Events
- 13 January – The bushfires of Black Friday kill 70 people in Victoria.
- 27 March – The first CAC Wirraway training aircraft, A20-3, takes to the air at Fishermans Bend, Victoria.
- 7 April – Prime Minister Joseph Lyons dies of a sudden heart attack, the first Prime Minister to die in office. Sir Earle Page, the leader of the Country Party is appointed caretaker Prime Minister until the United Australia Party can elect a new leader.
- 26 April – Robert Menzies is elected leader of the United Australia Party, and is sworn in as Prime Minister.
- 10 June – Premier of Tasmania Albert Ogilvie dies in office. Edmund Dwyer-Gray acts as Premier until he is officially elected as leader of the Labor Party in Tasmania on 6 July.
- 3 September – World War II begins. Australia declares war on Germany, following the United Kingdom and British Dominions' declaration of same, after the German invasion of Poland.
- 15 September – Robert Menzies announces a new War Cabinet.
- 1 December – Australia agrees to take 15,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Europe, following the German occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
- 18 December – Edmund Dwyer-Gray steps aside as Premier of Tasmania, by prior arrangement with Robert Cosgrove to assume the premiership.
Read more about this topic: 1939 In Australia
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)