Why Records Go Missing
Podcast: Australia’s Deadliest Picnic
On New Year’s Day 1915, in the outback town of Broken Hill, New South Wales, two men opened fire on an open-air train, carrying 1200 people to nearby Silverton for the day. Four people were killed and seven injured on the train, and another man was later killed when he was discovered in a shepherd’s hut by the shooters. The shooters themselves were later killed in a joint effort by police and the army.1 The shooter’s names were Gool Mohamed and “Mullah” Abdullah (this was a nickname, not a religious title), and they had previously been camel drivers in outback Australia until the expansion of the railways pushed the camellering business into decline. By 1915, they were bitter, under-employed and living in poverty, and both were dependent on marajuana. Because of their drug use they were ostracised by the cameller community, as Islam forbade the use of marajuana, and because of the colour of their skin and their culture they were ostracised by the Anglo-Australian community too.2 Despite it often being described as terrorism, the attack on the Picnic Train was a revenge attack by Mohamed and Abdullah, against the communities which (in their mind) and wronged them so badly.
The rifles and Turkish flag used by Mohamed and Abduallah in their attack. Photo: ABC.
The Missing Suicide Notes
Present in the archive today is Gool Mohamed’s suicide note from 1915; it was written for him by Abdullah as Mohamed was illiterate.3 The note was written in a mixture of Urdu and Dari, suggesting that Abdullah could not write in English, although newspaper reports suggest both men could speak English relatively well.4 Another suggestion from the newspapers is that there were three notes found on the bodies of Mohamed and Abdullah, all written by the latter.5 If this is true, where are the other two letters, and how did they disappear?
This in of itself is not unusual. Documents go missing from archives all the time, due to everything from careless filing to active cover-ups. The act of archiving itself is also a relatively new discipline, and interest waxes and wanes depending on the social and political climate of the day, and the needs of the organisation storing the material. A cover-up can be immediately discounted in the case of the missing suicide notes, as there was no benefit to anyone in hiding or destroying them. The fact that they’d already been reported on in the press and seen by dozens of police, soldiers and civilians meant that any attempt to pretend they’d never existed would have been foolish in the extreme. Carelessness, then?
Most likely. According to the Barrier Miner, the two other notes were Abdullah’s own suicide note, in which he outlined his intention to try and kill the health inspector who had twice fined him for his halal butchering, and a letter from Mohamed to the Turkish interior minister, offering to re-enlist in the Turkish army.6 Mohamed had served several short stints in the Ottoman army between 1890 – 1900, but we cannot read too much into this. Armies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were havens for poor, unemployed and desperate men. Given Mohamed’s spotty employment history in both Australia and the Ottoman Empire, it is likely he enlisted seeking to escape poverty. He was proud of his service though, and it upset him that the Ottoman Empire was at war with Australia.7
But how did his suicide note survive, while Abdullah’s and the letter to the interior minister did not? Dumb luck, probably. None of these documents would have been considered important to the people of Broken Hill after the inquests were complete. They would have either been thrown away or put in a box at the back of a cupboard to be dealt with another day. Legislation regarding archiving is even more recent than the practice itself, so items which did not have any further value were often just thrown away. It is only within the last fifty years or so that we have seen the value in keeping records (or not, depending on who wants to hide something) even after we have finished with them in the present.
Today, an incident like this would form part of an inquest, and any and all documents associated with it would be archived. There was an inquest in1915, but it was a relatively hurried affair. Australia was at war, there were multiple witnesses to the events, and no one really wanted to look too deeply into Abdullah and Mohamed’s motives. Doing so would have forced the people of Broken Hill to examine their own appalling behaviour towards the cameller community, which no one was willing to do. The way Abdullah and Mohamed were treated is not an excuse for their actions, nor does it justify them. The motives laid out in the lost suicide notes provide context which cannot be gleaned from their actions alone, and the importance of context in history cannot be overstated.
Concluding Thoughts
Without context, we make assumptions based on our own morals and values, and when this occurs, we risk losing history in favour of comforting mythology. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (many times!) that history is not nice. It’s uncomfortable, and it often forces us to interrogate our own society in ways which can make us feel, to use a colloquialism, icky. But we need to do it. When documents are missing from archives, either by accident or design, the possibility of creating fake history increases. In today’s world of click-bail style content, fake news, and AI-created stories and videos, keeping history real has never been so important.
Footnotes
- “Broken Hill’s 1915 Picnic Train Attack was not terrorism, historians say,” ABC News, 1 Jan 2025,, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-01/broken-hill-picnic-train-1915-attack-not-terrorism/104654382 ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Christine Stevens, “Mahomed, Gool Badsha (1875–1915)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University (Canberra, ACT), https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mahomed-gool-badsha-13288/text23021, published first in hardcopy 2005, accessed online 5 January 2025. ↩︎
- “The Reason: Inspector Miller’s View,” Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 2 Jan 1915, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/45309608. ↩︎
- “War in Broken Hill,” Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 1 Jan 1915, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/45309452. ↩︎
- “The New Year’s Day Massacre,” Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 2 Jan 1915, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/45309607. ↩︎
- “War in Broken Hill,” Barrier Miner. ↩︎