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 orders from the Turkish Sultan.

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.

[1] 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, sixteen miles (26 km) north-west of Broken Hill.

[1] When the train had travelled for two miles (3 km) 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.

[4][5][6] 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.

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.

[18] 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.

[18] 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".

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.

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.

[4] A 70-year-old tinsmith, Thomas Campbell, was expecting a visit from a friend and was standing in the doorway of his house at Allendale, on the western edge of the township (north-east of the scene of the picnic train attack).

[6] After shooting Tom Campbell the two assailants continued in a north-easterly direction, skirting the township, and eventually took cover amongst rocks several hundred yards west of the Cable Hotel.

[4] Police and soldiers numbering about thirty men, under the direction of Inspector Miller and Lieutenant Resch, caught up with Abdullah and Mahomed in their defensive position behind the rocks on Cable Hill and used what cover they could find to fire at them.

Mulla Abdullah said in his last letter that he was dying for his faith and in obedience to the order of the Sultan, "but owing to my grudge against Chief Sanitary Inspector Brosnan, it was my intention to kill him first".

Stones were thrown against the walls and through the windows, while the crowd cheered and "sang snatches of patriotic songs", interspersed with "terrible execrations" directed at "all foreigners, German, Turks, and Afghans in particular".

[31] With the German Club ablaze, the constable attempted to switch on the bell in the nearby street fire box, but "the crowd for a long time hampered his progress to the instrument, although they did not actually lay violent hands upon him to stop it".

The most substantial building at the camp was a mosque, a single room twenty by fifteen feet in dimensions with an alcove in the wall and heavily carpeted, but otherwise having no furniture.

[34] After the angry crowd had attacked and set fire to the German Club, the authorities decided to send a contingent of police and military to protect the mosque at the North Camel Camp.

The policemen briefly entered the mosque and then explained to the two men that they were there to "preserve order", as they "feared a repetition of the proceedings that had taken place a little earlier in the evening at the German Club".

Though the circumstances were exceptional and "at the time none of those entering gave the matter a moment's thought", the desecration of the mosque in this manner caused considerable disquiet amongst the local Muslim community.

[35] In the days following the murderous attack on the picnic train, the bodies of Mulla Abdullah and Gool Badsha Mahomed were buried by the police at an undisclosed location.

The work was stopped and local Muslims "raised their voice in protest at their burial place being utilised for the interment of cowardly slaughterers of defenceless women and children".

[6] The men who attacked the picnic train were misleadingly labelled "Turks" in newspaper reports, a categorisation bolstered by the Ottoman flag they attached to their cart and the letters they left explaining their actions.

[43][44][45] The names of the wounded were: On Monday, 4 January, the local military and several policemen arrested eleven "alien enemies resident in Broken Hill".

When clippings from the foreign papers filtered back to Australia in the letters home of serving soldiers, it only reinforced the belief that the story in the Bulletin was true.

The 'fake news' was revived as an example of German mendacity by Australian papers during the Second World War and even as late as 1951 in Broken Hill's own Barrier Daily Truth newspaper.

[citation needed] In 2014, the Greek Australian genocides scholar Panayiotis Diamadis noted that the attack occurred only a few weeks after the declaration of jihad (holy war) on 14 November 1914 by Sultan Mehmed V and Shaykh al-Islām (primary religious leader) Essad Effendi of the Ottoman Empire against Great Britain and the Allies.

[61] On 29 June 2018, the two significant sites connected to the 1915 New Year's Day picnic train attack at Broken Hill were added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register.