ON THIS day
1688
English privateer William Dampier (above) anchors near Cape Leveque off northwestern Australia. He returns 11 years later to be one of the first to map the Australian coast.
1809
French educator Louis Braille, who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him, is born near Paris.
1815
The Francis and Eliza, en route to Australia with 123 convicts, is captured by US privateer Warrior and pillaged. Later released, it reaches Sydney on August 8.
1923
Vladimir Ulyanov, aka Lenin, on his deathbed, writes a note that Josef Stalin cannot be trusted to exercise his power wisely, and should be removed as Soviet Communist Party general secretary.
1943
Prime minister John Curtin asks the ALP federal conference to drop the party’s ban on conscription for overseas service. Next day the party does so, by 24-12.
1958
Soviet Sputnik 1, the first satellite launched by man, breaks up in the upper atmosphere after completing about
1440
circuits of Earth and travelling about 70 million kilometres on its 92-day mission.
1960
French novelist and playwright Albert Camus, who received the 1957 Nobel prize for Literature, is killed in an car accident.
1965
American-English author T.S. Eliot, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922), dies in London.
1988
National Australia Bank staff in Chinatown, Sydney, find robbers, never found, had blasted their way into vaults over three days to take $20 million in gold and other valuables.
2004
Former Sydney boxing champion Jeff Fenech is stabbed near a restaurant at Brighton LeSands; two brothers get sixmonth jail terms.