This year will be remembered for some of the world's worst disasters and greatest escapes, stunning sporting triumphs and scandalous affairs.
The Herald Sun has covered them all, but you can refresh your memory of an incredible year, where you can see all pictures, video and most strident opinions again, as well as everything you missed.
The most popular stories on our website were not surprisingly reports about some of the best known faces in the country getting into strife, whether they were those we loved, or just love to hate.
Arguably the biggest global story of the year, was the incredible rescue of all 33 miners trapped in a Chilean mine were rescued who had originally been given up for dead 66 days earlier. One by one, the miners emerged from 600m underground as a live TV audience watched with bated breath.
But the miracle of their rescue was underlined by the deaths of 29 trapped miners in New Zealand’s Pike River coal mine after multiple underground blasts. There was no shortage of grim news through the year, not least of which was the shocking deaths of nearly 50 asylum seekers as they tried to land a rickety boat on Australia’s Christmas island. That tragedy was dwarfed in January by a catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti killing at least 230,000. Pakistan also reeled from disaster in July when one-fifth of the country was flooded affecting 20 million people in as crops, homes and infrastructure were wiped out. And a gigantic oil spill by BP off the Gulf of Mexico in the United States in April 22 is now considered the worst ever ecological disaster in the US.
The same month an airline crash in Poland sent the nation into mourning and triggered a political crisis after killing President Lech Kaczynski and much of the Polish leadership. But it was also a year of draws and close calls, and in an early prediction of Australia’s close-run political race, a hung UK Parliament eventually fell to the conservatives. In Australia, political watchers witnessed the first hung Federal Parliament for generations after Julia Gillard’s bloodless coup against Kevin Rudd in June. Weeks later our first female Prime Minister’s honeymoon was over, leaving Labor forced to deal with the independents.
The FIFA World Cup is now in the hands of Spain after the soccer superpower defeated the Dutch in South Africa. For many Aussie rules fanatics, there was no more dramatic moment of the year that the 2010 AFL Grand Final, and one the most dramatic draws ever seen on the sporting scene. In the gripping game, St Kilda fought raging favourite Collingwood a standstill, leaving fans and players gasping with shock at the siren and the drawn scoreboard. The Pies romped into history with an emphatic win at the following week’s rematch, ending a 20-year Premiership drought and easing the pain of the dreaded Colliwobbles.
Global celebrities endured a rough ride of break-ups, deaths and sex scandals. And among the biggest shocks was for Sandra Bullock when she learned then-husband Jesse James had been up to no-good with the inked star "Bombshell" McGee in March, only days after the high of picking up Oscar gold.
As the year drew to a close, one of the biggest stories on the planet was about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. As the embarrassing revelations uncovered about 200,000 leaked US diplomatic cables continued to mount, furious governments called for him to be arrested or assassinated. Ironically, the WikiLeaks files are stored on servers in a Swedish cold war nuclear bunker 30m underground.
