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1154 Death of Pope Anastasius IV.

1170 The fortieth Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket (c. 1118 - 1170), 52, returned to England after six years of exile in France. He was murdered on December 29 of this year, and we will be looking then at the event and some associated folklore.

1552 The death of St Francis Xavier, Spanish missionary who helped Ignatius Loyola found the Jesuit order.

1587 Sir Thomas Herriot introduced potatoes to England, from Colombia.

1642 Dutch navigator Abel Tasman and his crew set foot on Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land) for the first time.

1803 (Francois Marie) Charles Fourier published his utopian Universal Harmony, France, announcing the theory of "passional attraction" which will "lead the human race to opulence, to sensual pleasures, to the unity of the globe".

"His system, known as Fourierism (a form of idealistic "Utopian" socialism), is based on the idea that there exists a universal principle of harmony, displayed in four departments, the material universe, organic life, animal life, and human society. This harmony can flourish only when the restraints which conventional social behavior places upon the full gratification of desire have been abolished, allowing man to live a free and complete life. His ideas were similar to those of Sir Thomas More."   Source

1805 USA: Explorer William Clark reached the Pacific Ocean after floating down the Snake and Columbia Rivers. "Clark's journal entries noted an appalling lack of enormous hydroelectric dams."  

Source: Daily Bleed

1818 Illinois became the 21^st US state.

1823 Death of the Great Belzoni

Forty-five-year-old Giovanni Battista Belzoni (b. 1778), larger than life showman extraordinaire, died of dysentery in Guinea, after attempting to travel to Tombouctou, often called Timbuctu or Timbuktu, a city on the Niger River in the West African country of Mali.

The explorer of Egypt and its antiquities was born the 14^th child of a poor barber in Padua, Italy. Before becoming a famous traveller he was a barber, a Capuchin monk, magician, and a strongman in a circus) ... 
Read on

1828 US presidential election, 1828: Challenger Andrew Jackson beat incumbent John Quincy Adams and was elected President of the United States.

1846 Australia: Explorer Ludwig von Leichhardt left on his last expedition of discovery.

1847 USA: Frederick Douglass and Martin R Delaney started North Star, an anti-slavery paper.  

Eureka Stockade

1854 Australia: The Battle of Eureka Stockade, an uprising of Victorian Gold Rush gold miners against the State of Victoria; six troopers and 22 miners died in the civil revolt by gold miners against the officials supervising the gold-mining regions of Ballarat. Although the revolt failed, it has endured in the collective social consciousness of Australia. As Mark Twain wrote, "It was the Barons and John over again ... it was Concord and Lexington".

Eureka has been variously described as the birthplace of Australia's democracy, republicanism and multiculturalism. It is often regarded as being an event of equal significance in Australian history as the storming of the Bastille was to French history, the Easter Uprising to the Irish, or the Boston Tea Party or Battle of the Alamo to the history of the USA. Its multicultural heroes include an Italian writer (Raffaello Carboni; read his book), a freed African-American slave (John Joseph, who was the first to be charged with sedition), a former German soldier and sundry American democrats, Canadians, Irish rebels and British Chartists. The first incident was the arbitrary arrest of a physically disabled, non-English speaking Armenian, wrongfully charged with assaulting an officer.

The miners held a series of huge peaceful meetings demanding fairer treatment (their main complaint was about miners' taxes), but following the murder of a miner, those calls for non-violence were pushed aside. A 27-year-old Irishman, Peter Lalor (read his letter), who'd never before addressed a public meeting, was thrust into leadership on November 30; his first word: "Liberty". Lalor went on to be a Member of Parliament, although not a particularly radical one. Thirteen miners were tried for treason early in 1855, but all were rapidly acquitted to great public acclaim.

G'day, digger

The miners referred to themselves as 'diggers', and formed the Diggers' Right Society, in part a reference to the 17^th-Century proto-socialist movement, the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley. 

The name was adopted by Australian infantry soldiers in WWI and continues as Australian slang for either an Australian soldier, or simply an Australian man; even today the term is occasionally used in the same way as the better-known 'mate'.

No taxation without representation

The Ballarat Reform League, which sprang from the Diggers' Right Society, used the British Chartist movement's principles to set their goals. A meeting passed a resolution "that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called on to obey, that taxation without representation is tyranny". The meeting also decided to secede from Britain if the situation did not improve.

We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, 
and fight to defend our rights and liberties.
The diggers' oath was not sworn before a deity, but a constellation

The Eureka flag

At left is shown the Eureka flag under which the protesters fought and died, the tattered original of which is still in existence. Showing the constellation of the Southern Cross, a stellar feature that dominates the night sky in Australia, it is favoured by many Australians as a replacement for the national flag which still shows Britain's Union Jack even after more than a century of independence. However, many conservative elements oppose the Eureka flag, for obvious reasons, and there will likely be no change in the foreseeable future. One hopes that the sesquicentenary of 2004 further raised consciousness about this anachronism.

"The Communist Party seized Eureka as its own. The ultra-right, racist National Front followed suit. The capacity of political extremes to mould history in their own image reflects poorly on the mainstream. Whatever Eureka's complex assembly, it was never a battle fought at the fringes. And its consequences affect us all, a point the Prime Minister, John Howard, curiously disregarded by deciding to give the current celebrations a wide berth."
Sydney Morning Herald, editorial, December 3, 2004

"Peter Lalor, the great-grandson of the rebellion leader, says he is proud of his heritage.

"'Slowly but surely, even the conservative elements can see that Eureka was a fundamental stand for human rights and liberties, not for revolution, not for breaking laws, not for bringing down governments, but for sound democratic principles,' he said."   Source

"In a letter to his friend Karl Marx on September 23, 1851, Friedrich Engels remarked that the scale of the Australian gold strikes had the potential to turn the world upside down. Certainly for the fine English gentlefolk of the colonies it must have seemed as though that had already happened ...

"In 1861 the Eureka flag flew at Young, in NSW, over a massacre of Chinese by European diggers on the Lambing Flat goldfield. Seizing on a handy scapegoat, the colonial governments passed laws limiting the immigration of Chinese and, in time, the Eureka flag became a symbol of the White Australia policy, a device that has proved useful ever since to distract working people from the real causes of their misery."
Why celebrate Eureka?

"In The Communist Movement and Australia (1986), the communist author W. J. Brown favourably quoted Karl Marx as maintaining that 'the workers' were the 'main force at Eureka'."
Eureka: A short war that's long on history

"Their actions laid the foundations for reforms that made Victoria – and ultimately Australia – a progressive centre of parliamentary democracy. The first secret ballot in the world was introduced in Victoria in 1856. Male suffrage followed a year later. It was a climate that encouraged women's suffrage in some Australian colonies before the end of the 19th century. For a young colony, the idea of breaking with the British Empire even at the turn of the 20th century may have seemed unreasonable. A century later it is no longer so. The Eureka anniversary is a reminder of democratic traditions that must ultimately propel Australia towards becoming a republic. This issue remains unsettled. Opinion polls have long recorded majority support for a republic in Australia. The defeat of a reluctantly held 1999 referendum was one of process rather than principle. Yet as The Age has long argued, Australia's standing as an independent, democratic nation can only be enhanced by severing the largely symbolic residual ties that bind us to the monarchy. Given all that has passed since the Eureka miners took their stand, the continuation of a hereditary, absentee monarch of another country as our head of state seems all the more absurd."
Source: The Age, editorial, December 3, 2004

"The Stockade was given a prominent place in great Nineteenth century novels of Marcus Clark [sic] and Rolfe Boldrewood. It was applauded in the verse of Henry Lawson, Victory Daley, Randolph Bedford, Francis Adams and Mary Gilmore. Eureka plays have been written by E. W. O'Sullivan, Louis Esson, Lesie Haylen and Richard Lane. There is a report of a 1906 silent film as well as the postwar Harry Watt production. And Eureka has formed the theme of one of the old Cycloramas, various novels, radio features, paintings, pieces of journalism, and many others."
RD Walshe, The Eureka Stockade 1854 - 1954 free online text (Marxist-Leninist)

 

How the Southern Cross was formed (Australian Aboriginal myth) 

Baiame, the Great Spirit, made the animals and plants, and created man and woman to rule over them. They were told they could eat plants, but not animals. All was well until one drought year. A man in desperation killed some kangaroo rats, and shared them with his wife. They offered some of the flesh to one of their friends, but he was mindful of the prohibition, and walked away from them rather than eat. 

He walked across a broad plain, to the edge of a river that flowed despite the great drought. The man and woman followed him and saw him on the other side of the river, lying under a tall gum tree. They saw a black figure, half man and half beast, which was the Yowie (Spirit of Death), take the man up into the tree.

The tree was lifted up into the sky, flying south. Two white cockatoos tried to catch the flying tree.

Because Baiame's rules had been violated, and man had experienced death as the kangaroo rat had; the swamp oaks sighed and the gum trees wept tears of blood. To this day the Kamilroi tribe knows the Southern Cross as Yaraandoo, the place of the white gum tree, and the Pointers as Mouyi, the white cockatoos.

Baiame and Man: how human beings came about

Eureka Stockade at Wikipedia    Eureka 150: Dissent into Democracy

The Australian flag    Eureka flag to fly in Senate chamber    Eureka on Trial

The birthplace of Australian democracy    Eureka: Has Australia found its defining moment?

Eureka Stockade, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia    Reclaiming the Radical Spirit of Eureka Rebellion

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson    Anzac Day Vs Eureka Day

A divergent view on the Eureka Stockade

1860 The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a Mr Holt of the Cooks River, near Sydney, was attempting to establish rabbits on his property. By the 20^th Century, rabbits had reached plague proportions throughout Australia.

1866 USA: Textile strikers won a 10-hour work day, Fall River, Massachusetts.

1904 The Jovian moon Himalia was discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine at Lick Observatory.

1905 British troops quelled a riot in Georgetown, British Guiana.

1909 King Edward VII dissolved the British parliament. As a consequence, with no budget passed, the government could gain no taxes from alcohol, tobacco and cars.

1910 France occupied the port of Agadir, in Morocco.

1917 After nearly 20 years of planning and construction, the Quebec Bridge opened to traffic (the bridge partially collapsed on August 29, 1907 and September 11, 1916).

1920 British writer, Rudyard Kipling, won damages of two pounds against a medical company. The crime: they had used part of his famous poem 'If––' in an advertisement.

1921 Anti-authoritarian educator AS Neill established his school, Summerhill, at Lyme Regis, in England. He moved it three years later to Leiston (Suffolk). Neill was a proponent of children sharing in running schools, and told of this anarchist experiment in numerous books.

1925 New York police smashed the biggest bootlegging ring so far in the Prohibition era, arresting 20 people.

1926 Agatha Christie went missing.

Agatha's real-life mystery

On December 3, 1926, while almost at the peak of her fame, English mystery writer Agatha Christie became part of a real-life mystery. She disappeared from her Berkshire home, and, for eleven days, no one could find her. Police across the nation searched without success, till she turned up on December 14 at the Harrogate Hydro Hotel in Yorkshire. To this day, the case remains a mystery. The film, Agatha, is a fictionalized version of this incident.

1928 In Rio de Janeiro, a seaplane sank near Cap Arcona with pioneer Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont (b. 1873) on board. On October 19, 1901, he had won the world's first aviation prize by circling the Eiffel Tower in an airship. Santos-Dumont is believed to have committed suicide by hanging himself in the city of Guarujá in São Paulo, on July 23, 1932.

1929 Great Depression: US President Herbert Hoover announced to Congress that the worst effects of the recent stock market crash were behind the nation and the American people had regained faith in the economy. Nice to be told.

1937 The Dandy, the world's longest running comic, was first published.

1947 Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway, starring Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, opened at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater and ran for 855 performances.

1948 The Chinese refugee ship, Kiangya, hit a mine in the Huangpu River, near Shanghai, and sank, with the loss of an estimated 2,750 lives.  

1953 The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and Republic of China was signed in Washington, DC.

1960 The musical, Camelot, opened in New York. The popularity of the show was influential in the popular name for the John F Kennedy household and administration (1960 - 63) as 'Camelot'.

1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Police arrested more than 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and massive sit-in at the administration building protesting the UC Regents' decision to forbid Vietnam War protests on UC property.

1964 Australian Treasurer, Dr Jim Cairns, invited Ms Junie Morosi to join his office in Canberra. The married Treasurer's controversial relationship with Morosi endured long after his sacking by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (for Cairns's 1973 role in an attempted borrowing of national funds from the Middle East, the 'Khemlani Loans Affair').

1967 The luxury train, 20^th Century Limited, completed its last run from New York City to Chicago, Illinois (the train was inaugurated on June 15, 1902).

1969 Protesters destroyed files at eight New York draft boards.

1969 John Lennon was offered the role of Jesus Christ in Jesus Christ Superstar.

1970 October Crisis: In Montreal, Quebec, kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross was released by the Front de Libération du Québec terrorist group after having been held hostage for 60 days. Police negotiated his release and in return the Government of Canada granted five terrorists from the FLQ's Chenier Cell their request for safe passage to Cuba.

1971 War broke out in Bangladesh.

1971 Montreux, Switzerland: The Montreux Casino burned to the ground during a show by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The incident was commemorated by Deep Purple in their song 'Smoke on the Water'.

Source: Daily Bleed    Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list

1973 Pioneer program: Pioneer 10 sent back the first close-up images of Jupiter.

1979 In Cincinnati, Ohio, a stampede for seats at Riverfront Coliseum during a Who concert killed eleven fans (band members were not made aware of the deaths until after the show).

1982 A soil sample was taken from Times Beach, Missouri that was later found to contain 300 times the safe level of dioxin.

1984 Bhopal Disaster: A leak of 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, killed more than 3,800 people outright and injured anywhere from 150,000 to 600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom later died from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history. As many as 23,000 people have died from the Bhopal chemical debacle.

The US Government later blocked extradition of Union Carbide officials facing criminal prosecution in India. UC paid only about $500 compensation for each victim, while denying responsibility for the accident; much of each victim's compensation money had to be paid out to medical and legal services. Greenpeace members and other activists have been arrested trying to clean up the site.

"On November 29, 1999, Greenpeace issued its report entitled "The Bhopal Legacy" which lists the UCIL facility and the area surrounding that facility as one of Greenpeace's global "toxic hot-spots." The report goes on to confirm scientifically that massive environmental contamination, including contamination of the drinking water of residents in the nearby communities, entirely unrelated to the Bhopal Disaster, has taken place at the UCIL site where large amounts of toxic chemicals and by-products from the factory's original manufacturing processes continue to pollute the land and water."   Source

Slow justice: The lawsuit    BBC Investigation    Greenpeace Bhopal campaign

Wilson's Almanac activism page   Daily Planet News

Website of Students for Bhopal, the student network for justice in Bhopal

Union Carbide's spin site    Fake Dow website by The Yes Men

Greenpeace report on the whereabouts of Warren Anderson

Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabiliation Department, Indian Government    More

1989 Cold War: In a meeting off the coast of Malta, US President George HW Bush (Daddy) and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev released statements indicating that the cold war between their nations might be coming to an end (some commentators from both nations exaggerated the wording and independently declared the Cold War over).

1992 The Greek oil tanker Aegean Sea carrying 80,000 tonnes of crude oil ran aground in a storm while on approach to La Coruña, Spain, and spilled much of its cargo.

1997 In Ottawa, Canada, representatives from 121 countries signed a treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines. However, the United States, the People's Republic of China, and Russia did not sign the treaty.

Antipersonnel landmines are still being laid today. These – and mines from previous conflicts – continue to claim victims in every corner of the globe each day. The situation has improved in recent years, but a global mine crisis remains and there is still a lot to be done before we live in a mine-free world. 

Indiscriminate

Antipersonnel mines cannot be aimed: they do not distinguish between the footfall of a soldier or a child. 

They lie dormant until a person or animal triggers their detonating mechanism. 

Then, landmines kill or injure civilians, soldiers, peacekeepers and aid workers alike. 

Inhumane

When triggered, a landmine unleashes unspeakable destruction. 

A landmine blast causes injuries like blindness, burns, destroyed limbs and shrapnel wounds. 

Sometimes the victim dies from the blast, due to loss of blood or because they don't get to medical care in time. 

Those who survive and receive medical treatment often require amputations, long hospital stays and extensive rehabilitation. 

The injuries are no accident, since landmines are designed to maim rather than kill their victims. 

Stolen lives, limbs and livelihoods
Mine deaths and injuries over the past decades now total in the hundreds of thousands. 

It is estimated that there are between 15,000 and 20,000 new casualties caused by landmines and unexploded ordnance each year. That means there are some 1,500 new casualties each month, more than 40 new casualties a day, at least two new casualties per hour. 

Most of the casualties are civilians and most live in countries that are now at peace. 

In Cambodia, for example there are almost 40,000 landmine survivors recorded between 1979 and 2002. These are the survivors. Some 18,000 people were killed in this period. More than 60% of the total casualties, numbering some 57,000, were civilians (source: Landmine Monitor Report 2003).

Source: International Campaign to Ban Landmines

Annan urges greater efforts to rid world of landmines    Pope endorses world ban on landmines

A Way Forward Towards A World Without Landmines    Google news on landmines

Campaign to Ban Landmines    Adopt-A-Minefield    Clear Landmines    USA Campaign to Ban Landmines

1999 After rowing for 81 days and 2,962 miles, Tori Murden became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by rowboat alone when she reached Guadeloupe from the Canary Islands.

1999 NASA lost radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere.

1999 Seattle Police Chief Assistant Ed Joiner said he had reviewed all the World Trade Organisation protest's videos and media, and stated that no one had been bloodied.  

See Book of Days November 30

"In her book, No Logo, Canadian Naomi Klein claims

'...corporate investment in the Third World was seen ... as a key to alleviating poverty and misery. By 1996, however, that concept was being openly questioned, and it was recognized that many governments in the developing world were protecting lucrative investments – mines, dams, oil fields, power plants and export processing zones – by deliberately turning a blind eye to egregious rights violations by foreign corporations against their people.'"   Source

2008 Mick Keelty effigy burned on Eureka Day: Following our blog post Mick Keelty burns at dawn, we report that an effigy of Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty was indeed burned at dawn on Eureka Day, December 3, at the site of the Eureka Stockade rebellion of 1854.

Tomorrow: Ghost ship? Mystery of the Mary Celeste

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