Historical Oddities

General Chat In The News
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As you may know this has been a wet year. Normally theweather reports give the height of the flood above the normal river level, say 18 metres etc.

The reports about the floods at Echuca and Moama on the River Murray are predicted to be 95 metres. What! 95 metres! what kind of water rise is that?

Turns out it is an historical anomaly. Echuca was an inland port so the water level is measured from sea level rather than normal river level! Isn’t that weird?

Another historical factor is the fact that all the towns on the Murray have a twin town on the other bank. This dates back to the days before federation when the two colonies of Victoria and NSW had customs posts to tax goods from the other colony.

Another oddity is that because Victoria was originally part of NSW when it was decided to create another colony NSW insisted that the border be on the southern bank of the river rather than in the middle as is normal. This means that Victorians fishing in the Murray River need a NSW fishing licence.

I thought it would be nice to have a thread dealing with oddities that owe their origin to history. Got any?

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Wasn’t Australia, or at least the west coast, called New Holland after being “discovered” by a Dutchman 100 years before Cook?

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And the French and the Chinese. Cook was merely investigating earlier reports after carrying out the main purpose of his voyage, observing the transt of Venus.

The Dutch were in Batavia in the 1600s (Indonesia). The First Fleet ran into the French explorer La Perouse when they arrived to settle Australia, Sydney even has a suburb named after him on the shores of Botany Bay.

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I love these potted histories.

Is it just me who has noticed the brit colonies are all a bit second-hand? Other countries had been there before us.

There is a reason for that: back in the day, the great explorers were working for the pope to spread the catholic word. Job done, they moved out, the brits moved in and, well, we were very business-like in those days.