As ten million striking workers demanded the end of his regime,President Charles de Gaulle dissolved the French National Assembly and announced new elections.
Melbourne physicists cracked the secret of an eerie cloud formation that rolls across north Queensland’s gulf country on moist spring mornings and occurs occasionally on Port Phillip Bay.
Seventy years ago,Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of the highest mountain in the world.
In what was considered to be a world first,a wedding in Sydney was televised in real time to relatives and guests in Athens.
On June 2,1953,large crowds flocked to London to see Queen Elizabeth crowned in Westminster Abbey. At the moment of the crowning,the crowd outside the Abbey rose in a great body. Hats came off,heads were bowed. Then down came the rain.
In 1980,Raelene Boyle withdrew from the Australian Olympic team for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Many countries and some individual athletes around the world decided to join the US led boycott of the Games,as a protest against the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
The Painters and Dockers celebrated their centenary during an adjournment to the Royal Commission into the union’s activities.
In 1993,‘The Piano’ became the first Australian film to win the Palme d’Or while New Zealand-born Jane Campion became the first woman director to win the prize.
After a chaotic evening that saw cars and buildings burnt out and airports closed due to dense smoke,the future of Cracker Night was in doubt.
In 1988,Harry “the Breaker” Morant was found innocent,according to an unofficial ‘retrial’ held in Burra in South Australia. The verdict rejected the official guilty verdict of one of British military history’s most controversial trials.