Broken Hill Attack 1915-Revisited: A Battle Fought for Gallipoli on Australian Soil

Abstract

On a Friday morning, the New Year's Day of 1915, two Afghans attacked a train carrying 1200 picnickers from Broken Hill. The inhabitants of the town had only recently farewelled a group of volunteers who were being sent to Egypt to be trained and to protect the Suez Canal. These forces would later be sent to Gallipoli to fight the Ottomans, and to Europe to fight alongside the British forces on the Western Front. The two men - first identified as Turks but later confirmed to be Afghans - killed three men and a seventeen year-old girl, and wounded half a dozen picnickers before they were hunted down and killed within a couple of hours by the police and armed volunteers from the town.

The Australian media interpreted this (to modern eyes terrorist) attack on Australian soil, as a retaliation for the Allies fighting the Turks, and continued this line whenever radicalised Muslims killed Australians or Christians in Europe or elsewhere. This incident at Broken Hill will be revisited and analysed in the light of newspapers published in Broken Hill as well as the feature articles written about the attack in newspapers of our days and online. Show more