The Hawsing Crisis was ... a fake Wikipedia entry just waiting to happen! Let's do this!
Here's a start:
Hawsing Irons were a kind of axe used in shipmaking.
So, maybe some early group in Australian history wanted to win a shipbuilding concession from the crown, the right to make their own vessels in Oz, and out of protest they marched the streets of Sydney with Hawsing Irons.
We need to know:
Was shipbuilding ever illegal in Australia?
Is there an overlap between the era of the British Crown granting monopolies on shipbuilding, and the founding of Australia?
The only reference to Hawsing Irons I can find is in that reference, with scanned in pics from an old shipbuilding catalog. There's related to something called a Hawsing Beetle.
We must, must do this. It will be awesome. And, I'll get to point it out to future students as a cautionary tale on why they should never trust Wikipedia.