EDDIE McGuire —  the late Mr K F B Packer’s Melbourne journalist-cum-impresario-cum-Top Magpie, single-handedly, if indirectly, responsible for making lots of us much more aware of the word “ubiquitous”  —  opens The Footy Show [the AFL version, celebrating (if that’s the word) the game of our own, not the boof-head NSW version] every Thursday with a “Well, What a Big Week it’s been in Football !!!”.
Were he to open this offering, he might well start with “What a Big Year it’s been in Anniversaries !!!”.
And it has, too, by the dozens, including, in no particular order, and with no special weighting Albert Einstein, Trafalgar, Australia’s First State’s first train, Dr Johnson, Bergen-Belsen & Auschwitz, the Whitlam Dismissal, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Curtin & Chifley, Vietnam, the UN’s founding, Gorbachev becoming General Secretary CPSU and the 75th anniversary of Phar Lap’s Melbourne Cup.
The Really Big Ones are to do with 1945, a year which set scenes for so much of where we play our roles.
The world began to learn of the Holocaust, that most monstrous of wars against the Jewish people. As, too, it began to understand a newly horrifying aspect of nuclear physics.
This year the UN celebrated, or, at least, recalled, the founding of the world’s second attempt at a world-wide polity.
It’s the 60th anniversary of the death of, arguably, Australia’s greatest PM, his immediate one-week succession by one of Australia’s great trivia questions, and finally by, arguably,  Australia’s greatest PM. What’s more, have any succeeding PMs had to face anything like what the Lyons (1931-39) and Curtin-Chifley (1941-49) governments had to ?
On a more recreative note, Tasmania’s three traditional football competitions resumed after their WWII hiatuses, with the TFL becoming a district-based competition, old established clubs Cananore and Lefroy failing to meet the Brave New Criteria of post-War football.* In the VFL, the notorious Carlton-South Melbourne Grand Final “bloodbath” at Princes Park seemed like a sick imitation of the recently ended global hostilities; maybe it is fitting and meet that the Sydney Football Club, South Melbourne’s Harbourside incarnation, marked this anniversary by its first (and the Swans’ fourth) Premiership.
Taking the longer view, and concentrating on 50ths and 100ths, here are some anniversaries worth pondering.
It’s the 2050**th anniversary of C Julius Caesar’s introduction of his reformed calendar [now eponymously called the Julian calendar] in 46 BCE^. The Gregorian version which we now use will have its latest fine-tuning with the addition of an extra second at the end of 2005. Perhaps the 21st century will see the final rationalisation of the calendar, the proposed Universal Calendar, which has four quarters, totalling 364 days, of three months in a 31-30-30 days pattern, plus an intercalary day called “New Year Day” or “World Day” between each December 30th and January 1st. But what about all those anniversaries and birthdays that’ll get the Universal chop ?
Sixteen centuries ago, St Jerome published (if that’s the right term for the time) the Vulgate, his Latin version of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, which was the canonical standard till the Hebrew and Greek texts were re-introduced, or re-discovered, during the Renaissance and the Reformation.
Scots everywhere, and they are everywhere, should recall the barbaric execution of William Wallace by England’s Edward I in 1305; if their eyesight’s going, they can be thankful, along with the rest of us over 45, that spectacles were apparently invented the same year.
Another biblical anniversary: the Gutenberg Bible, Europe’s first book with movable type, came off the press about 1455.
Shown on the ABC, Gunpowder, Treason & Plot reminded us of the 1605 origin of the once-popular cracker night, and in 1705, Edmond Halley predicted the pattern of returns of “his” comet.
The devastating tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 is but one of the latest in a long chain of natural disasters, and one of the most destructive was the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. If ever we need a reminder that “natural” is not synonymous with all that’s good, healthy and beneficent, the Indian Ocean tsunami is such a mental note. But one of the finest Western examples of town planning since Roman times came out of that destruction -  the Marquis de Pombal’s rebuilding of central Lisbon.
For scribblers, 1755 saw the publication, after eight years of strenuous labour, of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary.
The biggest bi-centenary this year is that of Trafalgar, admiral Horatio Nelson’s decisive naval victory over the Franco-Spanish fleet off the SW coast of Spain. It’s reasonable to claim that it denied Napoleon ultimate victory on terms acceptable to him. Reminds you, doesn’t it, of another European tyrant who got held up by perfidious Albion, turned to attacking Russia, and came a cropper. (Psst, and don’t mention it to the French: the bi-centenary of Waterloo is in ten year’s time.)
More connected in person to us, even to the most curmudgeonly, our Princess Mary was very close to the celebrations in Denmark of the 1805 birth of Hans Christian Andersson. Two Tasmanian “stations” were established this year: the Low Head Signal Station by Col William Paterson at the mouth of the Tamar, and a bay whaling station by William Collins at Ralphs Bay on the Derwent River, worth remembering in relation to recent International Whaling Commission decisions, and Japan’s continuing whale-hunting to our south.
1855: More controversy: would we be debating genes, GM crops and cloning without friar Gregor Mendel’s publication in 1855 of his Laws of Heredity ?
In the same year, NSW’s first railway transports Australia’s first rail-mail -  will Tasmania have any trains at all after this year ? And, with a State election in the air soon, it’s also the sesquicentenary of Van Diemen’s Land achieving “responsible” ^^ government.
You reckon TV’s Big Brother shows are a bit too raunchy for our tender sensitivities ?  In Sydney, in 1855, Lola Montez (hugely popular in our Queenstown) performed her Spider Dance, which the Sydney Morning Herald’s editor called “the most libertinish and indelicate performance that could be given on the public stage . . .” 
If you’ve caught the fad for Victorian, Edwardian and Federation(-style) houses, 1855 was the year when curved corrugated iron became more readily available, hence the highly popular bullnose verandah.
Very Important Events occurred a century ago.
Russia had its first revolution, after decisively losing the Russo-Japanese war. Australia’s settler population reached the 4 million mark, and, in unrelated developments, Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity and J P Sartre was produced.
The Marconi Company carried out the first radio link between two land stations, from Devonport to Point Lonsdale in Victoria, and the Wireless Telegraphy Act was passed. Notice how, a century on, that old-fashioned word “wireless” has made a come-back bigger than one of Nellie Melba’s. If you’re allowed into the Henry Jones Art Hotel on Hobart’s waterfront, or even if you’re just passing by, recall that it’s 100 years since Henry Jones & Co P/L began fish-canning there.

A little-known US mining engineer, Mr H C Hoover, late of Stanford University, helped form the New Broken Hill Company; he later gained greater prominence elsewhere.
”  …  and there’s nothing new under the sun.”  —  Ecclesiastes I, 8:  “New Education” was introduced into Tasmanian schools following a scathing report by newly-appointed Director of Education William Lewis Neale, “modernising the primary curriculum, improving the recruitment and training of teachers (and their pay and conditions, assisted by the teachers’ union [he] helped found), upgraded the physical conditions of the schools, and broadened the reach of the educational authorities” (from “The Companion to Tasmanian History”).  Will our current Ms Wriedt’s “Essential Learnings” have half as good a write-up a century from now ? The above-mentioned “teachers’ union” is now the Tasmanian Teachers Federation.
Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country, first published in The [UK] Spectator, turned 100 this year.
When you’re flying interstate courtesy of Jetstar and Virgin lowering the costs of flying along with the comfort levels, remember that on Sunday 23 November 1930, a Gypsy Moth biplane took off as the first aeroplane to use the Commonwealth Government’s newly-gazetted Western Junction aerodrome; five years on, Holymans Airways (which a year later became ANA, and ultimately the ill-fated Ansett) “began a daily flight out of Hobart, sometimes with only one intrepid passenger . . .  It was a long day for travellers: the [trans-Derwent] ferry left at 7.40 am and they reached Melbourne at 12.30 pm” (from “The Companion …”).
Not all transport news was Good News in 1935, for on Tuesday 16 July, the world’s first parking meter was invented in Oklahoma, invented, wouldn’t you know it, by a bloody journalist. Australia’s first lot were in Melbourne 20 years later.
Plenty of other happenings for future history books in 1955, among them the formation of the Warsaw Pact,  West Germany joining NATO, Rosa Parks, who died earlier this year, keeping her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the ALP splitting after the Federal Executive, meeting in Hobart, banned the Industrial Groups.
James Dean starred in Rebel without a Cause and the landmark Australian film Jedda premiered in Darwin.
As if in a mandatory 50 year cycle, a report by the Tasmanian Director of Education recommended re-organising secondary education, leading to the establishment of ground-breaking (for Australia, at least) “matriculation” colleges.
Two “Economy V Environment” developments: the Lake Pedder National Park, of about 240 sq km and including the lake itself,  was declared under the 1915 Scenery Preservation Act, and aluminium production began at Bell Bay.
As for the years between 1955 and 2005, readers can pick their own, particularly if re-hashing Whitlamophobia or Whitlamophilia. And what about some additional offerings via “Comments” ?
Next year is the bi-centenary of the foundation of the city of Launceston; unlike the uncertainty about when, exactly, did Hobart begin, 2006 is the year: there’s a metal plaque on the tower of the old Launceston PO attesting to the “first centenary” of the city. By the way, did you know that, in terms of demographic capital city a-centricity, Launceston is to Lae, PNG, as Hobart is to Port Moresby ?
* John Devany’s Full Points Footy entries on these two vanished clubs end as follows:
“During its brief existence, Cananore was the TFL’s second most successful club, with its overall record bettered only by that of North Hobart.  Moreover, the club’s achievement in procuring 10 state premierships was unsurpassed at the time of its demise.  These achievements alone should be sufficient to earn the Canaries a prominent place in any objectively selected football ‘Hall of Fame’, but the sad reality is that, with football outside the AFL-VFL behemoth being accorded less and less value and credence with each passing year, it is not likely to be very long before Cananore’s highly laudable legacy disappears without trace.”
“All told, the Lefroy Football Club existed for less than half a century, and yet its impact on, and contribution to, Tasmanian football was significant, and deserves to be recalled with admiration and respect.  In a sense, it helped lay the foundation for what might be described as Tasmanian football’s ‘golden era’ of the 1950s and ‘60s, as well as providing a useful reminder that, in football as in life, no amount of success can ever guarantee survival.”
For more from this excellent site, visit: http://www.fullpointsfooty.net/
** because there is no Year Nought [“Year Zero” has horrific connotations, doesn’t it ?] between the traditional BC and AD, anniversaries from BC to AD have to add a year. Try it: if, as some assert, Baby Jesus was born in 6 BC, in what year did he have what we’d call his tenth birthday ?
^ CE, Common Era, and BCE, Before the Common Era, are less culturally specific than our traditional BC and AD.
^^ Wikipedia at the time of writing describes responsible government as “a system of government that embodies the principle of parliamentary accountability which is the foundation of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. Governments in Westminster democracies are responsible to Parliament (and more specifically to the lower, popularly-representative, house) rather than to the monarch, or, in the colonial context, to the imperial government.
Responsible government and the principle of parliamentary accountability manifests itself in several ways. Ministers must firstly account to Parliament for their policy decisions and for the performance of their departments. This requirement to make announcements and to answer questions in Parliament means that ministers have to be members of either house of Parliament.
Secondly, although ministers are officially appointed by the head of state and can theoretically be dismissed at pleasure, they retain office subject to their holding the confidence of the lower house of Parliament. Once the lower house has passed a motion of no confidence in the government, the government must immediately resign or submit itself to the electorate in a new general election.”
Leonard Colquhoun
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