Menzies is born

Posted in Decades

Sir Robert Menzies

1894 menzies birthplace
Robert Gordon Menzies is born to James and Kate Menzies on 20 December 1894 in Jeparit, a small town in Victoria about 400km north-west of Melbourne. Robert was born in a room at the back of his father's general store where the family lived.

Australian Events

Bark hut home on the gold fields complete with bird cage and container of lilies
Premiers' Conference on Federation held in Hobart, Tasmania during 1895 calls for a convention to frame the federal constitution. Enabling Acts were to go through colonial legislatures authorising popular election of delegates and machinery to consider and pass the draft Constitution by referendum.

World Events

Marie Curie
Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium in 1898. Together, they demonstrated in a major discovery that radioactivity was not the result of a chemical reaction but a property of the element or, more specifically, of the atom. In 1903 they share the Nobel Prize for Physics with Henri Becquerel.