On New Year’s Day 1915 in Broken Hill, two men in white turbans ambushed a train full of people on their way to the annual Oddfellows picnic in Silverton. They killed four people and wounded seven. Australia was in the early days of WWI. A party of armed citizens and police pursued the attackers and killed them. There was an Ottoman flag at the crime scene. The perpetrators, an Afridi-Afghan and an Indian cameleer used a Snider and a Martini Henry. A few days later, suicide letters in Urdu mysteriously appeared on some rocks nearby. Newspapers reported that a Koran was found on one of the perpetrators.

Was this an answer to the Ottoman Empire’s call for jihad? Are the suicide letters authentic? Was that religious document really a Koran? This ongoing PhD research aims to broaden the contextualisation of the Battle of Broken Hill, which is, a century later, largely a curiosity. The material entities of the incident and place-based methods are an invaluable path to the motivations of the perpetrators and how complex and connected this seemingly obscure event is. The crime scene artifacts help us hear the whispers and silences of this desert community with global moods and ideologies.

Guest Speaker: Burçak Gürün Muraben

Burçak Gürün Muraben is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at UTS. Her PhD thesis is a historical analysis of the Battle of Broken Hill,1915. Burçak is also a casual lecturer and content creator in the Turkish program at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University.

This hybrid event will be live-streamed on Zoom and can be accessed with the following Zoom link.

This seminar is part of the Translational Criminology Seminar Series (TCSS), hosted by the Crime and Security Science Research Group, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney. For any queries about the event or the TCSS, please contact Dr Kai Lin, Lecturer in Criminology and Convenor of the TCSS, at kai.lin@uts.edu.au