Australian History
Monday, June 1, 1829. : Today is Foundation Day for Western Australia.
The first recorded sighting of Australia’s western coastline came in 1611, when Dutch mariner Hendrik Brouwer experimented with a different route to the Dutch East Indies. As the route became more popular, the Dutch began to refer to the land as “New Holland”.
Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh named the Swan River in 1697 because of the black swans he saw in abundance there. In 1826, Edmund Lockyer was sent to claim the western half of the Australian continent for Britain. He arrived at King George Sound on Christmas Day in 1826, and established a military base which he named Frederick’s Town (now Albany). However, this is not regarded as Western Australia’s Foundation Day.
In 1829, Captain Charles Fremantle was sent to take formal possession of the remainder of New Holland which had not already been claimed for Britain under the territory of New South Wales. On 2 May 1829, Captain Fremantle raised the Union Jack on the south head of the Swan River, thus claiming the territory for Britain.
Western Australia’s Foundation Day is considered to be 1 June as, on 1 June 1829, Western Australia’s first non-military settlers arrived in the Swan River Colony aboard the Parmelia. The colony of Western Australia was then proclaimed on 18 June 1829, and less than two months later, Perth was also founded.
Australian History
Saturday, June 1, 1850. : The first convicts arrive in Fremantle, Western Australia, to help populate the waning Swan River colony.
The Swan River colony, established on Australia’s western coast in 1829, was begun as a free settlement. Captain Charles Fremantle declared the Swan River Colony for Britain on 2 May 1829. The first ships with free settlers to arrive were the Parmelia on June 1 and HMS Sulphur on June 8. Three merchant ships arrived 4-6 weeks later: the Calista on August 5, the St Leonard on August 6 and the Marquis of Anglesey on August 23. Although the population spread out in search of good land, mainly settling around the southwestern coastline at Bunbury, Augusta and Albany, the two original separate townsites of the colony developed slowly into the port city of Fremantle and the Western Australian capital city of Perth.
For the first fifteen years, the people of the colony were generally opposed to accepting convicts, although the idea was occasionally debated, especially by those who sought to employ convict labour for building projects. Serious lobbying for Western Australia to become a penal colony began in 1845 when the York Agricultural Society petitioned the Legislative Council to bring convicts out from England on the grounds that the colony’s economy was on the brink of collapse due to an extreme shortage of labour. Whilst later examination of the circumstances proves that there was no such shortage of labour in the colony, the petition found its way to the British Colonial Office, which in turn agreed to send out a small number of convicts to Swan River.
The first group of convicts to populate Fremantle arrived on 1 June 1850. Between 1850 and 1868, ultimately 9721 convicts were transported to Western Australia. The last convict ship to Western Australia, the Hougoumont, left Britain in 1867 and arrived in Western Australia on 10 January 1868.
World History
Friday, June 1, 1962. : Adolf Eichmann, ‘Chief Executioner of the Third Reich’, is hanged for his war crimes.
Adolf Eichmann was a member of the Austrian Nazi party in World War II. After his promotion to the Gestapo’s Jewish section, he was essentially responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during the war. He is often referred to as the ‘Chief Executioner’ of the Third Reich. After the war Eichmann escaped to Argentina in South America, but was located and captured by the Israeli secret service in 1960.
Eichmann’s trial in front of an Israeli court in Jerusalem started on 11 April 1961. He faced fifteen criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and war crimes. As part of Israeli criminal procedure, his trial was presided over by three judges instead of a jury, all of which were refugees from the Nazi regime in Germany. Eichmann was protected by a bulletproof glass booth and guarded by two men whose families had not suffered directly at the hands of the Nazis. Eichmann was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death on 15 December 1961. He was hanged a few minutes after midnight on 1 June 1962 at Ramla prison, the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel.
World History
Saturday, June 1, 1968. : Helen Keller, blind and deaf author and lecturer, dies.
Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on 27 June 1880. She was deprived of her senses of sight and hearing when she contracted scarlet fever before she was two years old. The breakthrough for Helen Keller came when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, persisted with the difficult child to make her understand that touching shapes and letters were her means to communication. Helen Keller was the first deaf and blind person to graduate with a college degree, and ultimately published 14 books, along with 500 articles. She toured more than 35 countries, speaking on civil rights matters, advocating for the blind and for women’s suffragette matters, and influencing over 50 policies. She met every President of the United States from Calvin Coolidge to John F Kennedy, and wrote to eight Presidents of the United States, from Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, receiving letters from all of them.
Helen Keller International was founded in 1915 to aid soldiers who had been blinded while serving in World War 1. Helen Keller Intl is now a global health organisation dedicated to eliminating preventable vision loss by addressing issues of diseases of poverty and malnutrition. It remains a lasting legacy to a woman of extraordinary courage and determination.
Helen Keller died on 1 June 1968.
World History
Friday, June 1, 2001. : Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal massacres the Nepali Royal family before committing suicide.
The Kingdom of Nepal is a landlocked Himalayan country in South Asia, bordering the People’s Republic of China to the north and India to the south, east and west. The world’s only Hindu state, it became a constitutional monarchy in 1990, a situation marked by dissension and unrest through the years.
On 1 June 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra is officially reported to have shot and killed his father, King Birendra, his mother, Queen Aishwarya, his brother, sister, his father’s younger brother, Prince Dhirendra and several aunts, before turning the gun on himself. The incident started when Crown Prince Dipendra allegedly had a dispute with his mother over his choice of bride. It is believed that Queen Aishwarya threatened to remove her oldest son from the line of succession, although this would not have been allowed under the country’s constitution.
He did not die immediately, but lay in a coma for two days. Although he never regained consciousness before dying, Crown Prince Diprendra was nonetheless the king under the law of Nepalese royal succession. After his death two days later, the late King’s surviving brother Gyanendra was proclaimed king.