1837: In the 19th century, Prussian Lutherans in Germany suffered religious persecution under King Friedrich Wilhelm III. Many Lutherans immigrated to Australia to escape persecution. The first German immigrants sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the Solway in June 1837. The Solway's arrival at Kangaroo Island on 16 October 1837 marked the arrival of the first German settlers in the new colony of South Australia.


1867: James Nash immigrated to Australia in 1858, initially as a laborer and doing prospecting in his spare time. On October 16, 1867, he discovered gold in a gully along the Mary River, sparking the Gympie Gold Rush. The gold mine was originally named Nashville, but less than a year later it was renamed Gympie, after nearby Gympie Creek.


1975: The Balibo Five, a group of Australian television journalists based in the town of Balibo in what was then Portuguese Timor (now East Timor), were murdered by Indonesian troops. Senior diplomats told the 2007 coroner's inquest that they understood "the killings were committed by the Indonesian military and were carried out deliberately".


1996: A collection of fossilized dinosaur tracks has been reported stolen from a sacred Aboriginal site in the Australian outback. These tracks are from the best-preserved Stegosaurus tracks in the world and are the only set of fossilized Stegosaurus tracks known in the world. The theft shocked and angered Aboriginal people because it violated sacred Aboriginal sites on the remote coastline near Broome.


2022: Victoria was facing a flooding crisis that had left about 6,000 homes without power and more than 9,000 people had applied for emergency support payments. Thousands of homes in Shepparton and other regional Victoria communities were set to be flooded or disconnected as Victoria's flood crisis worsens. The Australian Defense Force was stepping up assistance with evacuations, sandbagging and clean-up of affected areas.