ON THIS DAY
44BC Julius Caesar, dictator of the Roman Republic, is assassinated by a group of senators led by Gaius Cassius on the Ides of March.
1493 Christopher Columbus returns to Spain, concluding his first voyage to the western hemisphere.
1806 The Hawkesbury River rises to its highest level seen by colonists. Loss of crops brings the colony to near starvation.
1892 John Houlding, owner of Anfield, the home ground of Everton Football Club, has a disagreement with the club and takes members of Everton to form his new club, Liverpool Football Club.
1917 During the first phase of the Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II is forced to abdicate, thus ending the Romanov dynasty.
1933 Australian filmmaker Charles Chauvel releases his first sound film in Sydney. Errol Flynn makes his debut in The Wake Of The Bounty.
1937 The first so-called central “bank’’ to preserve blood by refrigeration to be used for transfusion is set up at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, US, following Soviet successes.
1963 Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly shoots safe-cracker Lloyd Edward Day, 32, dead in a Drummoyne street during a wild car chase. Day had just fled the Marcus Clark department store in Railway Square after a weekend cracking its safe.
1964 Actress Elizabeth Taylor (pictured) marries actor Richard Burton in Montreal for the first of two times; it is her fifth marriage and his second.
2002 A jury in Brisbane finds Robert Long guilty of murder and arson. He set fire to a hostel at Childers in Queensland in 2000, causing the deaths of 15 backpackers. He is sentenced to 20 years jail.
2006 Queen Elizabeth opens the 18th Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.