#ozhist — Public Fediverse posts

Remembering the day school children around Australia broke the news of the sacking of the Whitlam government by the Governor-General...

The announcement of the sacking by the Governor-General's secretary on the steps of old Parliament House was broadcast to all the children watching kids programmes after school. With no social media and most parents working, the children heard about the dismissal of the government first and told their parents when they got home. I remember running out to my parents with my younger brother shouting the news to them. Coincidentally, our car had broken down so my mother arrived in a tow truck pulling the car.

I was in primary school and old enough to understand how big this news was. At school for years afterwards my friends and I recalled this momentous occasion and how we told our parents.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-11/the-dismissal-50th-anniversary-photo/105958494

I started reading newspapers from a young age and remember reading Michelle Grattan's articles in The Age. Here are her recollections of The dismissal:
https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-remembering-the-day-gough-whitlam-lost-his-job-269387

#OzHist #Whitlam #whitlam #Dismissal #Australia

Over the last few days I have been sharing about the landscape of western Victoria which is covered with volcanos, some of which erupted comparatively recently, as little as 10,000 years ago. The Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland also has quite a few volcanos of a similar age.

The eruptions of both the western Victorian and Far North Queensland volcanos have been remembered by the Aboriginal peoples of the respective regions. They have carefully passed on this history in their oral storytelling traditions for thousands of years.

Today the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) has published some of these indigenous histories. Read these stories about the creation of landscape that includes the stories about the volcanos: https://www.abc.net.au/news/deeptime/topic/landscape-change/

#volcanos #WesternDistrict #AthertonTablelands #TowerHill #Warrnambool #OzHist

Eight years ago I downloaded about 80 years worth of Australian #Hansard from ParlInfo and created the Historic Hansard site for 'lovers of political speech'. I'm planning some updates in the next few months, so I thought it was a good time to pull together some threads documenting my adventures with Hansard.

If there's anything you'd like to see in the new version of Historic Hansard, let me know. Also, as it says in the post, it costs me about $400 a year to run, so contributions are welcome!

https://updates.timsherratt.org/2024/08/29/the-future-and.html #histodons #ozHist #digitalHumanities @histodons

Hey Australian #Hansard fans, I've done a complete reharvest of all of the Hansard XML files from 1901 to 1980 from ParlInfo. There's been lots of improvements/corrections, and most of the file names have changed (they now have a version flag). The improvements seem to be ongoing, so I'll try to harvest more regularly from now on. You can download the lot here: https://github.com/wragge/hansard-xml

I still need to load the updated XML into the Historic Hansard site, but that's going to have to wait for a month or two... #digitalHumanities #histodons #ozhist