1.
Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia
2.
1908 in Australia
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See also,1907 in Australia, other events of 1908,1909 in Australia, Timeline of Australian history. 30 March – Commonwealth Quarantine service came into operation and took over quarantine stations in every state,20 April –44 are killed and 400 injured in the Sunshine train disaster. 7 May – The Coat of Arms of Australia are granted Royal Assent,8 October – The capital of Australia is chosen, settling a feud between rivals Melbourne and Sydney. 13 November – The Australian Labor Party withdraws its support for the minority government of Prime Minister Alfred Deakin,18 November – The Victorian government passes the Adult Suffrage Bill 1908, granting female suffrage for the first time. 15 December – The Invalid and Old Age Pensions Act is passed, the government of Sir Thomas Bent is returned to power. 1 January – The Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology formally commences operation,3 February – first trans-Tasman radio transmission 16 May – The Commonwealth Literary Fund is established. The funeral was held at the Kew Cemetery in Melbourne,31 January – Victoria wins the 1907–08 Sheffield Shield. 11 February – Australia regains The Ashes with a 308 run victory over England,20 April – The first New South Wales Rugby League premiership begins in Sydney. At the 1908 Summer Olympics held in London, Australia forms a team with New Zealand, australias national rugby league team sets sail for England on the 1908–09 Kangaroo tour of Great Britain
3.
1906
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As of the start of 1906, the Gregorian calendar was 13 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923. January 16–April 7 – Algeciras Conference to resolve the First Moroccan Crisis between France and Germany, january 22 – The SS Valencia strikes a reef off Vancouver Island, Canada, killing over 100 in the ensuing disaster. January 31 – Ecuador–Colombia earthquake and associated tsunami, february 10 – HMS Dreadnought is launched and sparks the naval race between Britain and Germany. February 11 – Pope Pius X publishes the encyclical Vehementer Nos denouncing the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches, february 11 – Two British £1-per-head tax collectors are killed near Richmond, Natal, sparking the Bambatha Rebellion. March 10 – Courrières mine disaster, an explosion in a mine in France kills 1,060. March 18 – In France, Romanian inventor Traian Vuia becomes the first person to achieve an unassisted takeoff in a powered monoplane. April 7 – Mount Vesuvius erupts and devastates Naples, april 14 – The Azusa Street Revival, the primary catalyst for the revival of Pentecostalism this century, opens in Los Angeles. April 18 – San Francisco earthquake on the San Andreas Fault destroys much of San Francisco, California, USA, killing at least 3,000, with 225, 000–300,000 left homeless, and $350 million in damages. April 23 – In Tsarist Russia, the Fundamental Laws are announced at the first state Duma, may – Jack Londons novel White Fang begins serialization in the American magazine Outing. May 29 – Karl Staaff steps down as Prime Minister of Sweden over the issue of expanded voting rights and he is replaced by the right-wing naval officer and public official, Arvid Lindman. June 7 – Cunard liner RMS Lusitania is launched in Glasgow as the worlds largest ship, July 1 – Sporting Lisbon, a well known football club in Portugal, founded. July 6 – The Second Geneva Convention meets, July 12 – Alfred Dreyfus is exonerated. He is reinstalled in the French Army on July 21, thus ending the Dreyfus affair, august 4 – The first Imperial German Navy submarine, U-1, is launched. August 16 – A magnitude 8.2 earthquake in Valparaíso, august 22 – The first Victor Victrola, a phonographic record player, is manufactured. August 23 – Unable to control a rebellion Cuban President Tomás Estrada Palma requests United States intervention, the subsequent provisional occupation administration lasts until 1909. September 11 – Mahatma Gandhi coins the term Satyagraha to characterize the Non-Violence movement in South Africa, september 18 – A typhoon and tsunami kill an estimated 10,000 in Hong Kong. September 30 – The first Gordon Bennett Cup in ballooning is held, the winning team, piloting the balloon United States, lands in Fylingdales, Yorkshire, England. October 1 – The Grand Duchy of Finland becomes the first nation to include the right of women to stand as candidates when it adopts universal suffrage, october 6 – The Majlis of Iran convenes for the first time
4.
Australian federal election, 1906
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Federal elections were held in Australia on 12 December 1906. All 75 seats in the House of Representatives, and 18 of the 36 seats in the Senate were up for election, watson resigned as Labour leader in October 1907 and was replaced by Andrew Fisher. The Protectionist minority government fell in November 1908 to Labour, a few days before Reid resigned as Anti-Socialist leader, the Labour minority government fell in June 1909 to the newly formed Commonwealth Liberal Party led by Deakin. The merger didnt sit well with several of the more liberal Protectionists, the 113 acts passed in the second Fisher government exceeded even the output of the second Deakin government over a similar period. At the time, it represented the culmination of Labours involvement in politics and it was a period of reform unmatched in the Commonwealth until the 1940s under John Curtin and Ben Chifley. It was the federal election in Australia following the adoption of the federal government. It would also see if all parties could survive the implementation of protectionist policies which differentiated the two, george Reid adopted a strategy of trying to reorient the party system along Labour vs non-Labour lines – before the election, he renamed his Free Trade Party to the Anti-Socialist Party. Reid envisaged a spectrum running from socialist to anti-socialist, with the Protectionist Party in the middle and this attempt struck a chord with politicians who were steeped in the Westminster tradition and regarded a two-party system as very much the norm. Since the Protectionist primary platform of government tariffs had been dealt with by previous governments and those who remained were largely supporting the Partys leader, Alfred Deakin, rather than its policies. The first federal referendum in Australias history was held in conjunction with the election, the proposed alteration to the Constitution, to change the start date of Senators terms from 1 January to 1 July, passed in all states and was carried. Members in italics did not contest their seat at this election
