Been There Done That

10 Jan 2018

Another year – where did the last one go?

Archives, Diversity, Gay, History, Icons, Politics

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Another year – where did the last one go?

The fireworks were grand and the pets survived the noise; we greeted the New Year with restrained indulgence (as always), and again ignored making resolutions – we always fail to meet. So far, so good.

We remind ourselves that one of the most powerful men in the US of his time – J. Edgar Hoover, born 1/1/1895, rose to be boss of the FBI. He managed to get the dirt on so many of society ‘in the pursuit of criminals’, whilst being a gay man and being ‘above the Law’. We wonder if his anger and hatred came from his sexual repression. He died on 2/5/1972, and his faithful male companion lies buried next to him.

Someone who was ‘just a naught boy’ was UK actor, comic and member of the famous Monty Python team – Graham Chapman born 8/1/1941, died 4/10/1989 (see illustration.) An openly gay man, he contributed greatly to the Python sense of situation comedy, on stage, TV and film.

In general anniversaries, and closer to home, the surf lifesaving reel was invented on 3/1/1907 and first used to rescue a young Charles Kingsford-Smith, who survived the surf to become a famous Australian aviator.
We are reminded that Louis Braille – inventor of the raised dot writing system for the blind – was born 4/1/1809. Phil tells us that modern-day computing character encoding schemes like ASCII use a similar concept for character generation and recognition, being born from Braille, Morse and other codes.
A simpler product development around 1/1/1888 was the drinking straw, made from spirally-coiled waxed paper.

On 28/12/1836, the Australian State of South Australia was proclaimed at the Old Gum Tree Glenelg (see illustration) – celebrating the creation of the colony of free settlers. On 21/12/1894, South Australia went on to be the first Australian state and one of the first governments in the world to grant women the right to vote.

Listen to these stories and more, with some merriment – presented by Chris, Gordon & Phil.

First broadcast on 2 January 2018