ON THIS day
1113 Pope Paschal II issues the Piae postulatio voluntatis, a papal bull recognising the church’s first Sovereign Military Order of Knights, Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta.
1788 Lieutenant Philip Gidley King leaves Sydney on HMS Supply for Norfolk Island to found a colony there. The aim is to supply sails and masts from pines and flax.
1788 The first women’s floggings are held in convict Sydney when two women get 25 lashes each for stealing from fellow convicts.
1796 First bushranger, John “Black’’ Caesar, an African, is shot and killed at Liberty Plains, now Strathfield. 1804 Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins sails HMS Calcutta up Tasmania’s Derwent River from Port Phillip to set up a penal colony.
1937 Thirteen miners die in an explosion at Wonthaggi state coal mine.
1942 Singapore falls to Japan (above) as British commander Lieutenant General Arthur Percival surrenders his forces. More than 15,000 Australians are imprisoned.
1949 Mary Anne Mickelson, 60, late of Ryde, dies after a long illness, during which she was spoonfed by her sisterin-law, Caroline Grills. It later emerges that Grills had been poisoning her with thallium, from rat poison, and had murdered about five people.
1954 The Queen opens parliament in Canberra after the two weeks she spent touring Australia, the first such visit here by a reigning monarch.
1966 Deputy opposition leader Gough Whitlam attacks the ALP federal executive as 12 “witless’’ men for banning government aid for private schools, reversing a federal conference decision.
2010 Five devout Muslims from southwestern Sydney are sentenced to between 23 and 28 years’ jail for having conspired to carry out a terrorist act.