Qualla: 1915 Picnic Train Attack and White Rocks Reserve

1915 Picnic Train Attack and White Rocks Reserve: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. On New Year's Day in 1915, a train left Broken Hill carrying about 1,200 people toward a picnic at Silverton. There were no carriages to spare, so the Manchester Unity Order of Oddfellows borrowed forty-one open ore trucks from the Silverton Tramway Company and fitted them with rough plank seats. Men, women, and children rode out into the morning in the metal boxes that usually hauled ore, dressed for a holiday. About two miles out, beside a low embankment, two men were waiting with rifles and a flag. What happened next was over within minutes, but Broken Hill has spent more than a century trying to understand it.

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

1915 Picnic Train Attack and White Rocks Reserve: The Four Who Died

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bilby, CC BY 3.0. They should be named, because for a long time the telling of this day reduced them to a number. Alma Cowie was seventeen, riding beside the young man she planned to marry; she was struck in the first volley and died within the hour. Alfred Millard was about thirty. William Shaw w...

Image: Bilby | CC BY 3.0

1915 Picnic Train Attack and White Rocks Reserve: Two Men and Their Grievances

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bilby, CC BY 3.0. The men who fired were Mulla Abdullah, around sixty, and Gool Badsha Mahomed, around forty. Both had worked as cameleers, part of the community that hauled the outback's freight before the railways. Abdullah served as a mullah at the local Ghan Town, leading prayers, officiating ...

Image: Bilby | CC BY 3.0

1915 Picnic Train Attack and White Rocks Reserve: When Fear Turned on the Innocent

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bilby, CC BY 3.0. The attack ended at a place called White Rocks, where police and military cornered and killed both men. But the violence did not stop there, it changed targets. That evening a crowd gathered in Argent Street, convinced without evidence that Broken Hill's German community had some...

Image: Bilby | CC BY 3.0

1915 Picnic Train Attack and White Rocks Reserve: The Cameleers Who Built So Much

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Виктор В, CC BY-SA 3.0. It is worth holding the wider story in view, because fear has a way of erasing it. From 1850 to 1900, more than 20,000 camels and the men who drove them came to Australia from Kashmir, Rajasthan, Punjab, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, present-day Pakistan, and beyond. Lumped together ...

Image: Виктор В | CC BY-SA 3.0

1915 Picnic Train Attack and White Rocks Reserve: What the Reserve Remembers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bilby, CC BY 3.0. The White Rocks site, where the day finally ended, is now a fenced reserve on the edge of Broken Hill, listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register since 2018. Interpretive panels lay out the events of 1 January 1915 alongside the local geology, and a replica ice-cream c...

Image: Bilby | CC BY 3.0