Australian Explorers
Saturday, February 5, 1803. : Early Australian sea-explorer, George Bass, disappears.
George Bass, together with Matthew Flinders explored and charted much of the coastline south of Sydney in the early days of the New South Wales colony, adding valuable information to charts of the Australian coastline. Bass and Flinders each completed significant voyages in their own right. In 1797, Bass sought sponsorship from Governor Hunter to determine whether a navigable strait existed between Van Diemen’s Land and the Australian continent. It was on this journey that Bass discovered the strait that is now named after him.
Bass left the Navy to become a South Pacific trader, and on 5 February 1803, he departed Sydney Harbour in the cargo ship ‘Venus’, bound for Tahiti. Bass was never heard of again, and his fate remains unknown.
Australian History
Friday, February 5, 1869. : The first permanent white settlers arrive in Darwin, Australia.
The city of Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory, Australia is located on Darwin Harbour. The land was originally occupied by the Larrakia people of the Top End who had already been trading with the Macassans for many years before European settlers came. The first known Europeans to the area were Dutch traders who visited Australia’s northern coastline in the 1600s, creating the first European maps of the region.
Darwin Harbour was first discovered by Captain of the “Beagle”, John Lort Stokes, on 9 September 1839 and named “Port Darwin” after British naturalist Charles Darwin. It was initially not settled, as Port Essington, 300 kilometres north, was regarded as a more strategic site for settlement and a better prospect to offset any intended French colonisation of Australia’s far north coast. Like other settlements along the northern coastline which preceded it, Port Essington floundered for some years, eventually being abandoned. It enjoyed fame briefly when explorer Ludwig Leichhardt appeared there, after being thought lost during his arduous trek to the north coast, but it was not enough to sustain the remote population.
After John McDouall Stuart made the first successful crossing of Australia in 1862, this opened the way for the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line from Adelaide to the north coast, enabling Australia to have direct and immediate communication with the rest of the world. Thus, the settlement of Darwin was more successful than previous incursions into settling the north coast as it was to serve a very important link in this communication. The site of Darwin was surveyed by George Goyder, a surveyor in South Australia while the Northern Territory was part of South Australia. Goyder arrived to establish the new settlement on 5 February 1869.
The town was initially named Palmerston after the Prime Minister of Britain, Lord Palmerston, Henry Temple. However, all shipping to the area was consigned to “Port Darwin”. In 1911, when South Australia handed control of its northern half to the Commonwealth of Australia, the name Darwin was officially adopted.
Australian History
Friday, February 5, 1869. : The world’s largest recorded gold nugget is found in Victoria, Australia.
The world’s largest recorded gold nugget is the “Welcome Stranger”, found in Australia on 5 February 1869. The Welcome Stranger measured 61cm by 31cm and was discovered by prospectors John Deason and Richard Oates at Moliagul, about half-way between Maryborough and St Arnaud in western Victoria, Australia. No scales of the time could handle the weight of the nugget, so it was broken into three pieces by a blacksmith in order to be weighed: it weighed in at over 2300 ounces, or 70 kilograms. Deason (Deeson) and Oates were paid £19,068 for their nugget which became known as “Welcome Stranger”. It is not the same as the “Welcome Nugget” found in Ballarat in 1858.
Australian History
Wednesday, February 5, 1947. : Australia’s first cloud-seeding experiment resulting in artificially produced rain is carried out at Bathurst, New South Wales.
Cloud seeding is a technique for artificially producing rain by dropping chemicals or small objects into clouds, thereby allowing water droplets or ice crystals to form more easily. It is commonly used to increase precipitation in areas experiencing drought. There is some dispute as to whether the first successful experiment of cloud seeding occurred in Australia or the United States, as precipitation produced in US experiments did not reach the ground.
The Australian experiment was undertaken by scientists from the CSIRO’s Division of Radiophysics on 5 February 1947 at Bathurst, New South Wales. Dry ice was used in the initial experiment, but later experiments used silver iodide more effectively. In the early 1950s the CSIRO team, now known as the Division of Cloud Physics, pioneered the highly successful silver iodide seeding technique.
Australian History
Tuesday, February 5, 2002. : It is reported that the remains of a Tasmanian tiger have been found on the Eyre Peninsula.
The Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was a carnivorous marsupial living in Australia, specifically the island of Tasmania, up until the twentieth century. Although sometimes known also as the Tasmanian wolf, this animal was neither a wolf nor a tiger, but a marsupial. It stood about 60cm tall, with a body length of up to 130cm, not including its tail, up to 66cm long.
European settlement spelt doom for the Thylacine. Early settlers, fearing the Thylacine was a threat to their livestock, campaigned for the colonial government to offer a bounty for killing the animal. The last known Thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo in September 1936, a victim of exposure and the fact that the needs of these animals were simply not understood.
Fossil evidence has shown that, besides being found in Tasmania, the Thylacine once existed on the Australian mainland as well as the island of New Guinea. Remains have been located on the Nullarbor Plain, in South Australia’s mid north and around Adelaide, as well as in parts of Western Australia. On 5 February 2002, it was reported that scientists had uncovered two teeth from a Thylacine in a sink hole near Coffin Bay on South Australia’s Lower Eyre Peninsula in South Australia – the first ever found on Eyre Peninsula.
World History
Sunday, February 5, 1922. : The first issue of the Reader’s Digest is published.
The Reader’s Digest is a monthly magazine with a global circulation of 10.5 million. Now published in 21 languages as well as Braille, it began as a simple collection of condensed magazine articles on a wide range of topics, designed to appeal to a variety of readers.
William Roy DeWitt Wallace was an American soldier who, while recovering in France from injuries he sustained during World War 1, spent his time reading American magazines. Upon his return to the USA, he started researching articles and stories suitable for abridging into a single magazine. He showed his collection to the sister of a college friend, whose positive and enthusiastic response led not only to their marriage, but to the public debut of a new magazine. In October 1921, the pair were married. Four months later, they decided to publish their collection under the name of Reader’s Digest. Due to lack of interest from commercial publishers and retailers, they opted to market it by direct mail.
The first edition of the Reader’s Digest appeared on 5 February 1922. Its projected net income was an estimated $5,000. By 1929, thanks to Wallace’s ongoing research into the nature of what his reading audience wanted, the journal had acquired 290,000 subscribers, giving a gross income of $900,000 a year. The Reader’s Digest has continued to appeal to the wider public, with its circulation continuing to increase; it has also embraced modern technology, now being offered in a digital format.