A cricket match on 11 and 12 February 1851, played by teams from Van
Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) and Port Phillip District (now Victoria),
was the first between two Australian colonies, recognised in later years
as the initial first-class cricket match in Australia. It took place at
the Launceston Racecourse (pictured in 2009). The match was one of the
celebratory events marking the separation of the Port Phillip District
from New South Wales in 1851 as the colony of Victoria. The team
representing Port Phillip was drawn from the Melbourne Cricket Club; the
Van Diemen’s Land team consisted of players from Launceston and Hobart.
The visiting Port Phillip team was expected to have an advantage but had
difficulties with the batting conditions and the opposition’s unusually
slow bowling. Batting first, Port Phillip scored 82; Van Diemen’s Land
replied with 104, assisted by a large number of extras. Batting again,
the Victorian team scored 57; the Tasmanian team needed 36 to win, which
they accomplished on the second day to record a three-wicket victory.
Following this match, intercolonial cricket became increasingly
Today’s selected anniversaries:
Britannicus, son of Claudius and heir to the Roman
emperorship, died under mysterious circumstances in Rome, apparently
poisoned at a dinner party.
University College London (Main Building pictured) was founded
as the first secular university in England.
The BBC aired an adaptation of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., the
first science fiction television programme ever broadcast.
After two black employees were killed on the job, black
sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S., agreed to begin a strike
that lasted over two months.
Rebel East Timorese soldiers invaded the homes of President
José Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão, seriously wounding
Wiktionary’s word of the day:
1. (geometry) Lacking an angle.
2. (cartography, navigation) Having a magnetic deviation of zero.
Wikiquote quote of the day:
Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs.
And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the
other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost
the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping
of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have
sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at
Nuremberg and hanged them? But, again, don’t misunderstand me. The only
conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided
by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very
little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in
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