The fallout from the IRA's attack and assassination of British Lord Mountbatten aboard his cruiser in Ireland was being felt on this day in 1979. The IRA had declared it thought the teenage Prince Edward was aboard when it planned the bomb attack, prompting fresh international outrage.
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The IRA said it would continue to aim at "prestige targets" like Lord Mountbatten, after claiming responsibility for that killing and the separate killing of 18 British soldiers in Northern Ireland.
The British Army officer in command of Northern Ireland pledged his forces would not waver in their fight against terrorism.
"We may have been scarred, we may have been bloodied, but are certainly not bowed", Lieutenant-General Sir Timothy Creasey said of the killings of his soldiers at Warrenpoint.
Here in Australia, the head of the Returned Services League, Bruce Ruxton, said an IRA sympathiser in Melbourne should be hanged for sedition. Mr Ruxton said John Murray's televised comments that applauded the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and the IRA's targeting of the British Royal family were a hanging offence. He would gladly be the hangman, he added.
Mr Murray, secretary of the Ulster Association of Victoria, had said Lord Mountbatten had "committed suicide", describing his regular holidays to the Irish Republic as "provocative".
Also on the front page was a main picture of Bishop Vasilije, the newly appointed Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church for Australia and New Zealand. The bishop had been conducting a service at St Sava's Church, Farrer.
