Last Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (above) led a ceremony of mourning for more than 200 of his compatriots killed in wild-
fires early last month. 'We have lost mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, we have lost brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, the tiniest of children. All [were] precious lives,' he said, from the city around which most of the devastation occurred: Melbourne ...
In 1860, Melbourne was the starting point for the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, which was an attempt to cross Australia from south to north (a journey of 2,800km). The team completed the south-north leg but only one of the four men who reached the Gulf of Carpentaria, John King, made it back to Melbourne. The return trip claimed the lives of both of the expedition's leaders: Irishman Robert O'Hara Burke and Englishman William John Wills ...
Wills was born in January 1834 in Totnes, in the western English county of Devon. The market town, which these days has a bohemian feel to it, is at the head of the estuary of the River Dart, which enters the English Channel at Dartmouth ...
Dartmouth played host in 1373 to author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat (there was a lot of multitasking in those days) Geoffrey Chaucer. One of his fictional pilgrims ('A schipman was ther, wonyng fer by weste; For ought I wost, he was of Dertemouthe') was written as coming from the town, in his best-known work, the Canterbury Tales ...
The collection of stories, told by members of a group on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, was the inspiration for the movie A Knight's Tale (2001). Although the story is nothing like the Canterbury Tales' A Knight's Tale, a fictional Chaucer does appear in the film, which stars Heath Ledger ...
