Australian History
Saturday, June 23, 1810. : Governor Macquarie opens Australia’s first post office.
In 1809, Lieutenant Colonel Lachlan Macquarie arrived in Sydney to take up the position of Governor of the New South Wales colony, which he held from 1810 to 1821. With his military training and vision for organisation and discipline, Macquarie was an ideal candidate to restore order to the colony, following the Rum Rebellion against deposed Governor William Bligh. Macquarie upheld high standards for the development of New South Wales from penal colony to free settlement. He introduced the first building code into the colony and ordered the construction of roads, bridges, wharves, churches and public buildings.
One of Macquarie’s earliest duties was to appoint an official postmaster. The first postmaster of Sydney was Isaac Nichols, an ex-convict who took up the post in 1809. Australia’s first post office was opened the following year by Governor Macquarie, on 23 June 1810, and was situated on Circular Quay, Sydney. Mail continued to be delivered by coach and messengers on horseback to outlying areas of New South Wales. Australia’s first delivery postman was a private servant of George Panton, then Sydney Postmaster, in 1828.
Australian History
Monday, June 23, 1913. : The first Federal postage stamps in Australia are issued.
Australia’s earliest postal deliveries were carried out by boat along the Parramatta River, between Sydney and Parramatta. Costing twopence for private mail, the service was utilised only by officers and their families, as convicts were either illiterate or could not afford to send letters. However, demand increased as free settlers arrived in the colony. The first official post office in Australia was opened by Governor Macquarie in Sydney in June 1810. By 1844, every town was serviced by a post box, and through the nineteenth century, each of the colonies of Australia instituted its own postal services.
Sir Henry Parkes, commonly regarded as the Father of Federation, was a strong advocate of bringing all telegraph, telephone and postal services under the banner of one government. Thus, the Australian Constitution gave control of communication services to the Federal Government under the Postmaster-General’s Department, which became effective on 1 March 1901. It controlled all postal services in Australia, and later also controlled the telecommunications services.
Initially, stamps used within each of the colonies prior to Federation remained in use. Costs varied in different localities until all states adopted the penny-post system used throughout the British Empire, in May 1911. Following a design competition, the first Commonwealth postage stamps in Australia went into circulation on 23 June 1913. The chosen design depicted an image of a kangaroo inside a map of Australia.
Australian History
Friday, June 23, 2000. : 15 people die in a fire at a Backpacker hostel in Childers, Queensland.
Childers is a small town of approximately 1,500 people, lying inland from the central coast of Queensland and 325 km north of the state capital of Brisbane. Europeans first settled the area in the 1850s, and sugar cane has become the most common crop in the district. As fruit-picking work is also available in the locality, it is a popular place for young backpackers.
In the early hours of the morning of 23 June 2000, a fire swept through the Palace Backpackers Hostel, killing 15. The fire started in a downstairs TV lounge, from where it quickly spread, rushing up the stairwell and destroying the century-old former pub. Survivors criticised the lack of fire safety precautions in the building. There were no alarms or water sprinklers, and later investigations revealed that the hostel had been refused a fire safety permit 17 months earlier. However, nothing further was done to ensure the owners of the building applied for a permit. No further inspections of the hostel were conducted, despite a local law that said it needed to be satisfied that premises were free of fire hazards.
Five days after the fire, fruit-picker Robert Long was captured, 30km south of Childers, after his girlfriend named him as a likely suspect. A loner with a history of petty crimes until he tried to burn his girlfriend and her daughter in Darwin, Long appeared to be seeking revenge after the hostel ousted him for non-payment of rent. In 2002 Long was jailed for life over the blaze.
Australian History
Friday, June 23, 2006. : The world’s oldest known animal in captivity, a 176-year-old tortoise, dies.
“Harriet” was a Giant Galapagos tortoise, at least 176 years old, which resided at Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo near Beerwah, Queensland, Australia. Believed for one hundred years to have been a male, she was the world’s oldest living chelonian in captivity. A chelonian is a reptile with a shell or bony plates.
The giant tortoise was taken from the Galapagos Islands by naturalist Charles Darwin in 1835 as a personal pet during his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. On that voyage was a young naval officer, John Clements Wickham. After studying Harriet whilst formulating his theory of evolution, Darwin handed the tortoise on to Wickham when the latter sailed for Brisbane to take up a post as police magistrate. Over the years, the tortoise was carefully tended, and in 1958, was moved to naturalist David Fleay’s wildlife park on the Gold Coast. She was moved to Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast in 1987 where she enjoyed celebrity status until her death on 23 June 2006.
World History
Tuesday, June 23, 1626. : A rare book is found inside the body of a codfish.
On 23 June 1626, a fish vendor in a Cambridge market was cleaning the catch that had been caught off the coast of King’s Lynn and delivered to his market earlier that day. As he cut open a large cod, he detected a tiny book inside the fish, half-digested and covered with a type of jelly. It was a unique sextodecimo, a book composed of sheets, each of which is folded into sixteen leaves.
Theologian and scholar Dr Joseph Mede, who was also a fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge, was passing by, and took the book for identification. By carefully separating the pages with a knife and blotting them, he discovered that the book was a collection of short theological works by John Frith, written whilst Frith was in prison, and printed eighty years earlier. Frith had been burned to death for introducing reform ideas into England. The sextodecimo was one of his illegal books and included sections titled “Of the Preparation to the Cross” and “A Lettre which was Written to the Faithfull Followers of Christes Gospell.” Frith’s book was subsequently reprinted under the title: “Vox Piscis, or the Book-Fish containing Three Treatises, which were found in the belly of a Cod-Fish in Cambridge Market on Midsummer Eve, A.D. 1626.
World History
Sunday, June 23, 1985. : An Air India jet crashes off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people on board.
Canada, like many other countries in recent times, felt the brunt of terrorism personally on 23 June 1985. On that day, Air India Flight 182, enroute from Toronto to London and carrying 22 flight crew and 307 passengers, was bombed just 45 minutes from London’s Heathrow airport while the aircraft was off the coast of Ireland. All 329 people were killed when the plane dropped from an altitude of 30,000 feet into the sea. The majority of the 280 Canadian passengers aboard were of Indian origin. The bombing was the single largest terrorist attack before the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, and the largest mass murder in Canadian history.
The cause of the crash was suspected to have been a bomb planted by Sikh extremists. The main suspects in the bombing were members of a Sikh separatist group called the Babbar Khalsa, devoted to creating a Sikh state called Khalistan in the Punjab. The investigation and prosecution took almost twenty years and was the costliest in Canadian history at nearly CAD $130 million. On 16 March 2005, the two accused, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, were found not guilty by Justice Ian Josephson in British Columbia and were released. Inderjit Singh Reyat was convicted of involvement in the bombing. On 10 February 2003 Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter in constructing the bomb used on Flight 182 and received a ten year sentence.