on 25 August 1989, the spacecraft sent back the first close-up pictures of Neptune and its satellite planets before it left the solar system. It was the first, and so far the only, probe to visit Uranus and Neptune. As of April 2006, Voyager 2 was at −52.51° declination and 19.775 h Right Ascension (the two coordinates of the equatorial coordinate system), placing it in the constellation Telescopium. The spacecraft is expected to continue transmitting into the 2030s.