On This Day

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Dave's Office

Have Detector Will Travel
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On This Day In 1977 More Than 80 People Died When A Commuter Train Crashed Into The Supports Of A Road Bridge In The Sydney Suburb Of Granville. This is Australia's worst rail disaster and I still remember it well, thoughts still go out to all the people affected by this tragedy, such a sad day. :brokenh: 8.(
 
On this day, 19th Jan 1976 a clairvoyant predicted that a tidal wave would destroy the cit of Adelaide, Don Dunstan the then Premier met the wave head on standing on the end of the Glenelg Jetty.

How do I remember the day, it was my first day working as a cabinetmakers apprentice at Clayton Furniture. Could have been a short career!
 
I remember that day too pa, the property market crashed around the beachside suburbs because all the superstitious people wanted to sell up and move to higher ground, pity it's not happening now. ;)
 
My father was joiner/cabinet maker and every thing HAD to be square. I remember at high school we were asked to build something at home and bring it in to display the item and get it marked. My Indian friend and i carried it in to school and no-one believed that I had made it. I lost 1/2 a point to gat 9 1/2 out of 10. Sooo pissed off.
It still wasn't exactly square but looked great. It was a bedside cabinet with a drawer up top and door at the bottom stained wood all over and clear varnished -there were 2 sections in the bottom half. The top was laminex top and edges.
 
"On This Day In 1788 The First Fleet Arrived At Sydney Cove Led By Captain Arthur Phillip"
 
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Mackka said:
Very true mate , so why are they always having a go at Cook when he arrived in Australia 19th April 1770?
Mackka
Just for the record - the reason is because Cook claimed Australia as belonging to Britain when he did his 1770 exploration - he considered it "empty" because he saw few aboriginals. His reports prompted Britain to colonize it as a penal settlement and to declare Terra Nullius (that it was empty and unsettled land).

These arguments are mostly purposeless - most of us would not be Australian if it were not for Cook, those in the British government who decided to settle it could be claimed to have initiated the damage to indigenous occupation, or the First Fleet that started the settlement, or the Dutch and Portuguese who first reported the existence of a Great South Land. The whalers who predated the settlers possibly introduced the diseases that caused much of the damage (smallpox scars were noted on aboriginals around Melbourne in the late 1790s. long before Batman's arrival, and it has been suggested by at least one prominent historian that 75% of the Wurundjeri were wiped put in 2 smallpox expeditions that predated any settlement). What occurred was unquestionably sad and catastrophic for indigenous people, but was mostly not planned by government - Britain did not want to get Spain's record as a brutal colonizer and killer of tens of millions (if one bothers to read history).

Entire populations thoroughly approved of slavery for centuries (Britain, I think the Saudi's only abolished it in the 1960s - China abolished slavery and serfdom in Tibet when they marched in. So knock down any statue made of a person in Britain over hundreds of years? Want a demon, take your pick....

I can understand that people might object to statues of people like Hitler or leaders of punitive expeditions against aborigines (I am not aware of statues of the latter, and whites in the cities were still vocally disapproving of what was done, and some whites were hung for killing aborigines - to set an example). Who wants to walk past a statue of Hitler on every walk to the synagogue? However even then, perhaps stick the staues or their portraits in a museum not in a park. Otherwise we would have no knowledge now of what some tyrants looked like (eg Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Mao, Cortez, Cromwell, Stalin). We of Celtic descent should be knocking down statues of past British landowners in ireland and Scotland given the effect of the period around the potato famine and dispossession of the crofters, when more than a million died (if this logic is followed through). The dispossessed then did the dispossessing - such is life...it can be hard and unfair.

Limit it to a few tyrants and stick them in museums anyway...
 
Thanks for the in-depth info goldierocks, I thoroughly enjoy reading your posts on all things Geology/prospecting and this post was no exception. Cheers from Dave :perfect: :beer:
 
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