Born on this day
Wednesday, October 29, 1947. : American actor Richard Dreyfuss is born.
Actor Richard Dreyfuss was born on 29 October 1947. After spending his early childhood in Brooklyn, his family moved to Los Angeles. He landed various smaller roles on TV shows such as Peyton Place and The Big Valley, then earned small parts in films such as American Graffiti, The Graduate and Dillinger. He then starred in hits such as Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After starring in The Goodbye Girl, he became the youngest actor at the time to win the Best Actor Award.
Following this success, a relatively nondescript acting career was revived when he threw off his cocaine addiction following a serious car accident, and landed a major role in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. During the 1990s he held starring roles in movies such as Postcards From the edge, What About Bob, The American President and Mr Holland’s Opus. He has continued to be regarded as one of Hollywood’s most versatile and talented actors, in films, television and on the stage.
Australian History
Friday, October 29, 1880. : Bushranger Ned Kelly is sentenced to hang.
Ned Kelly, Australia’s most famous bushranger, was born in December 1854 in Victoria, Australia. Kelly was twelve when his father died, and he was subsequently required to leave school to take on the new position as head of the family. Shortly after this, the Kellys moved to Glenrowan. As a teenager, Ned became involved in petty crimes, regularly targeting the wealthy landowners. He gradually progressed to crimes of increasing seriousness and violence, including bank robbery and murder, soon becoming a hunted man.
Many of Ned Kelly’s peers held him in high regard for his stand of usually only ambushing wealthy landowners, and helped to keep his whereabouts from the police, despite the high reward posted for his capture. However, he was betrayed to the police whilst holding dozens of people hostage in the Glenrowan Inn in June, 1880. Wearing their famous armour, the Kelly brothers held a shootout with police. The Kelly brothers were killed, but Ned was shot twenty-eight times in the legs, being unprotected by the armour. He survived to stand trial, and was sentenced to death by hanging, by Judge Redmond Barry on 29 October 1880. Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne on 11 November 1880.
Australian History
Friday, October 29, 1982. : Lindy Chamberlain is convicted of the murder of her baby daughter after the child’s disappearance at Ayers Rock.
Uluru, formerly Ayers Rock, is a huge monolith in central Australia. It has long been a popular tourist destination, but gained a new notoriety on the night of 17 August 1980, when two-month-old Azaria Chamberlain went missing from the nearby camping ground. When baby Azaria disappeared, her mother 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. At the first inquest into her death, commencing in February 1981, it was found that the likely cause of Azaria’s disappearance was a dingo attack.
Police and prosecutors, unhappy with this judgement, moved for a second inquest which began on 13 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, and her husband Michael was found guilty of being an accessory.
Lindy Chamberlain’s acquittal came four years later when a matinee jacket worn by Azaria was found partially buried in a dingo’s lair at Ayers Rock. New evidence was presented showing that earlier methods of testing evidence had been unreliable, and no conviction could be made on those grounds. Both Chamberlains were officially pardoned, Lindy was released, and eventually awarded AU$1.3 million in compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
World History
Tuesday, October 29, 1929. : The stock market on Wall Street plunges dramatically, sparking off the Great Depression.
During the 1920s, the stock market boomed in the US. General optimism was high as businessmen and economists believed that the new Federal Reserve would stabilise the economy, and that the pace of technological progress guaranteed rapidly rising living standards and expanding markets. By 1928 and 1929 the Federal Reserve, in an attempt to curb the unnaturally high growth of the stock market, raised interest rates to make borrowing money for stock speculation difficult and costly.
An initial recession ensued and stock prices began to fluctuate. The unrealistic stock market began to catch up with the economy: stock prices were out of proportion to actual profits, and sales of goods and the construction of factories were falling rapidly while stock values continued to climb. Then, on October 24, 1929, people began dumping their stocks quickly. Following the weekend, a new wave of selling began. 29 October 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, saw the stock market on Wall Street collapse as prices plunged and wiped out all the financial gains of the previous year. By mid-November, 30 billion dollars had disappeared, which was the same amount of money spent during World War I. The Depression lasted from 1929 to 1941, when the USA entered WWII.
World History
Friday, October 29, 1999. : Over 10,000 are killed and about 1.5 million left homeless after a super-cyclone hits India.
The cyclone which hit India on 29 October 1999 came to be classified as a super-cyclone due to the combination of very high winds and a powerful tidal surge. The cyclone, with winds of over 250kph, was the second to hit the state of Orissa in two weeks. A powerful tidal wave also swept across low-lying plains along the coast, wiping out entire villages, with flooding reaching inland as far as 16km. Whilst true figures will never be known, it is estimated that over 10,000 people were killed, and 1.5 million left homeless.
Two years later, Orissa’s worst monsoon floods in 50 years killed nearly 100 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of houses. Many of those affected were still living in temporary shelter after the 1999 cyclone.