Category Archives: Australia

Zoo director heading home to Australia

DUCW club member and director of the Assiniboine Park Zoo, Tim Sinclair-Smith, has decided to leave Winnipeg to take his family back home to Australia. He has been very involved in the biggest changes seen at the zoo, still under construction.

We enjoyed the energy and participation of the family in our club activities, and were happy to have him on board with us. The club will be gathering at the zoo on June 15th for a special morning tour.

Read the article in the Free Press here: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/zookeeper-leaving-assiniboine-park-for-oz-205729221.html

Aussie prison break of 1876

Fremantle6-500x490The plot they hatched was as audacious as it was impossible—a 19th-century raid as elaborate and preposterous as any Ocean’s Eleven script. It was driven by two men—a guilt-ridden Irish Catholic nationalist, who’d been convicted and jailed for treason in England before being exiled to America, and a Yankee whaling captain—a Protestant from New Bedford, Massachusetts—with no attachment to the former’s cause, but a firm belief that it was “the right thing to do.” Along with a third man—an Irish secret agent posing as an American millionaire—they devised a plan to sail halfway around the world to Fremantle, Australia, with a heavily armed crew to rescue a half-dozen condemned Irishmen from one of the most remote and impregnable prison fortresses ever built.

Read more of this amazing tale from the Smithsonian.