Australian History
Thursday, March 12, 1868. : An attempt is made to assassinate Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, on his Australian tour.
Prince Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, born on 6 August 1844, was the second son and fourth child of Queen Victoria. He entered the Royal Navy in 1856 and was appointed to the HMS Euryalus. He was promoted to lieutenant in February 1863 and captain in February 1866, being then appointed to the command of the frigate HMS Galatea. He was created Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Kent and Earl of Ulster in the peerage of the United Kingdom in May 1866.
While in command of the Galatea, the Duke of Edinburgh started from Plymouth in January 1867 for his voyage round the world. He travelled via Gibraltar and the Cape before landing at Glenelg, South Australia, on 31 October 1867. During his stay of nearly five months, he visited Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Tasmania. Being the first English prince to visit Australia, the Duke was received with great enthusiasm.
On 12 March 1868, whilst visiting Sydney and picnicking in the beachfront suburb of Clontarf, he was wounded in the back by a revolver fired by Henry James O’Farrell. The Prince was shot in the back just to the right of his spine, and was tended for the next two weeks, making a full recovery. He was able to resume command of his ship and return home in early April 1868. Henry James O’Farrell was arrested at the scene, quickly tried, convicted and hanged on 21 April 1868.
Australian History
Wednesday, March 12, 1913. : Canberra is named the capital city of Australia, before it is even built.
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. 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. However, the city did not yet have a name. A variety of names had been suggested, some tongue-in-cheek, such as Kangaremu, Australific and Meladneyperbane, which was a combination of the other state capital’s names. Other choices included Olympus, Paradise, Captain Cook, Shakespeare, Eucalypta and Myola. The final choice remained a secret until the laying of the foundation stones on 12 March 1913. Lady Denman, wife of the Governor-General, then announced the name of the city as Canberra, believed to be a derivation of an Aboriginal word for ‘meeting place’. Lady Denman’s pronunciation was pivotal, as it determined for all time how Australians would say the name.
Australian History
Saturday, March 12, 1921. : The first woman is elected to an Australian parliament.
South Australia was the first colony in Australia to give women the right to vote. This right occurred with the passing of a Bill on 18 December 1894, although a letter from the Attorney-General advising Governor Kintore that Royal Assent would be required to enact the Bill is dated 21 December 1894. The Bill was enacted when Queen Victoria gave Royal Assent on 2 February 1895. Women in South Australia voted for the first time in the election of 1896. Initially, the bill included a clause preventing women from becoming members of Parliament. Ironically, the clause was removed thanks to the efforts of Ebenezer Ward, an outspoken opponent of women’s suffrage. Ward hoped the inclusion of women in Parliament would be seen as so ridiculous that the whole Bill would be voted out. The change was accepted, however, allowing the women of South Australia to gain complete parliamentary equality with men. Within thirty years, the first woman was elected to Federal Parliament in Australia.
Edith Cowan was born Edith Brown on 2 August 1861 on Glengarry Station near Geraldton, Western Australia. She married magistrate James Cowan when she was 18, and his work opened her eyes to the suffering of wives and children when the man of the family was sentenced to gaol. After becoming a magistrate of the Perth Children’s Court, a position she held for 18 years, Mrs Cowan campaigned heavily for the rights of children.
Although South Australian women had gained equal parliamentary rights with men towards the close of the 19th century, women in Western Australia had to wait until 1920. In 1921, Edith Cowan stood as the candidate for the Nationalist Party in West Perth, for the Legislative Assembly of Western Australia. On 12 March 1921, Mrs Cowan narrowly defeated the sitting member, state Attorney-General TP Draper, by just 46 votes. Thus, she became the first woman to be elected to any Australian Parliament. In her debut speech in Parliament, she stated:
“I stand here today in the unique position of being the first woman in an Australian Parliament. I know many people think perhaps that it was not the wisest thing to do to send a woman into Parliament … The views of both sides are more than ever needed in Parliament today. If men and women can work for the State side by side and represent all the different sections of the community, and if the male members of the house would be satisfied to allow women to help them and would accept their suggestions when they are offered, I cannot doubt that we should do very much better work in the community than was ever done before.”
Edith Cowan served in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly until 22 March 1924.
World History
Monday, March 12, 1928. : The St Francis Dam in California, USA, fails, killing between 400 and 500 people.
The building of the St Francis Dam in the San Francisquita Canyon of California was an ambitious project undertaken between 1924 and 1926, under the supervision of William Mulholland, an engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The dam was filled for the first time on 7 March 1928, but dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger was concerned about leaks. Mulholland dismissed them as minor. Five days later, Harnischfeger found a new leak which Mulholland’s son felt could be serious; but again, Mulholland himself felt it to be typical of concrete dams, and declared the leaks safe.
At a few minutes before midnight on 12 March 1928, the dam collapsed, some 12 hours after Mulholland had inspected it. 45,000,000,000 L of water surged down San Francisquito Canyon, demolishing the heavy concrete walls of Power Station Number Two, a hydroelectric power plant, devastating anything in the valley, and flooding numerous smaller towns. The official death toll made in August 1928 stood at 385. However more bodies were discovered every few years until the 1950s, and the remains of another victim were found deep underground near Newhall in 1992. It is generally accepted that the death toll was between 400 and 500.
Investigations over the years have indicated several factors which contributed to the collapse of the St Francis dam. During its construction, Mulholland ordered the dam height to be increased by a total of 6m, without factoring in the need to widen the dam’s base. Analysis of the concrete used in the dam wall has proven that insufficient water was used to mix the concrete, making the concrete brittle and more likely to fail. Further, it is known by modern geologists that the type of rock found in the San Francisquito Canyon is unsuitable for supporting a dam and a reservoir, but leading geologists of the time found no problems with it. Mulholland accepted a large part of the blame.
World History
Saturday, March 12, 1994. : One of the most famous photographs of the Loch Ness Monster is confirmed to be a hoax.
Loch Ness, or Loch Nis in Gaelic, is a large, deep freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands, which extends for about 37 km southwest of Inverness. It is the second largest loch (lake) in Scotland, with a surface area of 56.4 km2, but is the largest in volume. It is 226 m deep at its deepest point. For centuries, witnesses have reported sighting a large monster with a long neck in Loch Ness, Scotland. Famous photographs have been proven to be hoaxes, but still the myth of the monster has persisted.
One such photograph was supposedly taken by surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson on 19 April 1934. The photograph appears to show the long neck and head of an unidentified water creature rising from the lake’s surface. The picture, which became famously known as ‘the surgeon’s photo’, was touted as absolute evidence of the existence of the Loch Ness monster. Sixty years later, on 12 March 1994, a big game hunter by the name of Marmaduke Wetherell admitted on his deathbed that he had faked the photograph. Dr Wilson’s name had only been included to add credibility to the photograph, which was in fact nothing more than a fake serpent neck attached to the back of a toy submarine.