Of course, it would not be News Limited without having to report a problem involving Telstra...

Meanwhile the SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) has a video stream of the event

coming from Hawaii

http://media.smh.com.au/news/science/watch-live-transit-of-venus-3351274.html:

And the ABC has a picture streaming from St Lucia Qld:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/transitofvenus/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17745366

One Pommy captain James Cook decided to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti in 1769... By then the event was already a very interesting phenomenom as Venus passes between the earth and the sun... After that Cook sailed on and discovered "Australia"... Well not really. He "discovered" the east coast of the continent in 1770, while the Dutch had "discovered" the northern part of said continent around one hundred years before, and of course the Aboriginal people had "discovered" the place about 60,000 years ago...

Since then Australia is the place where the centre is called Canberra...

People gathered this week in Townsville, Queensland, to remember a seminal moment in the nation's history, and the efforts of one man to bring it about.

Aboriginal Australians are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their landmark victory over land rights.

It was on 3 June 1992 that the Australian High Court overturned more than 200 years of white domination of land ownership.

The victory was largely down to one indigenous man called Eddie Mabo.

That's why the legal decision is universally known as "Mabo".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18291022

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It is of course significant that the Aboriginal people became dispossessed soon after James Cook, fresh from his observation of the transit of Venus, landed in "Australia"... The American revolt against the Brits had transformed the prison system in Pommyland. The Brits could not send convicts to the American colony anymore and the hulk ships, mostly filled with Irish revolutionaries and kids (or women) who had stolen a loaf of bread, were brimming to the gun-whales (gunwales)... So the decision was taken to send the prisoners "for their natural life" to that new place "discovered by Cook" in the antipodes... The settlement was called Sydney (1788)... In order to invade the place without invading the place, the place was declared Terra Nullius... meaning non-inhabited... In a stroke of a couple of Latin words, the Aboriginal people — who did not understand that old dead language — were dispossessed of their land...

It took the courage of a Prime Minister, Paul Keating — on the footstep of another good man, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who had started Aboriginal affairs and Aboriginal recognition seriously  — to initiate a Native Title Act after the high court had acknowledged Mabo's rights to his land (1992)... Keating's Redfern speech remains one of the classic acknowledgement of Aboriginal rights, while Rudd's Sorry speech was the acknowledgement of the "stolen generations"...

The two speeches of course were the hallmarks of the Labor Party, while most of the Liberals (conservatives) opposed any form of land rights and recognition...

It all started with James Cook wanting to see the Transit of Venus... He was killed in the Sandwich islands (Hawaii)...

http://www.goodnet.org/articles/310