Today’s WOTD – 8 October 2012

austral

[aw-struhl]
adjective
1. southern.
2. ( initial capital letter ) Australian.

noun, plural aus·tra·les  [-trah-les]
3. a monetary unit of Argentina, equal to 100 centavos: replaced the peso in 1985.

Example Sentences

– The austral winters and summers resemble one long night and one long day between weeks of sunrise and sunset.
– On a sunny austral morning, wheeler surveys a stone corral filled with the bobbing white heads of hundreds of alpacas.

Today’s aphorism

‘It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations’.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On this day

8 October 1769 – Captain James Cook lands at Poverty Bay, New Zealand.

8 October 1939 – birth of Paul Hogan, Australian actor.

8 October 1970 – Soviet dissident author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wins Nobel Price for Literature. Author of ‘The Gulag Archipelago‘.

8 October 1971 – John Lennon releases the iconic song, ‘Imagine’.

8 October 1980 – Bob Marley collapses on stage in New York. The following day he collapses while jogging in Central Park. He is diagnosed with a brain tumour, which developed from a melanoma that had spread from his toe. He died on 11 May 1981.