The Battle of Broken Hill was a fatal incident which took place in Australia near Broken Hill, New South Wales, on 1 January 1915. Two men fired with rifles at a passing picnic train, killing four people and wounding seven more, before being killed by police and military officers. Though politically and religiously motivated, the men were not members of any sanctioned armed force and the attacks were criminal. The two men, Mulla Abdullah and Gool Badsha Mahomed, were later identified as Muslim 'Ghans' from colonial India who believed they were fighting a holy war under the proclamation from Mehmed V.
The events at Broken Hill on New Year's Day 1915 represent the only documented engagement with the enemy to take place on Australian soil during World War I.
The events of New Year's Day 1915
The Manchester Unity Picnic
New Year's Day in 1915 was to be the thirteenth annual picnic and sports gathering of the combined lodges of the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows in Broken Hill. For the previous twelve years, January 1 had become locally known as the day of the Manchester Unity Picnic, an annual public celebration held at Penrose Park at Silverton, north-west of Broken Hill. Each year a special train service was organised by the M.U.I.O.O.F. to convey their guests to the picnic ground.M.U. Picnic: Under the Pepper Tree at Silverton, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 2 January 1914, page 4. The line to Silverton was part of a railway operated by the Silverton Tramway Company.
At 10 o'clock on Friday morning, 1 January 1915, a train consisting of two brake vans and 40 ore trucks, modified with temporary bench seating, left the Sulphide-street station with 1,200 picnickers on board, seated in the open ore trucks. The train made a brief stop at the Railway Town station before resuming the journey. When the train had travelled for on its way to Silverton, on the outskirts of Broken Hill, near the cattle yards and opposite the cemetery, the passengers noticed a white ice-cream cart and horse on the northern side of the line, close to the railway fence. The cart was flying a flag with a white star and crescent, the flag of the Ottoman Empire. Two "dark men" wearing turbans were seen nearby, crouching behind a bank of earth and within a trench excavated for the pipe-line from the Umberumberka reservoir near Silverton.War in Broken Hill: Attack on a Picnic Train, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 1 January 1915, page 2.New Year's Day Tragedy: Inquest Resumed at the Courthouse, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 7 January 1915, page 2.New Year's Day Tragedy: Inquest on the Turks, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 8 January 1915, page 4.
The two men hiding in the trench, fifty yards from the railway tracks, were members of the local Muslim community, living at the 'ghantown' encampment at North Broken Hill.Peter Scriver (2004), 'Mosques, Ghantowns and Cameleers in the Settlement History of Colonial Australia', Fabrications (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand), Vol. 13, No. 2, pages 19-41.The New Year's Day Tragedy: The Battlefield, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 6 January 1915, page 2. As the picnic train began to pass their position, the intention of the men was to shoot as many of the passengers in the open ore trucks as they could.Goltz & Adams, page 66-67. The two men were:
Mulla Abdullah, aged about 60 years, a former camel-driver and halal butcher.The Slaughtering of Meat, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 25 August 1909, page 5; Abdullah was a licensed butcher by 1912 (see Municipal Council, Barrier Miner, 26 January 1912, page 5).Butcher Fined, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 18 December 1915, page 3.New South Wales Death Registration: Mulla Abdullah, aged "60 years", Broken Hill; Reg. No.: 3120/1915. Gool Badsha Mahomed, aged about 40 years, a former cameleer and local ice-cream vendor.New South Wales Death Registration: Gool Badsha Mahommed, aged "40 years", Broken Hill; Reg. No.: 3119/1915.
Background to the attack
In late October 1914, the Ottoman Empire had joined with Germany in the war against the Allied powers of Britain, France and Russia. In November 1914, Ürgüplü Mustafa Hayri Efendi, the Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam, spiritual advisor to the Turkish Sultan, proclaimed a holy war on behalf of the pan-Islamic world.Miscellaneous, Western Mail (Perth), 27 November 1914, page 16. This "appeal to Moslem fanaticism" was viewed with immediate concern by Britain and her allies, particularly in regard to the large Muslim populations of Egypt and India.Egypt and the War, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 1914, page 8.Mustafa Aksakal (2011), 'Holy War Made in Germany'? Ottoman Origins of the 1914 Jihad, War in History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (April 2011), pages 184–199.
Mulla Abdullah and Gool Mahomed lived on the outskirts of the northern camel camp at Broken Hill. Gool Mahomed had purchased ammunition for his rifle in mid-December 1914, and the two men were known to have carried out target practice in the weeks before the attack.The Two Turks, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 4 January 1915, page 4.
Several days before the attack on the picnic train, Mulla Adbullah was convicted in the Police Court for slaughtering sheep on unlicensed premises, a breach of municipal regulations. He had been reported by the sanitary inspector, Mr. Brosnan, and it was not Adbullah's first offence.Turks Attack Train, The Argus (Melbourne), 2 January 1915, page 9.
The two men transported their rifles and ammunition to the location of the attack in Gool Mahomed's ice-cream cart, which was a familiar sight in Broken Hill. When they left in the cart on the morning of the attack, they said "they were going into the bush". Two boys named Rex Thorn and Reg Bray were returning from the Sulphide-street station, after having driven "some lady passengers to join the picnic train". At about 9.30 a.m., they encountered the ice-cream cart, carrying two men wearing turbans, near the Pell-street railway crossing. The driver, Mulla Abdullah, signalled for the boys to stop and asked if the picnic train to Silverton had gone, to which the lads replied "No". He then asked, "What time does it start?" He was told 10 a.m., to which Abdullah then asked, "What is the time now?" After the encounter, the driver said "Good-day" and drove on.Boy's Story: Questioned by Murderers at Goods Station, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 2 January 1915, page 4.
The attack on the picnic train
The men waiting to attack the picnic train were both armed with breech-loading rifles. Abdullah was armed with an older-style Snider-Enfield rifle with cartridges in a home-made bandolier. He also had a revolver and cartridges and a knife in a sheath. Gool Mahomed was armed with a more modern Martini-Henry rifle.Turks Identified, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 1 January 1915, page 4.The Turk's Rifles, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 4 January 1915, page 4. The men had spread blankets on the ground within the trench, to lie on as they waited for the train to arrive.Early on the Scene, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 4 January 1915, page 4.
As the train passed, the two men started firing their weapons at the passengers. The wagons' low sides left the picnickers' upper bodies and heads completely exposed. The two assailants fired at the passengers as the train passed their position, firing an estimated 20 to 30 shots in all.
When John Coe, the railway guard in the brake van at the rear of the train, heard the reports of firearms he looked along the train and saw "two dark men" in the Umberumberka pipeline trench with rifles in their hands, shooting at the passengers. At first, Coe thought they were firing blank cartridges, but when he saw the 'kick' of the rifles, he realised they were firing ball cartridges. The passengers were also initially unconcerned, thinking that the shots were being discharged in honour of the train's passing or "perhaps a sham fight or some target practice"."For Revenge": Broken Hill Tragedy, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 4 January 1915, page 6. A witness to the events from nearby Railway Town heard the people in the ore trucks shout "hooray" as the firing began, and then soon afterwards screams were heard.
Alma Cowie, aged 17 years, was seated in the picnic train beside her boyfriend, Clarence O'Brien, a mill-hand at the South mine. As soon as O'Brien realised "the two men with turbans" were firing their weapons at the train he turned to tell Alma "to crouch down", but as he did he saw her "falling as though in a faint". O'Brien put his arm around her for support, "and as he did so the blood streamed down his arm from a wound in the top of her head". Fatally wounded, Alma Cowie died after 45 minutes. Mary Kavanagh, in the same truck, was also wounded.
Another fatality was William Shaw, riding in one of the ore trucks with his family members. Shaw was a municipal employee, a foreman in the Sanitary Department. Soon after the shooting began, Shaw, seated beside his wife Alice, fell forward with a wound in his back, calling out, "I'm shot". The couple's 15-year-old daughter Lucy was struck in the elbow with a bullet and another young girl in the same truck was hit on the leg, the bullet only bruising the skin. The other passengers laid the severely wounded Shaw on one of the bench seats, but he died soon afterwards.
Also killed during the attack was Alfred Millard, who had been riding along the pipe track on a bicycle. Millard was a resident of Balmain, but had come to Broken Hill to supervise the laying of the wooden pipe-line from the Umberumberka dam; he was boarding at Mrs. Beaumont's house in Cobalt-street, Railway Town. Millard had left his residence at 10.20 a.m. to repair a leak in the pipe-line, carrying photographic equipment in a case, when he was fired upon by Mahomed and Abdullah during their assault on the train passengers. A witness reported seeing four shots fired at Millard, one of which struck his back, causing him to fall from his bicycle "in a crouching position". By the time medical attention arrived at the scene, he had died.The Umberumberka Scheme, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 21 January 1914, page 6. Millard had taken his camera that day with the expressed purpose of taking a photograph of the picnic train "as the people in Sydney had no idea what a Broken Hill picnic train was like and would be greatly interested in a picture of one".Mr. Millard's Last Good-bye, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 4 January 1915, page 4.
The men in the trench continued firing "until the train had passed a good distance from them". In order to assess the situation Coe, the railway guard, applied the brakes and the train stopped at the Picton siding, about 850 yards beyond the position of the two assailants. However, with the train stopped Mahomed and Abdullah resumed firing. Some of the passengers had gotten off the train, but Coe ordered them back and the train went on a further three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) to the Silverton Tramway Company's reservoir. An assistant guard, William Elsegood, ran the half a mile to the pumping station and used the telephone there to "raise the alarm" in Broken Hill.
At about 10.50 a.m. a relief train, with men with rifles, arrived at the reservoir. Soon afterwards, doctors and others arrived at the scene in motor cars. Doctors Archibald Nairn and Owen Moulden both attended to the wounded passengers.
Police and military response
When the alarm was raised from the pumping station, Inspector Miller mobilised a force of policemen. Miller then contacted Lieutenant Resch, who began to gather all available military personnel in the township. Miller then sent Sergeants Gibson and Dimond and a force of armed police in two motor cars to follow the movements of Mahomed and Abdullah, from the site of the attack on the train, leading north-east along the western outskirts of the town.