1789 Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong, a Koori, became an intermediary between the British and Aboriginal peoples. Michael Boddy’s play ‘Cradle of Hercules’ in the 1974 was my introduction to Bennelong. More recently we saw the Bangarra dance company interpret this relationship. 
1867 Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented TNT.
1952 Agatha Christie’s ‘The Mouse Trap’ opened to an audience of 450. It has since had 20,000 performances in London’s West End and ten million people have seen it to date among them us.
1980 France continued nuclear weapons testing at Mururoa atoll. The tests were in the atmosphere until direct action by members of the New Zealand government led France to go into underground tests. Thank you, Kiwis. Continued testing led to diplomatic tension in 1994, and we encountered a whiff of it when Kate handed an Australian passport to a French official in Nice. He stared at it, at her, and slowly — very slowly — clicked away at the screen and then leafed through a very large ring binder (looking for a reason to gum things up, I thought).
1992 The Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia voted to partition the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, beginning January 1, 1993. We have been to the Czech Republic, and perhaps will make it to Slovakia in 2019.
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