There are few other events in the history of Australia that come close to how dramatic the rebellion at Eureka Stockade was, and it remains a fixture in popular imagination to this day. Some have seized on what happened as an inspiration for hard times, whether economic depression or war. A few dozen soldiers, accompanied by local policemen brutally put down an uprising over the costs of obtaining a gold-digging license, as well as outrage toward corrupt authorities tasked with enforcing the rules. In early 1851, Edward Hargreaves, John Lister and William, James and Henry Tom were announced by the government to have discovered gold near Bathurst, New South Wales. In June of that year gold deposits were found in Victoria, and this became the catalyst for great change. Suddenly, half the men who worked in Melbourne abandoned their jobs in the hopes of pulling their fortune up from out the ground, leaving ships at the ports and herds of sheep abandoned. In addition, people from all

... It's the mileage.

On this day in 1935, the American pilot Amelia Earhart departs from Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii for a solo flight to North America over the Pacific Ocean. Local business interests offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who accomplished this feat first, and after traveling a distance of 2,400 miles in 18 hours Earhart landed at Oakland Airport in California. On May 21, exactly five years after another American aviator, Charles Lindbergh, became the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Earhart became the first female pilot to do the same when she landed her own plane in Ireland. However, unlike Lindbergh before his historic flight, Earhart was already well known to the public before her solo trans-Atlantic flight. In 1928, as a member of a three-person crew, she was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an aircraft. Although her only job during the flight was to keep the log, she still became famous, and people all over the country were enamored of the daring and