It was 40 years ago in Newcastle, Australia at Merewether beach.

I can’t even remember what I did last week.

Good chance it would’ve been seen by a bunch of people and mentioned in the local newspapers of the time too.

I often look for things at trove — but I think that might be too recent for trove to have the relevant newspaper articles available.

Here’s an example of an advanced search there:

https://trove.nla.gov.au/search/advanced/category/newspapers...

(For meteor and newcastle between 1975 and 1987)

[edit - fixed hyperlink]

For older time periods such as the 1950s - where trove does index the newspapers — it’s very easy to find reports of meteors and bright lights —

https://trove.nla.gov.au/search/advanced/category/newspapers...

“The 1978 New South Wales fireball“

4:44am I think - would’ve been visible from Merewether

> Abstract A very large meteor fireball passed through the atmosphere above the east coast of New South Wales early in the morning of 7 April 1978. It was seen at 04.44 AEST (18.44 UT, 6 April) by hundreds of people from the cities of Sydney and Newcastle who deluged the news media with telephoned sightings. The resulting publicity led to the collection of many reports, of which 19 were useful in defining the trajectory and ground track of the fireball. I define here the ground track, which is shown in Fig. 1, and include the locations of the eye-witnesses

https://www.nature.com/articles/285464a0

Nice research!

However 40 years ago was 1983 so unlikely to be same event.

This article

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/127209576?searchT...

mentions:

“On June 19 last, a brilliant fireball was seen over a large part of NSW and the ACT”

…from 1985 referring back to 1984.

But most newspapers from that era not searchable yet. We have to get older first.