ON THIS day
1486 Henry VII marries Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, at Westminster, uniting the feuding houses of Lancaster and York.
1788 First Fleet starts arriving at Botany Bay as HMS Supply sails in. Aborigines brandish spears but then become more accepting.
1794 The NSW Corps mutinies on Norfolk Island after the governor has a soldier arrested for fighting. Ten soldiers are sent to Sydney in irons to be tried.
1871 While Prussian guns bombard Paris, the Reich is formed when William I of Prussia is crowned in Versailles as the first emperor of Germany.
1882 English humorist A.A. Milne, ho originated the immensely popular stories of Christopher Robin and his toy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, is born.
1901 Jimmy Governor, a bushranger who had previously been a hardworking Aborigine, hangs in Darlinghurst jail, aged about 26, for having murdered a woman schoolteacher.
1911 The first aircraft landing on a ship’s flight deck is performed by American pilot Eugene Ely on the battleship Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay.
1912 British explorers led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott arrive at the South Pole, reached one month earlier by Norway’s Roald Amundsen.
1944 Paul Keating, who was leader of the Australian Labor Party and prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996, is born st St Margaret’s Hospital, Sydney.
1977 The Granville train disaster kills 83 people when a commuter train is derailed (above).
2003 A bushfire in Canberra kills four people and leaves hundreds of homes destroyed or damaged.
2006 A boatload of 43 political activists who fled the Indonesian province of Papua make it to the Australian mainland. Australia later grants protection visas, sparking a row with Indonesia.