by Mark Durie –  Markdurie.com – January 1, 2015

One hundred years ago today, a lethal jihad attack was staged against New Year’s Day picnickers in Broken Hill, Australia. This attack and the recent Martin Place siege, events separated by almost exactly a century, show striking similarities.

For Australians, the anxious question about the Martin Place attack, which has grabbed the attention of everyone, is whether this atrocity is but a harbinger of a further series of deadly attacks on Australian soil, or whether it will pass into memory as an exceptional one-off event, much as the 1915 New Year’s Day massacre in Broken Hill did.

The Broken Hill Massacre

On New Year’s Day, 1915, two Muslim men, Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah, shot and killed four people and wounded several others before finally being killed by police. They had both come to Australia more than a decade previously.

Beginning in 1860, many Muslim cameleers came to Australia to help open up the arid outback. Today a famous train from Adelaide to Darwin is known as “The Ghan” to commemorate the contribution of the “Afghans” – as they were known (although they came from many different places across the Middle East and South Asia) – to the development of Australia.

The jihad attack was staged against a picnic train which was taking 1200 picnickers out on a New Year’s Day in open ore trucks. Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah first made enquiries at the station beforehand to make sure they would be in the right place at the right time to attack this particular train. They then positioned themselves on the side of a hill around 30 meters from the tracks, and opened fire as the trucks passed. Among the victims was Alma Cowie, aged 17, shot dead.

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