SBS50: Biggest Stories

1980 was a dark year for the world of popular music. On Tuesday the 9th of December, singer John Lennon was shot dead outside his New York apartment by Mark David Chapman, a mentally ill young man.

1981 was a year connected to assassinations, there was an attempt on the Pope and one on American president, Ronald Reagan. But the shots that rang loudest around the world came from Egypt, when an army officer, Khalid...

1982 was the year that the humble smiley face emoticon first made its appearance online at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania.

In December 1983, Treasurer Paul Keating announced that the Australian dollar would be floated. Removing a fixed exchange rate meant the value of the dollar could automatically adjust in response to how it was trading...

1984 was the year Britain and China sealed Hong Kong’s fate. Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, to return Hong Kong to China in 1997.

One of the biggest stories in 1986 was the explosion of a Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Labelled the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, Chernobyl resulted in the release of radioactive...

1987 was marked by a massive loss of wealth across the world when stock markets crashed on October the 19th – a day known as Black Monday. The global crash began in Hong Kong and spread to Europe, also hitting the...

In 1988 much of Australia was in party mode. On January the 26th, 200 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, we celebrated our bicentenary in a sunny spectacle focused on where it all began — Sydney Harbour.

In 1989, after almost 30 years of division, the Berlin Wall came down paving the way for German re-unification. On November the 9th the East German government announced its citizens could visit West Germany and West...

In 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from jail paving the way for democracy in South Africa. Arrested in 1962 for his campaign to get equal rights for black South Africans, Nelson Mandela was charged with treason and...

One of the stories that shook the world in 1991 was the start of Operation Desert Storm. A coalition led by the United States began military operations against Iraq after the United Nations condemned Saddam Hussein’s...

In 1992 the demolition of the Babri Mosque in India reverberated around the world. Situated in in Ayodhya, a town revered as the birthplace of the Hindu God Lord Ram, the mosque was the focus of a long debate over...

In 1993 the world of tennis changed in an instant when Monica Seles was stabbed during a match against Magdalena Maleeva in Germany.

After 27 years in exile, 1994 was marked by Yasser Arafat’s return to the Gaza Strip. The P-L-O leader gave a triumphant address to 200 thousand Palestinians in Gaza city.

One of our biggest stories of the past four decades took place in 1995, when an American space shuttle docked with the Russian space station Mir. Despite previous cold war animosity, Russian astronauts greeted the...