Born on this day
Tuesday, March 28, 1922. : Neville Bonner, the first Aboriginal parliamentarian, is born.
Neville Bonner was born on 28 March 1922 at Ukerabagh, near Tweed Heads in northern New South Wales. He worked as a farm labourer before settling on Palm Island, near Townsville, Queensland in 1946, where he rose to the position of Assistant Settlement Overseer. In 1960 he moved to Ipswich, where he joined the board of directors of the One People Australia League (OPAL), a moderate indigenous rights organisation, becoming its Queensland president in 1970. He joined the Liberal Party in 1967 and held local office in the party. Following the resignation of Liberal Senator Annabelle Rankin in 1971, Bonner was chosen to fill the vacancy. He thus became the first indigenous Australian to sit in the Australian Parliament. He was elected in his own right in 1972, 1974, 1975 and 1980.
In 1979 Bonner was named Australian of the Year, and in 1984 he was awarded the title Officer of the Order of Australia. From 1992 to 1996 he was a member of the Griffith University Council, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1993. Bonner died at Ipswich on 5 February 1999: the Queensland federal electorate of Bonner, created in 2004, was named in his honour.
Australian History
Saturday, March 28, 1908. : Witches Falls, the world’s third oldest national park, is declared the first National Park in Queensland.
Witches Falls is a thick, lush rainforest region located in the Gold Coast hinterland in southeast Queensland. It is now part of the Tamborine National Park, and encompasses large sections of land from the plateau and down to the foothills of Tamborine Mountain. Witches Falls and Mount Tamborine comprise the most northerly remnant of ancient lava flows from Mt Warning in northern New South Wales.
Witches Falls was gazetted the first National Park in Queensland on 28 March 1908. This makes it Australia’s second oldest National park after the Royal National Park, established in 1879, near Sydney, NSW, and the world’s third-oldest national park, after Yellowstone (USA).
Australian History
Saturday, March 28, 1942. : Critchley Parker sets off in search of a new Jewish homeland within Australia.
Zionism was a political movement and an ideology that supported the formation of a Jewish homeland, prior to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Even before Hitler began his campaign of exterminating the Jewish race, the British Zionist League sought a new homeland for Jews hoping to flee the increasingly dangerous climate of pre-war Europe. The Kimberley region in northwest Australia was considered as a possibility, but vetoed by then-Prime Minister John Curtin.
Critchley Parker was a young Tasmanian Zionist who took it upon himself to locate an appropriate site for the new Jewish homeland in Tasmania. On 28 March 1942, he set out to explore the area around Port Davey in the state’s southwest. Parker’s diary entries reflect his enthusiasm at the possibilities of settlement in the hitherto-untamed region. However, when he struck difficulties due to rain and gales and signalled for help, his pre-arranged signal went unseen. After some three weeks of subsisting on water and aspirin, he died in the wilderness, an Australian martyr for a Jewish cause.
Australian History
Friday, March 28, 2008. : A strange object found on an outback property in Queensland is identified as ‘space junk’.
Charleville is a town in western Queensland, some 750 km west of Brisbane, the state’s capital. Around 80km from Charleville is the small town of Cheepie which, although it once boasted a police station, blacksmith, railway station, tent boarding houses, butcher shop, bakery and two vegetable gardens, is now just a ghost town.
On 7 November 2007, Cheepie farmer James Stirton found a 20kg burnt and unidentifiable object on his 40,500-hectare property. He noticed the object was about 54 cm in length, hollow, and covered in a carbon-fibre material. Stirton took it in to the Charleville school, where staff requested that a representative from the Brisbane Planetarium come and examine it. The identity of the object was confirmed on 28 March 2008 by Brisbane Planetarium curator Mark Rigby. The item, named 2006-047-C, was identified as a helium or nitrogen tank from a rocket which had been used to launch a US solar satellite into space in October 2006.
There is an estimated 5000 tonnes of space junk orbiting the Earth at any given time, so falling space junk is more common than people realise.
World History
Wednesday, March 28, 1979. : A partial nuclear meltdown occurs at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania, USA.
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station is located near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA. It was the site of a near-nuclear accident, a partial core meltdown, on 28 March 1979. At around 4:00am, the main feedwater pumps in the secondary non-nuclear cooling system failed in the TMI-2 reactor. This caused a reduction in feedwater flow which led to overheating and partial melting of its uranium core and production of hydrogen gas. The partial meltdown released radioactive material and forced the evacuation of thousands of nearby residents.
The crisis lasted twelve days. The accident was ultimately attributed to a combination of human error and equipment failure. Despite the fears of radiation leaking into the atmosphere, research released in 2002 indicated that incidences of cancer in the area were not significantly higher than elsewhere.