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Ooldea
Ooldea is a tiny settlement in South Australia. It is on the eastern edge of the Nullarbor Plain, west of Port Augusta on the Trans-Australian Railway. Ooldea is from the bitumen Eyre Highway. Being near a permanent waterhole, Ooldea Soak, the area was frequented by Aboriginal peoples, and was the site of a camp for railway construction workers in the early 20th century, and the Ooldea Mission from 1933 to 1952. History Ooldea was an important camp during construction of the Trans-Australian Railway, as it is near a permanent clay pan waterhole surrounded by sand dunes, first discovered by Europeans when Ernest Giles used it in 1875. On 17 October 1917, the final link of the railway was completed at Ooldea, linking the western section from Kalgoorlie to the eastern section to Port Augusta. It was around this time that a severe drought led many desert people to migrate closer to the waterhole, increasing pressure on the limited water resources now largely reserved for use by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yalata, South Australia
Yalata is an Aboriginal community located west of Ceduna and south of Ooldea on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia. It lies on the traditional lands of the Wirangu people, but the settlement began as Yalata Mission in the early 1950s when Pila Nguru people were moved from Ooldea Mission when that closed, after previously being moved from their land in the Great Victoria Desert owing to nuclear testing by the British Government. The old Colona sheep station nearby is now part of Yalata Indigenous Protected Area. At the , Yalata and the surrounding area had a population of 248. History Yalata lies on the traditional lands of the Wirangu people. Decades after the European settlement of South Australia began in 1836, a sheep station known as Yalata station was established, with its homestead built in 1880 located on a high hill inland from Fowlers Bay, where there was then a town known as Yalata. Its land stretched from the Nullarbor Plain across to Point ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Nuclear Tests At Maralinga
Between 1956 and 1963, the United Kingdom conducted seven nuclear tests at the Maralinga site in South Australia, part of the Woomera Prohibited Area about north west of Adelaide. Two major test series were conducted: Operation Buffalo in 1956 and Operation Antler the following year. Approximate weapon yields ranged from . The Maralinga site was also used for minor trials, tests of nuclear weapons components not involving nuclear explosions. Kittens were trials of neutron initiators; Rats and Tims measured how the fissile core of a nuclear weapon was compressed by the high explosive shock wave; and Vixens investigated the effects of fire or non-nuclear explosions on atomic weapons. The minor trials, numbering around 550, ultimately generated far more contamination than the major tests. Operation Buffalo consisted of four tests; One Tree () and Breakaway () were detonated on towers, Marcoo () at ground level, and the Kite () was released by a Royal Air Force (RAF) Vickers V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daisy Bates (Australia)
Daisy May Bates, CBE (born Margaret Dwyer; 16 October 1859 – 18 April 1951) was an Irish-Australian journalist, welfare worker and self-taught anthropologist who conducted fieldwork amongst several Indigenous nations in western and southern Australia. Bates was a lifelong student of Australian Aboriginal culture and society and was the first anthropologist to carry out a detailed study of Australian Aboriginal culture. Some Aboriginal people referred to Bates by the courtesy name ''Kabbarli'' "grandmother."Glass, A. and D. Hackett, (2003) ''Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra to English Dictionary'', Alice Springs, IAD Press. , p39 Early life Daisy Bates was born Margaret Dwyer in County Tipperary in 1859, when it was under British rule. Her mother, Bridget (née Hunt), died of tuberculosis in 1862 when the girl was three. Her widowed father, James Edward O'Dwyer, married Mary Dillon in 1864 and died ''en route'' to the United States, planning to send for his daughter aft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trans-Australian Railway
The Trans-Australian Railway, opened in 1917, runs from Port Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, crossing the Nullarbor Plain in the process. As the only rail freight corridor between Western Australia and the eastern states, the line is strategically important. The railway includes the world's longest section of completely straight track. The inaugural passenger train service was known as the ''Great Western Express''; later, it became the ''Trans-Australian''. , two passenger services use the line, both of them experiential tourism services: the '' Indian Pacific'' for the entire length of the railway, and '' The Ghan'' between Port Augusta and Tarcoola, where it leaves the line to proceed north to Darwin. History In 1901, the six Australian colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia. At that time, Perth, the capital of Western Australia, was isolated from the remaining Australian states by thousands of miles of desert terrai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United Aborigines Mission
The United Aborigines Mission (UAM) (also known as UAM Ministries, United Aborigines' Mission (Australia), and United Aborigines' Mission of Australia) was one of the largest missions in Australia, having dozens of missionaries and stations, and covering Western Australia, New South Wales and South Australia in the 1900s. It was first established in New South Wales in 1895. The UAM ran residential institutions for the care, education and conversion to Christianity of Aboriginal children, mostly on mission stations or in children's homes. It was mentioned in the '' Bringing Them Home Report'' (1997) as an institution that housed Indigenous children forcibly removed from their families. UAM-operated missions In 1924 the UAM opened its first mission at Oodnadatta. In 1926 the mission moved to Quorn, where it was called the Colebrook Children's Home. The UAM also opened missions at Swan Reach (which was later moved to Gerard and taken over by the Government in 1961–2), Nep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nullarbor Plain
The Nullarbor Plain ( ; Latin: feminine of , 'no', and , 'tree') is part of the area of flat, almost treeless, arid or semi-arid country of southern Australia, located on the Great Australian Bight coast with the Great Victoria Desert to its north. It is the world's largest single exposure of limestone bedrock, and occupies an area of about . At its widest point, it stretches about from east to west across the border between South Australia and Western Australia. History Historically, the Nullarbor was seasonally occupied by Indigenous Australian people, the Mirning clans and Yinyila people. Traditionally, the area was called ''Oondiri'', which is said to mean "the waterless". The first Europeans known to have sighted and mapped the Nullarbor coast were Captain François Thijssen and Councillor of the Indies, Pieter Nuyts, on the Dutch East Indiaman '''t Gulden Zeepaert'' (the Golden Seahorse). In 1626–1627, they charted a stretch of the southern Australian coast ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pila Nguru
The Pila Nguru, often referred to in English as the Spinifex people, are an Aboriginal Australian people of Western Australia, whose lands extend to the border with South Australia and to the north of the Nullarbor Plain. The centre of their homeland is in the Great Victoria Desert, at Tjuntjunjarra, some east of Kalgoorlie, perhaps the remotest community in Australia. Their country is sometimes referred to as Spinifex country. The Pila Nguru were the last Australian people to have dropped the complete trappings of their traditional lifestyle. They maintain in large part their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle within the territory, over which their claims to native title in Australia and associated collective rights were recognised by a 28 November 2000 Federal Court decision. In 1997, an art project was started in which Indigenous paintings became part of the title claim. In 2005, a major exhibit of their works in London brought the artists widespread attention. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Norman Tindale
Norman Barnett Tindale AO (12 October 1900 – 19 November 1993) was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist. Life Tindale was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1900. His family moved to Tokyo and lived there from 1907 to 1915, where his father worked as an accountant at the Salvation Army mission in Japan. Norman attended the American School in Japan, where his closest friend was Gordon Bowles, a Quaker who, like him, later became an anthropologist. The family returned to Perth in August 1917, and soon after moved to Adelaide where Tindale took up a position as a library cadet at the Adelaide Public Library, together with another cadet, the future physicist, Mark Oliphant. In 1919 he began work as an entomologist at the South Australian Museum. From his early years, he had acquired the habit of taking notes on everything he observed, and cross-indexing them before going to sleep, a practice which he continued throughout his life, and whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Victoria Desert
The Great Victoria Desert is a sparsely populated desert ecoregion and interim Australian bioregion in Western Australia and South Australia. History In 1875, British-born Australian explorer Ernest Giles became the first European to cross the desert. He named the desert after the then-reigning monarch, Queen Victoria. In 1891, David Lindsey's expedition traveled across this area from north to south. Frank Hann was looking for gold in this area between 1903 and 1908. Len Beadell explored the area in the 1960s. Location and description The Great Victoria is the largest desert in Australia, and consists of many small sandhills, grassland plains, areas with a closely packed surface of pebbles (called desert pavement or gibber plains), and salt lakes. It is over wide (from west to east) and covers an area of from the Eastern Goldfields region of Western Australia to the Gawler Ranges in South Australia. The Western Australian mulga shrublands ecoregion lies to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aboriginal History
''Aboriginal History'' is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal published as an open access journal by Aboriginal History Inc. It was established in 1977 (co-founded and edited by Diane Barwick) and covers interdisciplinary historical studies in the field of the interactions between Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous peoples. The Journal has been described as "... a flagship of the field of Australian Aboriginal history." The journal's scope includes the areas of Australian Indigenous history and oral histories, languages, biographies, bibliographic guides and archival research. It has also brought previously unpublished manuscripts and research in the fields of Australian archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, demography, sociology, law and geography to the professional and wider public. A focus on cultural, political and economic history is complemented by critiques of current events of relevance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Government
The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government is made up of three branches: the executive (the prime minister, the ministers, and government departments), the legislative (the Parliament of Australia), and the judicial. The legislative branch, the federal Parliament, is made up of two chambers: the House of Representatives (lower house) and Senate (upper house). The House of Representatives has 151 members, each representing an individual electoral district of about 165,000 people. The Senate has 76 members: twelve from each of the six states and two each from Australia's internal territories, the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory. The Australian monarch, currently King Charles III, is represented by the governor-general. The Australian Government in its ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
