Australian History
Saturday, December 9, 1882. : One of the earliest sightings of Australia’s mythical ‘yowie’ is recorded.
The yowie is a mythical Australian creature, commonly frequenting bushland on the continent’s eastern side, although the west is not without its sightings. The name “yowie” has come from the Aboriginal word for the creatures.
One of the earliest sightings of the yowie is recorded in a letter from naturalist H J McCooey in “The Australian Town and Country Journal”, dated 9 December 1882. McCooey claimed to have seen the yowie in 1880, in an area of bushland between Ulladulla and Bateman’s Bay on the New South Wales southern coast. He described the yowie as being about 5 feet high, and it stood on its hind legs as it watched the birds up in trees. It had long black hair which was reddish about its throat. Its eyes seemed small and were hidden by dirty, matted fur around its forehead. Its forearms seemed grotesquely long, though the rest of its body seemed to be in relative proportions. Repulsed by the appearance of the creature, McCooey threw a stone at it, whereupon it disappeared into a nearby ravine.
Australian History
Tuesday, December 9, 1941. : Australia formally declares war on Japan.
On the morning of 7 December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy, stationed at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. This one act changed the direction of World War II. Despite the success of the Japanese in their aim of crippling the US navy, the attack pushed the US into WWII.
An hour after the attack, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin declared that “from one hour ago, Australia has been at war with the Japanese Empire”. Two days later, on 9 December 1941, at 11:15 am, Australian time (8:15 pm, December 8, American E.S.T.), war was formally declared. In part of his speech, John Curtin stated:
“The Australian Government … did not want war in the Pacific. The Australian Government has repeatedly made it clear, as have the Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the Netherlands East Indies, that if war came to the Pacific, it would be of Japan’s making. Japan has now made war.” With that declaration came Australia’s involvement in the war on Japan.
World History
Saturday, December 9, 1843. : The first Christmas cards are created.
The giving and receiving of Christmas cards has become a tradition throughout the world in the last century, with commercially-produced Christmas cards becoming more popular during the twentieth century. The earliest form of Christmas greetings were produced as gifts in Germany; they were called “Andachtsbilder” and were scroll-like greeting cards with devotional pictures, wishing the recipient “Ein gut selig jar”, or “A good and blessed year”. However, the tradition was not maintained over the ensuing centuries.
Sir Henry Cole, Director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, found that writing numerous Christmas greetings to friends and colleagues was becoming a time-consuming task. He asked his artist friend, John Calcott Horsley, to design a card which could be used by Cole and sold to the public. The first Christmas cards were created in England on 9 December 1843. Horsley produced 1000 lithographed and hand-coloured cards. More like postcards, they sold for a shilling, which was the equivalent of a day’s wages for a labourer. It was another twenty years before Christmas cards became commercially viable for the common man, following the invention of cheaper colour lithography.
World History
Thursday, December 9, 1993. : The first on-orbit service and repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope takes place.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on 24 April 1990, by the Space Shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The telescope was the product of a cooperative project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). After launch, it was decided that on-orbit servicing every three years would be preferable to returning the Telescope to Earth every five years, as originally planned.
The first servicing and repair mission took place on 9 December 1993. The telescope was captured by the space shuttle Endeavour, and repairs were carried out by astronauts Story Musgrave and Jeff Hofman, travelling at 27,358 kilometres per hour, and 580 km above the Earth. Among other defects requiring repair, the astronauts corrected a fault in the telescope’s mirrors which caused the instrument to transmit out-of-focus images of deep space, no better than images seen from Earth.