ON THIS DAY
1556 England’s first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, is burnt at the stake after being convicted of heresy under laws passed by the Catholic Queen Mary.
1617 Pocahontas, Native American, daughter of Powhatan (b 1595) is buried after dying just as she reached England.
1821 Three ships leave Sydney with 41 soldiers and 60 convicts to establish a colony at Port Macquarie to mete extra punishment to the worst offenders. Captain Francis Allmann is in command.
1823 Convict Thomas Pamphlett and three others leave Port Jackson in an open boat and are driven north for several days by a gale. They are eventually wrecked at Moreton Bay.
1842 Serial killer John Lynch, alias Dunleavy, is convicted in Berrima Circuit Court of having murdered hotel worker Kearns Landregan and later sentenced to hang. 1898
A gas explosion at Dudley Colliery, near Newcastle, kills 15.
1931 The aeroplane Southern Cloud, carrying eight people, disappears in the Snowy Mountains on its way from Sydney to Melbourne. The wreckage is found in 1958.
1965 Martin Luther King Jr leads 3200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
1998 The Australian cricket team suffers its worst Test defeat in 60 years, beaten by an innings and 219 runs by India in Calcutta.
2006 Twitter entrepreneur Jack Dorsey (above) sketches out a new communication tool in San Francisco, California, and sent his first Tweet.
2009 Anna Bligh becomes the first woman in Australia to be elected premier when Labor wins the Queensland election.