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 bidden farewell to its volunteers to Egypt where they were to be trained and protect the Suez Canal. These forces were than sent to Gallipoli to fight the Ottomans to Europe to fight along the British forces at the Western Front. The two men – first identified as Turks but later identified as Afghans – killed two men and a seventeen year-old girl, and wounded some picnickers. They were then hunted down and killed within a couple of hours by the police and the armed volunteers from the town. The Australian media interpreted this attack, to a modern term a 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.