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A woman's opinions are useless to her, she may suffer unjustly, she may be wronged, but she has no power to weightily petitions against man's laws, no representatives to urge her views, her only method to produce release, redress, or change, is to ceaselessly agitate.
Louisa Lawson, 'Mother of Women's Suffrage', born on February 17, 1848; speech to the inaugural meeting of the Dawn Club, Sydney, Australia. Published in Dawn, July 1889

Since the time when equal suffrage was first agitated, the subject has been grossly misrepresented and grossly caricatured ... [there is always] the covert sneer, the attempt at witticism, the unkind comparison ...
Louisa Lawson

I have always loved my countrywomen, always admired them, and believed in them, and believed them to be the most patient, long suffering, generous and capable Women in the whole World. I still think so. It does not seem so odd now as it did years ago, when Australians male and female were not considered as they are now. I had in my mind's eye a big capable, strong, virtuous Woman as a Representative of Australia. I saw her in my dreams when a little child, and when I grew up I wanted to fight every obstacle out of her way, and I fought, God knows I did with a persistence almost amounting to mania as long as health and means lasted.
Louisa Lawson

If the promise to love and to cherish were kept, then women would probably have settled down contentedly in their nests for another century or two and never have evolved...but to be shackled in loveless but tolerable marriage is to die before we have begun to live.
Louisa Lawson

 
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Highly recommended:
Folklore of World Holidays
by Margaret Read MacDonald

Ancient Ways

A Short Biography of Annie Besant

The Spiritual Life

The Ancient Wisdom

Mahabharata

Beauties of Islam
By Annie Besant

Thought Forms

The Masters and the Path
CW Leadbeater

A Textbook of Theosophy
CW Leadbeater

Isis Unveiled
By Helene Blavatsky

The Penguin Henry Lawson

Australia: Literature and History CD-ROM

Australian Literature

Lonely Planet Sydney

Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women's Writing 1880S-1930s

The Suffragettes and After

Louisa

The Suffragettes in Pictures

Henry Lawson: Selected Stories

Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism

Complete Poems
Banjo Paterson

Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse

The Works of 'Banjo' Paterson

The Dame Edna Experience - The Complete Series 1

Portrait of the Artist As Australian: L'Oeuvre Bizarre de Barry Humphries

 

Once an Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes

The Importance of Being Earnest
Wilde/Humphries

Be A Goddess

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints

Spellcraft

The Encyclopedia of Saints

Daily Everything

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Tanis Diena, ancient Latvia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

It was held in honour of pigs and was transferred to the feast day of St Anthony after Christianization.

A pig's head was placed atop a stone to protect from thunder and lightning. During the day, the townsfolk went to pig pens and sang sons glorifying the fertility of the pig. At lunch, a pig's head and feet were eaten and the remains were buried where the pigs would be herded the following year. Sewing or other needle-work was strictly prohibited, as was drinking in the home. A foggy day indicated floods; a sunny day indicated a good barley crop; a dry day indicated drought, and vice versa.

Parentalia, ancient Rome  (Feb 13 - 21)

Shiwasu Matsuri, Mikado Jinja, Nango, Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan (Jan 20 - Feb 20)

Sounkyo Ice Festival, Sounkyo Onsen (spa), Hokkaido, Japan (Jan 29 - Mar 5)

Bonten matsuri, Miyoshi-jinja Shrine, Akita-shi, Akita, Japan (Feb 16 - 17)

Powamu, Pueblo/Hopi purification ceremony, (Feb 12 - 28) 

Celtic tree month of Luis ends

Egyptian Day (unlucky day, European Middle Ages)

Feast day of St Alexis Falconieri

Feast day of St Anacletus, patron saint of bathroom cabinets

Feast day of St Bartholomew degli Amidei

Feast day of St Benedict of Cagliari

Feast day of St Donatus the Martyr

Feast day of St Faustinus and Companions

Feast day of St Fintan of Clonenagh, abbot in Leinster

Feast day of St Flavian, archbishop of Constantinople, martyr in Lydia
(Scotch crocus, Crocus susianus, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint)

Feast day of St Fortchern of Trim

Feast day of St Gherardino Sostegni

Feast day of St Guevrock

Feast day of St Hugh dei Lippi-Uguccioni

Feast day of St John Buonagiunta Monetti

Feast day of St Julian of Caesarea, martyr in Palestine

Feast day of St Loman, or Luman, first bishop of Trim

Feast day of St Polychronius

Feast day of St Romulus the Martyr

Feast day of St Secundian the Martyr

Feast day of the Seven Founders of Servants of Mary

Feast day of St Theodulus, martyr in Palestine

Feast day of St William Richardson

Day of Cancelled Expectations
According to main character in William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways.

Tuesday before Shrove Tuesday, Holly Boy
A note about the dating of items in Wilson’s Almanac
1779, in Kent, UK, girls burned in effigy the ‘holly boy’, which they had stolen from the boys. In another part of the village the boys were burning an ivy girl, stolen from the girls. Much noise was involved in an old custom whose reason is lost in antiquity.
Hone, William, The Every-Day Book, or a Guide to the Year, Vol., 1, William Tegg and Co., London, 1878

1699 Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, master builder (d. 1753)

1774 Raphael Peale, painter

1798 Auguste Comte, ‘father’ of sociology, (d. 1857)

1821 Lola Montez, dancer, actress, friend of monarchs, (d. January 17, 1861).

Born Eliza Rosanna Gilbert (or, according to one source, Maria Dolores Eliza Gilbert) at Grange, County Sligo, Ireland and like many other aspects of her life, discrepant reports of her birth have been published. In 1837 sixteen-year-old Eliza eloped with Lieutenant Thomas James. The couple separated five years later and Eliza became a dancer under a stage name. Her London debut as ‘Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer’ in June 1843 was disrupted when she was recognized as Mrs James.

The resulting notoriety did not hurt her career and she quickly became famous both for her self-created ‘Tarantula Dance’, and the expression “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets”.

In 1846, she traveled to Munich, where she was discovered by – and quickly became the mistress of – Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her Countess of Landsfeld.

As she was linked romantically to writer Alexandre Dumas and composer Franz Liszt as well as Ludwig, her arrival in Australia was attended by much popular and press interest. She was loved on the goldfields but the metropolitan press took a prudish view – wowserish being the Aussie term. She played to packed houses in these antipodean outposts of Western culture; one William Kelly wrote in 1860 “ … eager lads and lasses, who crowded from the remotest gullies, were impatient ... to see the charming dansante in this popular ballet”.

The Sydney Morning Herald thought the spider dance “the most libertinish and indelicate performance that could be given on the public stage”. An Australian musical comedy, Lola Montez (1958), by Peter Stannard, Peter Benjamin and Alan Burke, focused on the time she spent in Ballarat. After her Australian tour, she moved to New York.

Lola Montez was also a friend or acquaintance with Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand and Alphonse de Lamartine. The Victorians called her "La Grande Horizontele".

"At the age of 41 she had a schizophrenic collapse, abandoned the West and all her travels, and spent the last two years of her life on the streets of New York as a pauper. She shuffled along, speaking aloud to herself, urging God to forgive her wicked life.

"At 43 she died of a stroke in a wretched boardinghouse, alone."   Source

Discrepancies concerning the record of Lola Montez

Images of Lola Montez   Lola Montez's grave    More

1847 or 1854 Charles Webster Leadbeater (CW Leadbeater; d. March 1, 1934), English clergyman and Theosophical author who contributed to world thought mostly through his work as a clairvoyant.

Leadbeater was an Anglican priest when he joined the Theosophical Society in 1883. The next year he met Helena Petrovna Blavatsky when she came to London.

His most well-known activity was the discovery of Jiddu Krishnamurti, on the private beach that formed part of the Theosophical headquarters in Adyar, India. Krishnamurti and his family had been living in the headquarters for a few months before this discovery. Krishnamurti was to be the vessal for the indwelling of the coming "World Teacher" that many Theosophists were expecting. This new teacher would, in the pattern of Moses, Buddha, Zarathustra (Zoroaster), Jesus Christ, and Muhammad divulge a new dispensation, a new religious teaching.

Charles Leadbeater stayed in India for some time overseeing the raising of Krishnamurti, but eventually felt that he was being called to go to Australia for the cause. While in Australia he became a leading member of the Liberal Catholic Church.

Leadbeater was accused of paedophilia but was never charged or brought to court, though there is a body of evidence that suggests he may have sexually abused his students in the United States, India and Australia. Peter Michel, in his biography of Charles W. Leadbeater, writes that these accusations are suspect as they came from what can be considered as his enemies: Alexander Fullerton, Herbert Burrows, G.R.S. Mead, Hubert van Hook, Katherine Tingley and Hilda Martyn. It has been speculated that an incriminating letter to a young boy attributed to Leadbeater, that was signed "Thousand kisses darling", was a forgery by Fullerton.

It is true however that (before 1906), he recommended the practice of masturbation as a prophylactic in certain cases to young boys. But these were ideas that Charles Leadbeater already had before he joined the Theosophical Society and still was a member of the Church.

Leadbeater's clairvoyance was not without grave errors. In his book The Inner Life he claims that there is a population of humans on the planet Mars. See Leadbeater's Observations on Mars.

For more on his teachings, see Criticisms of CW Leadbeater's Teachings.

Leadbeater and a group of his students came to live in a large house ('The Manor') overlooking Sydney Harbour.

CW Leadbeater in Australia

"From 1900 and 1904, CWL made two long lecture tours in the United States and in Canada. and in 1905 in Australia ...

"Leadbeater left Adyar on February 20th, 1914 for a lecture tour in Burma, Java, New Zealand and Australia. At the time, the relationship between Annie Besant and Leadbeater was tense again. Free from the court cases, she began to work for India's independence. CWL was an imperialist, didn't like Mrs. Besant political orientation at all, and never missed an opportunity to say so. She was not sorry to see her old companion leave Adyar, as he had become a political liability. The inevitable separation came at the begin of 1915, when Leadbeater went to live in Sydney, Australia. He began to teach and assembled there a substantial audience. He had just discovered by clairvoyance the energies hidden in the Christian Sacraments and came to closer contact with James Ingall Wedgwood he knew since 1906 ...

"The following year (1916) Wedgwood came back to Sydney, but this time as a Bishop. and on July 22nd he consecrated Leadbeater to the Episcopate. Three days later, Leadbeater announces his episcopal consecration to Annie Besant , and explains the reasons for his acceptance.

"Wedgwood came to visit Australia in 1915. During his stay, he initiated Leadbeater to Masonry in the 'Droit Humain', also known as co-Masonry because it admits in its ranks women as well as men. Leadbeater found Masonry 'very useful', and began clairvoyant investigations on the Rituals. He also suggested to make changes to improve their performance in the invisible.

In 1930, Mrs. Besant asked Bishop Leadbeater (then 83 years old) to come and help her in Adyar, he agreed to come there to finish his life ... In 1934, Bishop Leadbeater wanted to travel to Sydney for a visit. While sailing he became ill and disembarked in Perth, in West Australia to receive medical treatment. He survived 16 days in hospital, but a heath wave overcame the old man. On February 26th, 1934, the doctors had lost any hope to save him, he died on the following March 1st. A statement concerning his passing was issued by the Rev. S. Fisher , Priest-in-charge of Western Australia on the 4th of March 1934. C.W.L. last words were, according to some witnesses: 'Go on, go further, keep your enthusiasm'."   Source

Sources: Wikipedia et al

A Chronological Listing of CW Leadbeater's Books and Pamphlets    

More    More    More    More    More    And more

1848 Louisa Lawson (d. August 12, 1920), Australian feminist, inventor, poet, founder/editor of the Republican and (for 17 years) founder/publisher/editor of Dawn: A Journal for Australian Women; mother of Australian poet, Henry Lawson (1867 - 1922).

When female Australian British subjects* won the vote with the Uniform Franchise Act (June 16, 1902), Louisa Lawson was hailed by her political sisters as “The Mother of Womanhood Suffrage”. 

Louisa was a poor, Mudgee-born bush battler, forced by marital breakdown, economic depression and drought to move with her four surviving children to the city. She was an idiosyncratic but indomitable woman, a prodigious worker, powerful writer and fine poet, a spiritualist, farmer, postmistress and shopkeeper. 

 Louisa spent thirty-five years of her hard life fighting for women’s rights. She founded the Association of Women, and with Henry, in 1887 - 88 she published the journal, The Republican. Louisa then became founder, owner, publisher and editor of The Dawn, the new nation’s foremost women’s political magazine, announcing that it would battle for women’s rights, and the vote. “Why should one half of the world govern the other half?” was Louisa’s rallying cry.

While she supported her children in a little house at 138 Phillip Street near Sydney's docks, she had to teach herself the difficult trade of setting lead type, because of a black-ban by the New South Wales Typographical Association. The Postmaster-General’s Department refused to register The Dawn for sending through the post. In 1891, Louisa helped launch (with Maybanke Anderson, Rose Scott, and Dora Montefiore) the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW. She also founded the Dawn Club, which met in various locations in Sydney, including Quong Tart's tea rooms ...

Read on at the Henry and Louisa Lawson page in the Scriptorium

Australian politicians and educators, particularly conservative ones, tend to promote the myth of Henry Lawson as a homespun rural author, and consequently, although there is some truth in it, a bucolic view of Lawson is very widespread – he has been washed in antiseptic and billy tea. For example, one website says "Henry Lawson lived in the country on a selection in Sapling Gully approximately 6 kms. from Mudgee in New South Wales." In fact, from the age of 17 to his death at 55, Lawson spent almost his entire life in Sydney, a bustling world city twice as populous as San Francisco in his heyday 1890s, where he mixed with the bohemian and (often extremely) radical intellectuals and activists of the era, as did his mother for the last 37 years of her life. A large part of Henry's writing, especially his poetry, was political, swinging between what we would call today "left" and "right". Progressives and reactionaries, unsure of what to do with him, have preferred to ignore him or make him a kind of literary jackaroo. Louisa Lawson's life, too, probably because she was both poor and in many ways excessively progressive for her times, has been virtually swept from public consciousness despite her incredible achievements. I hope the Almanac's Lawsons Chronology might in some small way help to correct the historical revision of the whole 'Lawson myth', by showing these two Aussies in context.

A world chronology of women’s suffrage    Louisa Lawson at Wikipedia

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

1864 AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson (Banjo Paterson; Andrew Barton Paterson; d. April 5, 1941), Australian bush poet and author of Australia's favourite song and unofficial national anthem, Waltzing Matilda as well as many poems such as Clancy of the Overflow. Paterson was born at Narambla, near Orange, New South Wales, the son of a Scottish immigrant from Lanarkshire, who had arrived in Australia in the early 1850s.

From Wikipedia: Paterson was educated at Sydney Grammar School and Sydney University, and practised as a solicitor. He began submitting and having his poetry published in The Bulletin and in 1895 had a collection of his works published. He would later become a war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald during the Boer war, the Boxer rebellion and World War I.

Other famous 'Banjo' poems include 'The Man From Snowy River', which (loosely) inspired a movie in 1980 and (even more loosely) a TV series in the 1990s, and 'Clancy of the Overflow', the tale of a Queensland drover (cattle handler responsible for herding large mobs of cattle long distances to market), amongst several others.

Paterson's poems mostly presented a highly romantic view of rural Australia. Paterson himself, like a majority of Australians even then and even more so since, was city-based and indeed was a practising lawyer. One may contrast his work with the (almost as famous) prose of Henry Lawson, a contemporary of Paterson's, including his work 'The Drover's Wife', which presented a considerably less sugar-coated view of the harshness of rural existence of the late 19th century.

Banjo Paterson's image appears on the (AUS - Australian Dollar) $10 note, along with an illustration inspired by 'The Man From Snowy River' and, as part of the copy-protection microprint, the text of the poem itself.

'Clancy of the Overflow'
by Banjo Paterson 
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just "on spec", addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow". 

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
"Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are." 

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. 

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars. 

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all 

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet. 

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste. 

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of "The Overflow". 

'The Band played Waltzing Matilda', anti-war song by by Eric Bogle

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson    More

National Geographic magazine August 2004 article on 'Banjo' Paterson

Serle, Percival (1949) Paterson, Andrew Barton In Dictionary of Australian Biography. Angus and Robertson, Sydney. From Project Gutenberg Australia

1874 Thomas J Watson, IBM president

“Bent on inspiring the dispirited NCR sales force, Mr. Watson introduced the motto, ‘THINK,’ which later became a widely known symbol of IBM. He told salesmen, ‘“I didn't think” has cost the world millions of dollars.’ Overnight, framed placards with the single word, ‘THINK,’ sprouted throughout the offices of the company. Later, at IBM, he reintroduced the same motto.”

Source

1854 Friedrich Alfred Krupp, industrialist (d. 1902)

1864 Banjo Paterson, Australian poet (d. 1941)

1874 Thomas J Watson, computer pioneer, first president of IBM

1877 André Maginot, politician, Maginot Line (d. 1932)

1888 Otto Stern, physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (d. 1969)

1908 Marjorie Lawrence, Australian opera star  

1924 Margaret Truman, novelist, daughter of Harry S Truman

1925 Hal Holbrook, actor

1929 Chaim Potok (d. July 23, 2002), American author and rabbi

1930 Ruth Barbara Rendell, (Baroness Rendell of Babergh), who also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, British best-selling mystery and psychological crime writer, often called the Queen of Crime

1934 Barry Humphries, Australian comedian, author and poet, best known for his characters, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson

Dame Edna Everage and her creator
Barry Humphries

More    More    More    More Please (autobiography)

Que?

Humphries is a supreme parodist, satirist and ironist. His various comedic characters such as Dame Edna and Sir Les are often loathsome, and obviously deliberately so. Unfortunately not everyone is blessed with the irony gene:

In February 2003, Vanity Fair published a satirical column written by Dame Edna:

“Forget Spanish,” Dame Edna advised. “There's nothing worth reading except Don Quixote.

“As for everyone speaking it, what twaddle. Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The home help?

“Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you're American, try English.”

Barry Humphries at ABC (some audio and transcripts)

Serious name-drop and sincere fawning greetings

[I'm going to do a serious name-drop here. I spent half an hour with Barry Humphries in Sydney once. We discussed poetry and Oscar Wilde (Humphries, a fine poet, is a Wilde freak) and BH excitedly retrieved from his room a photocopy of an original letter that he had just bought at auction in London. It was a typically vitriolic correspondence by The Beast, Aleister Crowley, who didn't like Wilde one bit and said so in the letter. I remember that Crowley's letter referred to Wilde as a "sodomite" – by coincidence, just last night I finished Lawrence Sutin's wonderful biography of The Beast, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, and if there was ever a man who shouldn't dare to call another a bugger, it was the detestable fraud, Crowley.

I must add that the brief chat I had with Mr Humphries I count as one of the greatest privileges of my life. I hold no artist from history in higher esteem, given his genius and prolific oeuvre. I had met him once or twice (he will not remember those meetings) and expected him to be fearsome. People often expect him to be so, probably because Dame Edna can be so harsh on latecomers to her shows. He is not harsh at all. A warmer and more friendly man I have never met. As Edna would say, it was spooky!

Many Ozzies agree that Barry Humphries is Australia's greatest living treasure and I wish him a very, very happy birthday (and many more) and hope that I meet him and his delightful wife Lizzie again. I trust my simpering obeisance will be noted by the Great Man.]

1934 Alan Bates (d. December 27, 2003), British actor (Far from the Madding Crowd; The Go-Between)

1938 Mary Frances Berry, controversial African American historian, lawyer and author (Black Resistance/White Law)

In 1976, Berry accepted the University of Colorado chancellorship – the first African American woman to lead a major research university. President Carter appointed her to the US Commission on Civil Rights, but in 1984, President Reagan tried to dismiss her. Berry also helped found the Free South Africa Movement and was arrested at an anti-apartheid protest on Thanksgiving in 1984 at the South African Embassy in Washington, DC.

1941 Gene Pitney, American pop singer (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)  

1942 Huey P Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party

1945 Brenda Fricker, actress

1953 Norman Pace, British actor, comic

1962 Lou Diamond Phillips, Philippines-born American actor (Renegades; Young Guns)

1972 Billie Joe Armstrong, musician (Green Day)

1972 Denise Richards, actress

1978 Jacob Wetterling, kidnapping victim (missing since 1989)

1981 Paris Hilton, actress and heiress to the Hilton Hotel chain