Australian History
Friday, February 20, 1903. : Royal approval of the new Australian flag is finally gazetted.
The Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed on 1 January 1901. Shortly after this, in April of that year, the Commonwealth Government announced a Federal Flag design competition. There were 32,823 entries in the competition, and most featured the Union Jack, the Southern Cross, or native animals.
Five almost identical entries were selected to share the 200-pound prize. The entries belonged to Ivor Evans, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy from Melbourne; Leslie John Hawkins, a teenager apprenticed to an optician from Sydney; Egbert John Nuttall, an architect from Melbourne; Annie Dorrington, an artist from Perth; and William Stevens, a ship’s officer from Auckland, New Zealand.
The first design of the flag was very similar to the current design, with differences being that the Federation Star, also known as the Commonwealth Star, had six points instead of seven, while the Southern Cross stars had between five and nine points according to their brightness in the night sky. Originally, the blue field was reserved for Government use only, so the main background of the flag was red.
The new Australian flag flew for the first time from the top of the Exhibition Building in Melbourne in September 1901, well before it was formally approved by the Imperial Authorities in England. The Australian Government was formally notified that the flag had been approved by King Edward VII late in 1902, and this approval was officially Gazetted on 20 February 1903.
Australian History
Thursday, February 20, 1913. : The first peg marking the start of development of the city of Canberra is driven in by King O’Malley.
Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, had been rivals since before the goldrush days. It was therefore decided that the nation’s capital should be situated between the two cities. A location was chosen which was 248km from Sydney and 483km from Melbourne, and the name selected was a derivation of the Aboriginal word for ‘meeting place’. It was then necessary to select someone who could design a truly unique capital city. The competition to design Australia’s new capital city, Canberra, was won in 1911 by Walter Burley Griffin.
The first survey peg marking the beginning of the development of the city of Canberra was driven in on 20 February 1913. The man who drove in the peg was King O’Malley, Minister for Home Affairs and who played a prominent role in selecting the site of the future capital of Australia. O’Malley was a controversial figure and prominent in Australian politics. A teetotaller, he was responsible for the highly unpopular ban on alcohol in the Australian Capital Territory. He was instrumental in beginning the building of the Transcontinental Railway from Melbourne to Perth, and pushed for the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, a state-owned savings and investment bank. He was also the one who advocated the spelling of “Labor” in the Australian Labor Party as being more modern than “Labour”.
Australian History
Friday, February 20, 1981. : An inquest into the disappearance of baby Azaria Chamberlain finds that she was taken by a dingo.
Michael and Lindy Chamberlain and their three children were camping at Ayers Rock when baby Azaria disappeared. Lindy claimed that a dingo had stolen her baby. No trace of the child was ever found, although her bloodstained clothes were found a week later by another tourist. Lindy Chamberlain was regarded with deep suspicion by many among the investigating party, and also by a great deal of the media and, subsequently, the Australian public. At the first inquest into her death, on 20 February 1981, coroner Dennis Barritt found that baby Azaria had been taken by a dingo.
Police and prosecutors moved for a second inquest which was held in September, 1981. This time, the new finding was made that Azaria had been killed with a pair of scissors and held by a small adult hand until she stopped bleeding. Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murder on 29 October 1982. Her acquittal came several years later when a British tourist fell to his death from the Rock. When his body was finally located 8 days later amid an area full of dingo lairs, Azaria Chamberlain’s missing jacket was also found. New evidence was presented showing that the methods of testing previous evidence had been unreliable, and no conviction could be made on those grounds. Lindy was released, and eventually awarded AU$1.3 million in compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
World History
Tuesday, February 20, 1962. : Astronaut John Glenn pilots ‘Friendship 7’ in the first U.S. manned orbital mission.
John Herschel Glenn, Jr was born on 18 July 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio, USA. After attaining a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering at Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio, he entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program at age twenty and was graduated from this program and commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1943. He flew combat missions in WWII and in the Korean War. In July 1957, he set a transcontinental speed record of 3 hours 23 minutes from Los Angeles to New York in the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed.
Glenn was selected as a Project Mercury Astronaut in 1959. On 20 February 1962, he piloted the “Friendship 7” spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. Launched at 9:47 am on 20 February 1962 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approximately 260 kilometres and an orbital velocity of approximately 28,100 kph. During his historic flight, the residents of Perth, Western Australia, greeted him by switching on their house lights simultaneously.
Australian Explorers
Sunday, February 21, 1802. : Matthew Flinders’ tragic encounter with dangerous waters leads to the naming of Cape Catastrophe, South Australia.
Matthew Flinders was the sea explorer who, together with Bass, was the first to prove that Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania, was an island and not connected to the mainland. Flinders was also the first to circumnavigate the continent, and between December 1801 and June 1803, he charted most of the coastline of Australia.
The South Australian coastline is notorious for its shipwrecks, with approximately 800 ships having come to grief off the coastline in the two hundred years since Flinders circumnavigated the continent. The first recorded victim of the region was one of Flinders’ own vessels. Flinders had two small cutters which travelled with his ship ‘Investigator’, which was used for landing parties. On 21 February 1802, the cutter’s captain was sent to the mainland with a crew of eight to search for water. Not a single man returned.
After the cutter was observed beginning its return journey, sight of it was then lost. The other cutter was sent to search for the first vessel, but all that was found of it was broken pieces on the shoreline. Despite searching the coastline extensively, no survivors from the cutter were found: hence Flinders’ naming of the headland Cape Catastrophe.